The front-page headline screamed: “GAMBLING DENS ARE WIDE OPEN.”

Just below: “Secrecy is Thrown to the Winds and Money Openly on the Table – Women Continue “working” the Wine Rooms.

What followed – in the May 20, 1906, Tacoma Sunday Ledger, was a lurid exposé of official toleration of vice in the City of Destiny.

Mayor George P. Wright had been re-elected on a pledge that he would enforce the local ordinances and state laws against the gambling and prostitution then rife in Tacoma. He hadn’t delivered.

The Ledger’s reporter led readers on a colorful tour of the many saloons on Pacific Avenue, South C Street and in Old Town, noting “money on the table” and dealers “brazenly” raking in the house’s cut “under the eyes of the police, in open defiance of the law and with the full knowledge of the appointees of Mayor Wright.”

On C, “women of the lowest type reaped a harvest without molestation.” In the Old Tacoma saloon on North 30th Street, the reporter explored a “restaurant” above the bar that, oddly, wasn’t serving meals. “The ‘waitress’ frankly admitted that the place was a house of ill fame.”

It wasn’t exactly the scandal of the century. But the Ledger – an ancestor of The News Tribune – was continuing what was already a long-running crusade. The Ledger’s attacks on official corruption began two decades earlier with a successful battle against vice lord Harry Morgan, a saloon owner of the 1880s who also had friends in City Hall. Many decades later, The News Tribune helped expose the crimes of Pierce County Sheriff George V. Janovich Sr., who in the late 1970s was colluding with criminal kingpins, protecting their nightclubs, ignoring prostitution and corrupting his subordinates.

None of this makes The News Tribune special. Every real newspaper serves – at least some of the time – as a watchdog on government, exposing wrongdoing and focusing public outrage on officials who abuse their trust.

Newspapers haven’t always been driven by idealism when they’ve taken on entrenched politicians. Far from it.

Exposés sell papers. Attacks on the bums in office sometimes serve the interests of newspaper owners who want their own bums in office. When the founders wrote the First Amendment, the journalists of the fledgling United States were often shrill, partisan, vicious and shamelessly unfair, like the nastiest shock jocks of today’s talk radio.

Still, James Madison and Company chose to guarantee the freedom of the press – not because the jackleg journalists of the day were noble, but because they provided another essential constitutional check on government. As a result, the press became – and remains – the sole commercial industry protected by name in the Constitution.

The power to write and publish without official permission was one dimension of the freedom of mind championed by Thomas Jefferson, Madison and others. They understood that self-government was impossible without it. It helped inform and educate the public. It created a marketplace of ideas in which novel concepts and proposals could compete alongside old orthodoxies and customs. It let citizens communicate to each other and to their government. It focused attention on urgent problems.

Freedom of the press had another crucial purpose: the protection of other bedrock constitutional freedoms.

Four additional liberties are guaranteed by the First Amendment: the right to worship (or not worship) according to one’s conscience, the right to speak freely, the right to assemble peaceably and the right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

These are mutually dependent; the erosion of one is an erosion of all. Freedom of the press has a unique role in guarding the rest: Only unfettered, independent media can quickly rally large numbers of citizens against dangerous abuses of power.

In the case of The Ledger’s 1906 exposé, the problem was a city government willing to ignore the law. Had the newspaper been able to publish only what the administration permitted – as might have been the case without the First Amendment – the account of gamblers and whores in Tacoma’s saloons would never have seen the light of day.

A more recent example of the press’ watchdog role was an award-winning News Tribune series – published in 2001 – that exposed extensive failures and mismanagement within the Department of Corrections’ parole-supervision system.

In case after case, parole officers had skipped required visits with ex-cons and holding them accountable for parole violation. Some of these criminals had committed murder or manslaughter when they should have been in jail for violating the terms of their release.

“In Washington state,” we editorialized, “the job is not being done right. People are dying. And the Department of Corrections does not appear to understand either the magnitude of the problem or how to remedy it.”

Another example came two years later, after Tacoma Police Chief David Brame murdered his wife, then committed suicide. In the months afterward, News Tribune reporters painstakingly pieced together the strange story of Brame’s rise through the ranks and the corruption he fostered in the Tacoma Police Department’s upper command. The newspaper kept digging for the full story in the face of complaints from critics who preferred to forget the whole thing.

But powerful institutions do not change unless their feet are held to the fire. That’s the job of journalists. Thank heaven for the First Amendment – and a free press.

Editorials represent the views of The News Tribune’s editorial board. Members include Cheryl Dell, publisher; David Zeeck, executive editor and vice president for news; David Seago, editorial page editor; Patrick O’Callahan, chief editorial writer; and Cheryl Tucker and Kim Bradford, editorial writers.

Our 125th anniversary values series

January: First Amendment

February: Community building

March: Open government

April: Connections

May: Fairness and objectivity

June: Quality of life

July: Journalistic independence

August: Building business

September: Openness

October: Trust and integrity

November: Diversity

December: Fostering change Editor’s note: This year marks the 125th anniversary of the first daily publication of The Ledger and The News Tribune’s other original parent newspaper, The Daily News. It’s a good occasion to explain The News Tribune’s core values to our readers. The first Sunday of each month, we will devote part of this page to one of those values. We begin with the most important: our commitment to the First Amendment.