“The Roman magistrate who protected the plebs from the patricians — the tribune of the people — gave his name to the platform from which he spoke, and the platform gave its name to newspapers. Tribune, the newspaper, is the plebeian magistrate's speaking stand.”
Latin tribunus — a tribune, a tribal chief — comes from tribus (tribe). The tribal leader was literally the man of the tribe, the one who represented the tribe's interests. The tribuni plebis — tribunes of the plebs — were magistrates elected from 494 BCE onward to protect the common people from patrician abuse. They had the power of veto — the power to forbid any act by a magistrate — and their person was sacrosanct, inviolable under divine protection.
The tribunal was originally the raised platform from which the tribune spoke and administered justice — from tribunus, the platform took its name. The architectural tribune (still used in Italian) is a raised platform or gallery in a church. The tribune is both the person and the place where the person speaks.
The verb 'to attribute' and the nouns 'tribute,' 'contribution,' 'distribution,' 'retribution' all come from the same tribus root — to tribute was to assign to a tribe, to allocate to the proper tribal group. Retribution is the re-allocation of harm to the one who caused it. The entire vocabulary of allocation, assignment, and justice contains the tribal division at its root.
The Tribune newspapers — the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times (part of Tribune Company), the New York Tribune — explicitly claimed the magistrate's mantle. The newspaper as the voice of the people against power: the tribune's function translated into journalism. The name was chosen deliberately, claiming the Roman tradition of popular defense.
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Today
The tribune of the people protected the commons from the powerful — with the power of veto, with sacrosanct personal immunity, with the authority to speak from a raised platform. The newspaper that took the name claimed the same function: to speak for the people against those who would harm them.
The power of veto survives in parliamentary procedure (from Latin vetare, to forbid — the tribune's word). The tribune's platform became the raised sanctuary in a church, the newspaper's masthead, the international court's bench. The tribal protector is everywhere in the vocabulary of law, justice, and public speech.
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