That’s the means. Putting things on paper or on air has no value in itself; it’s having a viable avenue to have them heard and propagated that’s important. (It doesn’t matter that you typed your samizdat issue on your own typewriter and not commandeered a printing press, you’re still going to prison. Hell, as we know nailing a piece of paper to a church door can be bad enough.)

The point is that public thought stagnates and rots once it’s impossible to publish dissenting opinions and a sucking swamp of apparent conformity sets in; and a central government is inordinately efficient at enforcing such conformity. So it shouldn’t get the chance to.

I’d expect that when that when the idea was first being established, a government was perhaps the only entity with wide enough reach to enforce this. (Maybe along with a couple of paragovernments like the Catholic Church and the India Companies.) That’s not the case today. It’s telling that GP mentions a radio broadcaster, because radio caused a centralization of news like nothing before it (as often outside the direct control of governments as under it), and while the Internet had an opportunity to reverse that, except for a brief moment it did not.