For a Free Press: The Atlantic $1000 Prize Article

VOLUME 174

NUMBER 1

JULY, 1944

87 th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by ROBERT LASCH

LIET us be frank about it. What the press in America needs is a constitutional revolution. It needs a measure of judicious abdication. It needs a transfer of power from publishers as kings to publishers and editors as prime ministers. It needs ownership that will give up the prerogatives of absolutism and function as a trustee recognizing direct responsibility to the people.

Freedom-of-the-press discussion is frequently barren and futile because it ignores two highly pertinent considerations: the historic social purpose of freedom, and the effects of economic development upon our freedom.

When these factors fall into perspective, the whole picture changes. Freedom is seen then not as something to be defended, but as something to be attained. The complacency and defensiveness that mark the traditional approach to the subject suddenly become pitifully inadequate. One realizes that instead of waging constant war against an imaginary enemy without, the newspapers would do well to take steps against the enemy within.

They would do well, too, to take warning from the widening gulf that separates the conception of freedom held by themselves and that held by the people.

Nothing illustrates the divergence better than the government’s antitrust suit against the Associated Press, now on appeal before the Supreme Court. Almost to a man, the publishers of America interpreted the filing of this action as a foul assault upon the First Amendment, and with frightening unanimity exerted all their power to impress upon the public that point of view.

“We see in this, not the end perhaps, but surely the gravest peril, to a free press in America,” said the Detroit News. From the citadel of its monopoly position in a city of 600,000, the Kansas City Star cried: “This is the sort of thing that belongs in the totalitarian states, not in a free democracy.” “In the event of a government victory,” said the New York Daily News, “the press services of the United States will be under the thumb of the White House.”

These were not extremist positions. They represented a fair sample of the opinion handed down by the press, sitting as a supreme court, long before the government brought its case to trial and won the first round in the United States District Court of New York. The Associated Press proudly published a volume of the collected editorial judgments for the instruction of the country.

The country rode out the storm with equanimity. Dimly or otherwise, the people perceived that the newspapers, once again, had proved unable to separate their commercial privileges from their civil rights. The AP suit did not suppress one newspaper. It threatened none with any form of censorship or restraint. It was a civil action, initiated under universally respected statutes of long standing, against the members of a newsgathering organization, on the charge that they had used the association for the purpose of discouraging or limiting commercial competition among themselves.

Copyright 1944, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Of all the outcry that greeted the suit, almost none came from the uninterested public. In Peter Zenger’s day, the people might feel that the defense of his rights was the defense of theirs. Now they sat jaded and silent. Perhaps they had witnessed too many invocations of the Bill of Rights to justify low wages for newspaper workers. Perhaps they had seen too many abuses of power by newspapers bent on spreading the ideas of an owner group. Or perhaps — and here is the ominous possibility — they had begun to regard the newspapers no longer as trustees of constitutional liberty, but as the beneficiaries of a special privilege tending to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

2

THERE is much talk of freedom, but not enough of what freedom is for. The value of personal liberty rests not upon any putative divinity, nor upon the naturalness of “natural rights,” but upon the plain fact of its social usefulness and, indeed, its indispensability in a democracy.

Freedom was not won by a newspaper lobby, though the proprietary interest claimed therein might make one think so. Like other civil liberties, this one arose from a slowly developed conviction among the people that when self-government was desired, freedom was a good thing. The press became free, therefore, not as a favor to those who happened to own it, but because men hoped by means of a free press to attain a desirable social end.

The end was unmistakable. It was to promote the widest possible freedom of expression. It was to insure the people unrestrained access to the means of expression. It was to set up an institution, separate from government itself, that would represent the people directly in public affairs.

Milton stated the faith: “And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

The purpose of a free press was to insure that Truth did grapple fairly with Falsehood. Give government power to license or prohibit, and force became party to the struggle — force that might be exerted on the side of Truth, to be sure, but that might just as easily sustain the opposite side. What the people wanted was a free and open encounter. Assured of that, they were willing to take their chances on Truth’s winning out in the end.

It is precisely this foundation of a free press that the modern economic development of journalism in America has undermined.

Once liberated from government restraint, the press burgeoned and proliferated alongside democracy itself. Newspapers sprang up, flourished, died, and were replaced. Two and sometimes five grew where one had grown before. The tramp printer and ambitious editor marched in the van of westward migration. During the expansive period of the nineteenth century every party, every faction, had its own newspaper. A shoestring and the gift of gab were almost all a man needed to launch one. The press was free, enterprise was free, the land was free.

When the last frontier had been conquered, however, maturity wrought quick changes in the press as in the entire economy. Personal journalism gave way to the corporation and the chain. Consolidation and concentration supplanted individualist expansion. Simultaneously, Bennett, Pulitzer, and Hearst uncovered the mighty secret of “popular” (sometimes called “yellow”) journalism — a talisman that shifted emphasis from information to entertainment, from opinion to titillation, from enlightenment to something like a daily variety show.

The resulting mass circulations not only enriched the owners, but estranged them from their readers. For the allegiance of readers could now be secured by manifold entertainment values, rather than exclusively by the paper’s quality as a medium of news and opinion. Little Orphan Annie took over some of the functions of Horace Greeley. If the reader did not like the editorials, he could be held with the sports page or the sex stories. If he grew restive in the half-knowledge that his news was being poisoned with bias, he could be soothed with a comic strip.

In one sense the attainment of commercial independence brought the press a new freedom. At least it was now possible to escape the toils of party and factional obligations. No longer need a certain section of political opinion be placated in order to hold circulation. Newspapers ceased to be party organs. “Independent Republican,” or “Independent Democrat,” or just plain “Independent” displaced on the masthead the once proud proclamation of party faith. Many an editor of a Blankville Democrat-Times had to explain to his readers that now this was just a name.

On balance, freedom from parties was net gain, an appropriate parallel to the growth of independent voting. Yet something deeper was involved. What had happened was that the press had driven the piers of its support down through the soil of politics to the bedrock of the economic structure. It had, indeed, become an integral part of the economic structure. Instead of reflecting a variety of opinions thrown out by underlying forces, it turned to throwing out opinions of its own, as one of those forces. Business had run politics and politics had run the press. Now the newspapers, as part of business, helped to run politics. They were in the big time.

The new position accentuated a natural drift toward the elimination of competition. Where on the old basis there might be ample room in one city for a Republican, a Democratic, and perhaps two or three other papers, the acquisition of economic power created urgent impulses toward monopoly. Why have two “independent” papers, when one might serve as well?

Other forces were working in the same direction. Competition for new comics, new features, new reader-lures, steadily increased the cost of publication and wiped out the marginal competitors. The emergence of radio as a heavy bidder for the advertiser’s dollar set up the final strain that drove newspaper after newspaper into oblivion. From 2042 in 1920, the number of dailies declined to 1787 in 1942. Today more than a thousand cities are onepaper towns.

So extragovernmental forces accomplished, to a substantial extent, what government had been enjoined from attempting. The press was cut off from intimate contact with its readers, not by a royal licenser, but by bigness. No official censor, but the disappearance of newspapers from the field, came to diminish unrestrained access to the means of expression.

Not only did the number of newspapers in each community decline. The surviving owners took on more and more the monolithic character of a class. As businessmen, they reflected the prejudices and attitudes of businessmen. The newspaper in Topeka tended to share the political and economic philosophy of its counterpart in Providence, and both found more in common with the shoe manufacturer and the steelmaker than with the majority of their readers. The era of the great editors passed, and the publishers took over: publishers who desired, above all, to make money, and whose social outlook could not escape domination by that purpose.

3

THE eighteenth-century conception of a free press assumed eighteenth-century economics. In those terms, the First Continental Congress in 1774 could appraise freedom of the press as consisting in “its diffusion of liberal sentiments on the administration of government; its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated into more honorable and just modes of conducting affairs.”

To promote union, however, to intimidate officers and act as a quasi arm of government, the press had to be competitive, not monopolistic; multifarious, not uniform; zealous and aggressive, not fat and satisfied. Answerable to nobody, it could check government only if it also checked itself.

In Adam Smith’s world this seemed no problem. The free market, the inexorable laws of supply and demand, the dynamic energy of unshackled enterprise, appeared to offer sufficient security against the press itself becoming an “oppressive officer.” If one paper failed to fulfill its function, another would inevitably spring up. Abuse of power would correct itself.

This natural law of free initiative, if it ever existed, has been repealed by twentieth-century economics. The high cost of modern publishing, the established monopolies in comics, features, and news enterprise, the overwhelming competitive advantage of the entrenched owner, all work against the rise of new ventures. It takes a millionaire with uncommon staying power to set up a new daily in any city over 200,000.

The typical entrepreneurs of the press since 1900 have been the consolidators and chain-makers like Hearst, Scripps-Howard, and Gannett, and the undertakers like Munsey, who bought newspapers to bury them. Journalism has thus developed its own structural rigidity, paralleling that of the great industrial corporations. At the same time it has cultivated a wondrous diversification. Rigidity keeps the threat of new competition at a minimum, and diversification enables the unscrupulous operators to get away with murder. People buy poisoned news, not because they have a real taste for news distortion, but because it comes wrapped in a palatable capsule of comics and features.

The effects are most serious in the smaller cities. Metropolitan populations can and do support some degree of competition, but the people of a thousand cities do not. In many a community the biggest single political fact may be the existence of a certain newspaper and a certain publisher. In a real sense this man is an arm of government, and a peculiarly irresponsible arm. Politicians of both parties crave his favor. Mayors, governors, legislators, and Congressmen drink at the well of his wisdom. Civic movements start or stop according as he nods or shakes his head.

Generally this man is not a sinister character. He often has a hazy notion of public service somewhere in the back of his mind, and convinces himself, at least, that he’s doing the best he can. The point is that he exercises power. And with few exceptions he exercises it as the representative of a small but nevertheless potent group within the community. His cronies are the bankers, the manufacturers, the utility operators, the department store tycoons. The habitat is the Chamber of Commerce, the well-stocked clubs, and the suburban estates of the rich. The ideas he absorbs and the attitudes he reflects are those of the well-heeled upper crust.

Advertiser influence, as such, has probably been overemphasized. In real life industrialists and department store managers do not pound on the publisher’s desk and demand favorable treatment. They do not have to. An owner who lunches weekly with the president of the local power company will always grasp the sanctity of private enterprise in this field more readily than the publicownership ideas of a few crackpots. With the best of will, he may tell himself that his mind is open. Yet as a businessman whose concerns are intimately bound up with those of other businessmen, he has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

This attitude filters down, by well-defined channels, to his staff. In extreme cases it colors the news, and in others controls the selection and emphasis of news. Almost any newspaper will live up to the finest traditions of the press by campaigning for local tax reduction, but few fight with equal ardor for improved public services when the consequence is higher taxes for the publisher and his friends. Fewer still find themselves stirred, say, by the civil rights of workers in a labor dispute.

Without orders, without crude directives, city editors fall easily into the habit of saving their big type for safe topics like rope and burglary, and burying the “hot” (the ideologically dangerous) news in the back pages. Reporters learn not to scrutinize too closely the sacred cows of the community, and editorial writers husband their mightiest blasts for the remotest wrongs.

So the problem of a free press has changed with the times. Its chief antagonist is no longer government, — though indeed assaults from that quarter must constantly be fended off, — but ownership as conditioned by modern economic circumstances. Because they are big, newspapers overawe local and sometimes other governments. Because they are monopolistic, they do not restrain one another. Because they are organs of entertainment which thousands find interesting if not indispensable, they need recognize but a token noblesse oblige. Their principal function remains what it was, — to inform about and conduct a continuing inquisition upon public affairs, — but the discharge of this responsibility has gradually shifted from the people as a whole, adequately represented by many competitive journals, to a narrow and narrowing class of publishers who share the same ideas to an astonishing degree.

4

IN CANDOR, redress cannot be expected from a revival of competition. The clock does not turn back. Having survived one era of jungle warfare, and facing now a new kind of rivalry in radio, the newspapers will not tolerate a further division of the spoils. And save for a few venturesome souls, the prospective rewards are unlikely to attract new enterprisers. Except as it occasionally shrinks, the present structure of the business is likely to endure.

Nor can one look with much confidence to other forms of ownership. A national newspaper regionally published by the government would certainly sicken publishers everywhere with dread, and might for a spell delight readers who love nothing better than a fight; but the corruptions it would invite foreshadow more evil than good. Coöperative ownership, whether by staff or readers, offers some attractions, but the prospect of widespread development along this line in competition with the giants already in possession is not encouraging. Labor newspapers, farm newspapers, and their like offer little general appeal and no guarantee of genuine devotion to the general welfare.

The new birth of freedom, if any, must come from within. It must emerge, not from dreams of the press as it might be, but from the premeditated acts of those who have a stake in the press as it is: the owners, the staffs, and the readers.

Upon the public, it must be confessed, rests the smallest share of the responsibility. For, though the readers are the ultimate jury, and though they can create or not the climate in which a truly free press may flourish, they exercise but a negative and tenuous control. It may be true that people get the kind of newspapers they deserve, but what they deserve, in the sense of what they demand, is largely determined by what they get.

That holds true particularly where one paper dominates or monopolizes the field. A steady diet of a monopoly paper blunts the critical sense and dulls discrimination. One forgets, reading the same paper every day, what kind of paper it might be. One tends to absorb, even while protesting against them, the attitudes and prejudices that shape the lineaments of the news to which he is exposed. We may rightly expect of readers, in time, a more articulate demand for decent journalism, but for the most part the initiative necessarily lies with those inside the business.

There are so many people (and so many kinds) inside the business that it is easy to shift responsibility from one to another. Leaving the front office out of account for purposes of this discussion, the responsibility borne by the men and women who make the newspaper is clear. The reporter, the copyreader, the news editors — all who have a hand in filling the news and editorial columns — owe to themselves and to the country a higher regard for the professional demands of their job.

No working newspaperman, I suppose, can honestly deny having at some time written something that at least bruised his conscience. There are skeletons in every closet: instances in which, from good motives or bad, stupidity or design, the great power momentarily vested in a (usually underpaid) newspaperman has been misused. Nor is the perfectibility of newspapermen any closer than that of human nature. And yet we of the working press have a duty to keep professional conscience alive.

I should define professional conscience as love of truth combined with zeal for the people’s cause. To dispose of quibbling at once, I hasten to affirm, as an article of faith, that truth exists, even though apprehension of it varies; and to add that disagreement on what the general interest may be does not prejudice the fact that there is a general interest of all the people, as opposed to special interests of special groups.

This brings us to the perennial question of “objectivity.” Both love of truth and zeal for the people’s cause are essential to a satisfied professional conscience, and a proper balance between them equally so. One can respect facts, yet, lacking devotion to an ideal, fall into a quite barren and spurious “objectivity” that is impaired by the very absence of a point of view. To report with deadpan detachment a Congressional debate composed of lies violates honest journalism as much as direct falsification. On the other hand, a point of view can achieve such dominance as to destroy fair reporting at the roots. In that case it does not matter whether news is distorted to the left or distorted to the right.

The newspaperman’s problem is to reconcile heart and head: to discipline the impulses with an intellectual regard for truth, and at the same time to inflame curiosity with a social purpose. This marriage takes place when he sincerely represents, in judgment, in selection, in emphasis, in the responses of his news sense, the whole people and not any one section or class; and when he devotes the whole of his technical competence to the pursuit of truth as best he can perceive it.

Given such a union, differences of approach can be tolerated. Two copyreaders sitting side by side may differ violently on the manner in which a story is handled, but their disagreement becomes significant only when it involves literary prostitution — that is to say, only when professional judgment gives way to emotional prejudice, or to unseemly attachment to a set of preconceived ideas, or to an overweening desire to make good with the front office. One does not ask that the control of news content be divorced from human nature; only that it be free and pledged, in the broadest sense, to the public welfare.

True professional freedom combined with high professional competence constitutes the definition of a great newspaper. All great newspapers have had them both — the New York Times under Ochs, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch under Bovard, the New York World under Frank Cobb, and so on down the honor roll. These papers had objectivity, in the sense of fair and responsible reporting, and they had behind and above that technique an unflagging will to see justice done.

We cannot all be great. But we can preserve professional standards front corruption. We can attain the dignity (even though underpaid) of a good job well done. We can put aside the cynicism which slants the news to suit a dominant group in the community. We can justify our right to wield the mighty power of the printed word by proving our ability to use it in behalf of the people. So used, it becomes a free press.

5

IN THE last analysis the question of freedom limps home and settles down on the doorstep of ownership. The readers can boil with discontent, but their immediate influence upon the newspaper of today is bound to be tentative. The working staff can glow with good resolutions, but in the end fulfillment depends not only upon the limitations of human frailty, but on the intangible atmosphere whose chief ingredient is the attitude of ownership.

What is required of ownership is the abandonment of its claim to the perquisites of absolute monarchy. If the request seems absurd, so to the possessors of power a challenge of their right to exercise it has always seemed unreasonable.

Under modern conditions the irresponsible control of newspapers in behalf of a narrow economic interest is incompatible with the social purpose of their freedom. That purpose is now, as it was in the beginning, to give the people at large genuine representation, not only “against” their government, but against the special interests that seek to gain their own ends through government. When newspapers become a confederate of those interests, the people are denied that free access to the means of expression which permits Truth and Falsehood to grapple in “free and open encounter.”

Conditions that might have safeguarded this purpose in an earlier and simpler day have vanished. New enterprises no longer spring up overnight. One newspaper may no longer check and offset another. Competitive restraints upon the abuse of power have been diluted by the monopolistic consequences of competition.

Having taken on the character of semi-monopolies, the newspapers are affected with a public interest exactly as are the utilities, the railroads, the milk supply. Socialization or regulation, the appropriate remedies in the case of other monopolies, do not recommend themselves because the peculiar function of the press demands real separation from government. This we have achieved at the cost of a growing separation from the people. To close the gap, we now need a recognition by ownership that it is a trustee and not a dictator.

In practical terms such a constitutional revolution calls for a new kind of newspaper owner, and new methods by which he exercises his powder. I do not hope for the voluntary reform of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, but it is obvious that his type of autocracy (somebody once called him the best mind of the thirteenth century) is ill-suited to the times. As the older generation of publishers dies off, as new men assume their responsibilities, as a few working newspapermen worm their way into property, the opportunity arises for a change of outlook.

What a free press needs is an owner who recognizes that he is selling circulation and prestige, not an economic point of view or service to special interests; and who, above all, recognizes that selling something is not his first obligation at all, but is subordinate to his responsibility to represent the unrepresented. A man who can divorce himself from the associations and outlook that normally go with wealth; a man who can sacrifice even his own short-range interest as a business entrepreneur in favor of his long-run interest as the champion of a greater cause; a man whose passion for the general welfare overcomes his desire to impose his own ideas upon the community; a man of wisdom and humility, character and devotion, courage and modesty — here is the kind of newspaper owner who can make the press free.

Such ownership would develop new methods of management. It would exploit, and thereby stimulate, the professional instincts of the working staff. There is a streak of the actor in nearly every newspaperman. Nothing drives him like approval from men he respects, and nothing disillusions him like doing nasty chores for men he does not respect. Good management would operate the newspaper as the great coöperative endeavor it must be. It would temper hierarchical authority with democratic participation, instilling in the newest reporter a sense of active contribution, and granting real power to the responsible editorial workers. In short, it would function as a constitutional monarchy.

Is it possible? Can newspaper owners so far subordinate their property stake as to serve the people rather than a class? Whether the press survives as a vital instrument of democracy will depend upon the wisdom and temper of its owners. Theirs it is to decide whether they shall rise above selfishness or remain representatives of wealth and economic power; whether they shall fight the people’s battles against special interests or fight the people for the interests; whether they shall administer a trusteeship or exploit a privilege.

The press will become free when its owners permit it to become free.