In Defense of the Press

by ARTHUR BERNON TOURTELLOT

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DEMOCRACY is not merely a political system. It is the long, the patient, the informed, and the critical effort of a people to live together for a common good. In America that good has been held to be the liberation of the individual from any kind of oppression, whether it be political or religious or social or economic.

The framers of the Bill of Rights believed that the people should reserve certain rights permanently, largely because Jefferson was convinced that the people must achieve freedom for themselves, and that they could achieve freedom only if they were informed and capable of critical observation. Democracy, the art and the reality of self-government, was to Jefferson the product of a giant educational process. And he held that process and a free press to be interdependent. “Where the press is free,” he wrote, “and every man able to read, all is safe.” Jefferson knew that you could no more have an educated people without a free press than you could have a free press worth its salt without an educated people.

If the American people are constitutionally endowed with a free press, that press is ipso facto charged with certain functions. Those functions are, first, to inform the people, and second, to stimulate criticism by being critical itself. In the historical development of American journalism, the first function has come to be known as reporting the news; and the only standard for that is truth. The second function is fulfilled by editorials, by commentators’ columns, and by other expressions of opinion; and the only standard for them is honesty. Without such truth and without such honesty, the press would not deserve any freedom at all. Moreover, far from aiding the people in their responsibility of governing and directing themselves intelligently, it would make efficient government and enlightened self-direction a virtual impossibility.

In a democracy, then, a free press vindicates the special right guaranteed it in direct proportion to the truth of its news and the honesty of its opinions. It would also follow that our journalism has been positive and good to the extent of its contribution to the achievement of the American goals, which are not only the preservation of such freedom as we may already have, but the constant exploration of new frontiers of freedom. Only on these grounds — on the fulfillment of its informative and critical functions — can t he progress of a free press in America be judged. Only on these grounds can its future be weighed. That future is mere speculation, however, and the past experience only a series of accidents, if the press is unaware of its functions and without a spirit of inquiry about the degree to which those functions have been fulfilled — if, in short, it is without a conscience.

After the 1940 Presidential election, much was written to suggest that grave dangers imperiled the usefulness of the press as an instrument of democracy. Roughly 70 per cent of the nation’s newspapers supported Mr. Willkie, even though such news stories as the Gallup reports in the same papers foretold the re-election of President Roosevelt, who had the support of only about a fourth of the papers. The post-election complaint was that the “power of the press” was at a vanishing point, and that the press either misrepresented public opinion or did not represent it at all. Mr. Harold Ickes felt sufficiently alarmed about this subject to assemble a symposium on it.

The storm was pretty much a tempest in a teapot, for the function of a press in a democracy is not to serve as a weathervane of public opinion. Nor is there anything healthful in a public opinion that serves as a weathervane of press opinion. It would have been alarming if, in 1940, the pro-Willkie papers had refused to carry stories indicating a Roosevelt victory, or if the electorate had veered blindly to the support of Mr. Willkie simply because the vast majority of the press advocated his election.

The first would have been a concealment of news, a withholding of information on the part of the press. The second would have meant an abrogation, on the part of the people, of that power to judge the press which Jefferson wisely held to be a duty of the citizens of a democracy. Nothing would be more dangerous to a democracy than a press of such power that the elections were merely an automatic, popular stamp of approval on its choices for public offices.

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WHEN we are worrying about the power of the press, it is well to remember that the kind of power which is able to swing elections increases only as the ability of the people to exercise critical judgment decreases. An enlightened people ought to make up its own mind. It is a far healthier symptom of the condition of a democracy that a people exposed to such an overwhelming urging of the election of one man should go out and elect another than it would be for the candidate who happened to have the most editors on his side to ride into office.

The power of the press, in short, should be a stimulative power and not a persuasive power, and the function of the press editorially should be to provoke criticism and to foster a critical attitude. Certainly that function is well fulfilled when the critical attitude of the people is sufficiently developed to enable them to criticize the critics!

Since journalism in America is a commercial enterprise, it is sometimes argued that the press must necessarily fall far short of ever achieving the ends for which it was guaranteed freedom. It is no more reasonable to condemn a newspaper because it is a product to be marketed than it is to condemn a hook or a play for the same reason. Certainly book publishing and play producing are commercial enterprises, too. But, say these critics, newspaper publishers have to sell both their papers and advertising space in them, while book publishers and theatrical producers do not. And the advertiser is frequently accused either of dictating editorial policy under threats of pulling his advertising, or of choosing his advertising medium on the basis of that medium’s editorial policy on public questions.

The evidence against the existence of any such conspiracy on the part of advertisers is much clearer than the grounds on which they are indicted. In the first place, the main purpose of the advertiser is to get ihe virtues of his product before as many people as possible. If there were any relationship between advertising and editorializing, then one would expect the advertiser to advertise in the paper with the most popular editorials. Hence, the pro-Roosevelt papers might have expected a huge increase in advertising in 1936, after the people had overwhelmingly rejected the rationalizing of the pro-Landon papers. But no such shift of advertising occurred.

The argument is frequently advanced that, though papers vary in editorial opinion, they all protect and further the interests of big business — in which category advertisers are lumped indiscriminately. The fact is that most American newspapers are supported, not by big businesses, but by small local businesses owned and operated by people in the middle economic group. Frequently the smalltown or country newspaper, supported almost exclusively by the very smallest businesses and by farmers, is the most conservative publication in the world; it may look upon the policies of a liberal metropolitan daily with horror. Again, in a typical large American city, where there are two or more dailies, the more liberal is likely to be the stronger newspaper, as the liberal St. Louis Post-Dispatch is stronger than the Globe-Democrat. All this suggests that there is no direct relation between a journal’s editorial policy and the amount of its advertising revenue.

The general mores of American newspapers are the mores of a capitalistic democracy, for the obvious reason that the United States happens to be a capitalistic democracy, and the press is a part of it. If it is capitalistic democracy that limits the press, then the critic should condemn capitalistic democracy; he should not condemn the press for being commercial in structure in a society where it would be suicidal and unnatural for it to be anything else. There can be no legit imate quarrel with the press for operating under the capitalistic impetus when the rest of the nation does the same thing. If there is any quarrel, it should be about the capitalistic impetus as the springboard for any individual or group action.

These fallacies about the press are important today because they confuse the people, who are the ultimate judges of the press. It is wrong to indict the press, or to excuse its shortcomings, on grounds that merely make big business or advertisers the scapegoats and then dismiss the problem. While a free press has neither the obligation nor the right to sit in judgment on the people, the latter have both the right, and the duty to sit in constant judgment over the press.

Such judgment is a condition of the press’s freetlom in a democracy, as Jefferson construed it when he wrote that “we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood.” Historically, the people have demonstrated the will and the ability to suppress a paper more than once in America, as in 1865 when the people of Cleveland forced the suspension of the Plain Dealer for its disloyalty to the Union. It is only the intelligent exercise of such power on the part of the people that can keep the conscience of the press alive.

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THE concern of our democracy should be less with the organizational or commercial nature of the press than with its sense of moral responsibility to fulfil! its functions. Judgment must come from the people as an integral part of the democratic process. If they sidestep this responsibility, then the whole democratic adventure has failed and not the press alone. Consequently, the press in America has advanced in quality with the ability of the people to judge it.

Nor can the press blame its shortcomings on the people. The press is always on probation, and when it violates that probation — when it suffers a lapse of conscience — then it is the press that is at fault. It is at fault when it ignores the people’s judgment simply because it can get away with such a course. It is at fault always when it slants, or entirely omits, news that would enable the people to formulate a sound judgment. And these are sins that have not yet completely disappeared from American journalism, although they appear to be diminishing.

They are on the decline solely because Americans are better educated today than ever before — a fact of which the wise editors and publishers are well aware. Americans today demand more from their news organs than in the past. They are quick to detect the false or distorted. They want breadth of opinion, a variety of views, and thoroughness in reporting. The Washington Star, an extremely conservative paper, does not publish the columns of Dorothy Thompson and Lowell Mellett — both liberals— for nothing. The Star simply knows good journalism. There was a century and a quarter of journalism in America when nobody’s opinions graced a paper except the editor’s. Today, most great dailies carry several columns of opinions that differ radically from the editor’s. The press in America today fulfills its critical function more thoroughly than in earlier days, simply because the diversity of opinions opens up competition of ideas.

In the days when personal journalism was at its height in the United States, a paper’s personality was that of its editor. Not only to the readers of the old New York Tribune, but to the entire nation, Horace Greeley and the Tribune were synonymous. If you quoted the Tribune, you quoted Greeley; and if you said that the Tribune was guilty of a piece of folly, you meant that Greeley was off on a tangent again.

Similarly, when the New York Sun lashed out at the World during the Cleveland campaign, everybody knew that Charles A. Dana was out after Joseph Pulitzer again. If an editor suffered from a delusion, as Greeley frequently did, then the paper was either useless or dangerous until he recovered. If an editor was by nature vicious and without principles, then there was not a principle to be found in his whole paper. As far as the health of the democracy went, such outright viciousness was not the worst thing that could happen, for the journal resulting from it could eventually be discovered and repudiated — and such journals always have been.

Cut when the influence of a paper like Greeley’s Tribune, perhaps the most influential single journal in all American history, was the printed personality of only one man, then the free press was really in danger. The Tribune and Greeley — inseparable as the two were — both had a liberal, humane reputation that exists, thanks to haphazard critics, to this day. What reason did the American people have to question its purity of purpose, then, when the bitterness and the vanity and the personal ambitions of Greeley led the Tribune to advocate “letting the South go” whenever the going in the Civil War was rough, to refuse to support. Lincoln in the darkest days of the 1864 campaign, and to flatter the Congressional scheme to impeach Johnson when the latter stood almost alone for a decent reconstruction program? The answer is that the people of the Tribune had no reason to doubt the wisdom of these things, for the Tribune printed nothing other than Greeley’s personal opinions.

This was dangerous journalism. A press whose freedom and conscience are conditioned by the unpredictable whims of individual men who are the papers falls far shorter of achieving its function in a democracy than a press whose freedom and conscience are limited by such predictable factors as a consistent economic or political dogmatism. For these last things are more easily recognized, and more easily considered in relation to editorial judgments, than are the whims of a man who becomes an institution—just as they are recognized and considered by the readers of Captain Patterson’s Daily News, who read his paper all during 1940 and then went out to act in direct opposition to his advice by putting New York City overwhelmingly in the Democratic victory column. And the present administration has very sound grounds for ignoring the McCormick-Patterson press, as Lincoln did not dare ignore the blundering Greeley’s Tribune.

Where once the personality of any newspaper was a rigid reflection of the views of its publisher, it is now a composite personality reflecting the minds of many editorial forces: the columnists, the Washington, foreign, and war correspondents, the news analysts, and the military and political commentators. This tendency towards a many-sided, broader personality, in place of the rigid, narrow view, better equips the journal to achieve its informative and critical ends, and the reader to judge the paper, to read it critically.

The editorial change has been accompanied by a considerable increase in both the scope and the accuracy of news coverage. Today the world-wide network of news sources covers every major spot on the globe. The California papers have access to as full and accurate reports of Washington events as the capital’s own papers. The New York papers know as much of happenings in London as any Fleet Street office. The recent Supreme Court decision liberating the Associated Press services from monopolistic restrictions opens the way for even better news coverage by more papers. Indeed, there remains today no material or physical obstacle to the fulfillment by the press of its cardinal duty to get the facts and to give them to the people.

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I HAVE suggested so far that the health of a free press depends upon the ability of the people to act as its censor, but that it is futile for them to act as censors on any such general, ill-informed grounds as the belief that the press is now exclusively the organ of big business, or is dictated to by advertisers, or is losing what power it ever had anyway; that the capitalistic structure of the press cannot be condemned as such so long as it is a part of a capitalistic society and must operate within that society; and, finally, that the commercial growth of the press has brought with it a complex editorial nature and a breadth, completeness, and speed of news coverage which make it far more able today to discharge its responsibilities to the people than it has ever been in all its history.

The question is: Docs the press have sufficient conscience to avail itself of its own opportunities and to do all that it can, within its structure as part of a capitalistic democracy, to fulfill its obligations to the people? And if it hasn’t such moral awareness or, having it, ignores it, then what is the remedy?

The history of the press during the years immediately preceding this war is a highly creditable one. During the most ostrich-like period of our whole national history, the press alone kept hurling at the people the tragic facts of the progress of fascism. While the intellectuals were still admiring the brilliant cynicism of Walter Millis’s The Road to War, the foreign correspondents were pouring out the story of the rising threat of Hitler. But the foreign correspondents were not even worth a laugh or a satire then. They were simply ignored. Later it was amusing when Dorothy Thompson was thrown out of Germany, and when American correspondents were tossed right and left out of Berlin and Rome.

The Spanish civil war was the most completely reported foreign rebellion in the annals of the American press, and rightly so, but most readers got too much of it. There seemed to be better things to do than read about an irrelevant squabble in Spain. Later still, when the implications of the European war could escape no half-thorough reader of the papers in 1940, the nation was treated to a Presidential campaign in which both candidates found it desirable to close their eyes to the inescapable fact that America must actively intervene or go down with the rest.

The wire services and the daily papers, the free press, spent more and more money to bring the realities of the storm in Europe to the attention of the American people as the thirties drew to a close — long before the other democratic institutions of the United States even cared to face the task of thinking seriously about it. Never was any one group of people more justified in shouting “I told you so” than the men of the press on December 7, 1941.

And never was any people less justified in protesting that the facts had been withheld from them than the American nation. The newspapermen published the facts in their papers; they expanded them in books; they preached them in lectures. Whatever charges may be brought against the press, the fact is that the press, its reporters and its commentators, brought t he meaning of world history straight to the people months and years before the people wanted to hear it. And the press as a whole was far ahead of the nation on the moral duty and the practical expediency of America’s aiding the foes of fascism during the early years of the war.

Tt would seem that it was democracy itself, rather than the press, that suffered a lapse of conscience. The American people simply could not be told; they had to be shown. The answer, so far as the conscience of the press is concerned, is that it did have a very strong sense of moral responsibility all through the late thirties and it did not ignore that sense.

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AT THE same time, the press does compromise with its conscience, and does rationalize questionable practices. There is, for example, the competitive foolishness of afternoon editions, when papers vie for attention by sacrificing all sense of value and proportion to sell copies on the strength of the sheer dimensions of the headlines. The afternoon press of any large city would lead an observer to believe that a decisive turn in the war is taken every single day just before each edition goes to press. As any newspaperman knows, it is better in such cases to be fast than to be right.

There is also the incompleteness of news on such controversial domestic subjects as labor and birth control. In both cases, there is either a largely onesided story or a shameless pussyfooting. Industrialists must not be offended, and churches must not be offended. Otherwise, apparently, the people can have the news. Again, there is still the practice of editorializing the news. A paper should have no news policy except truth. But it frequently does, and that news policy is far more difficult for the reader to discover than is the editorial policy, which is often blatant and sometimes hysterical.

By headlining a strike in which a policeman is killed and six pickets badly hurt, with “Policeman Killed by Pickets,” the press can turn many readers against the workers. Or by headlining it “One Killed, Six Injured as Police Battle Strikers,” readers can be turned against the police. Such direction of emphasis and slanting of stories is not done because the newspapers arc without a conscience. 11 is done as a temporary departure from that conscience for the sake of misconceived prudence. If every paper in this country began tomorrow morning to print impartial, unslanted news of labor, reserving its verdicts for opinion columns, those papers would not suffer a single bit. All the press needs is a voluntary compact to print all controversial news without doctoring it by omission or by emphasis.

These arc all cases — and there are others — where the press is prepared to ignore its conscience,

i which amounts to a temporary and partial repudiation of its functions in a democracy. Such cases are undesirable. And because they are not easy to detect, they can be dangerous. But there is no possible way both to keep a free press and to require it to publish unslanted stories. You cannot legislate the press into a more consistent adherence to its conscience and still have a free press.

Some have suggested that removing the press from contact with advertisers will make it completely free, consistently truthful in its news stories, and thoroughly honest in its editorials. The answer to that is, “ Look at PM.” There is a paper immune from “pressure” from advertisers, and immune also from the necessity of paying its own way. It certainly has no commitments to any special interests. It has on its staff many men of better than average ability. But it is a bad newspaper. It editorializes all the news it prints; it omits a huge amount of news altogether; its sense of proportion in make-up is a total mystery to its most faithful readers; it is intemperate, hysterical, shrill, and easily as sensational on a high level as the Graphic ever was on a lower one. It proceeds on the principle that a man is guilty until proved innocent, and usually it dares anyone it has once convicted to try to be or do good.

There is probably no qualified observer who will question the essential rightness of the instincts of PM. But you cannot stop there. It is not enough that the purposes of PM, however confused they sometimes seem, are high and worth while. To be an effective part of our society, our press must be not only in it but of it. To improve the press you must improve the society. The improvement must spring from the people. If the people are improved, then you will have an improved press, a press with a quickened conscience. Or as Bruce Bliven has put it, “We get about what we deserve.”

The free press, to fulfill its functions more adequately, has but one crying need — more adequately educated readers. You cannot blame the New York Times because four million people read the Daily News while only a tenth of that number read the Times, The burden of a better press in a

democracy, like the burden of a better government, rests with the education of the people. The better educated they are, then the more critical, the more demanding, the more discerning they will be. And then the press will have to improve to survive.