The Reader Also Has Rights

IN December, 1942, Henry R. Luce of Time, Incorporated, suggested to Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago an inquiry into the freedom of the press: both its present, state and future prospects. Mr. Hutchins selected a dozen distinguished men in several professions to serve with himself as a Commission on Freedom of the Press. The conclusions of this commission (A Free and Responsible Press, University of Chicago Press, $2.00) should prove to be important in the history of American journalism.

For the first time, an examination of the performance of the press has been undertaken by a highly competent, independent body with adequate resources. They spent three years and $200,000 of Mr, Luce’s money, then $15,000 more that Mr. Hutchins dug out of Encyclopaedia Brilannica, Incorporated.

They chose to consider freedom of the press in terms of a responsible press and they came out. with the warning that only a responsible press can remain free. Failure of the press to meet the needs of a society dependent on it for information and ideas is the greatest danger to its freedom, they conclude.

Their answer to the question, “Is the freedom of the press in danger?" is a flat “Yes.” Their reasons are bluntly given: —

1. As the importance of communication has increased, its control has come into fewer hands.

2. The few in control have failed to meet the needs of the people.

Press practices at times have been so irresponsible that, if continued, society is bound to lake control for its own protection. “The First Amendment will be amended.”

This formidable jury has tried the press and found it wanting in responsibility and adequacy to the public need. The judgment is severe and the gored press will not be without its glib spokesmen to explain it all away as an academic conclusion. But they have a hard case to break.

The commission carefully explain the communications revolution that has made the press big business, and show the press increasingly acting like big business and in alliance with the interests of other big businesses. They point out the increasing concentration of newspaper control contracting the channels for information and ideas. Forty percent of all newspaper eirculat ion is noncompetitive. That means that 19,000,000 newspaper buyers have no choice. In 90 per cent, of American communities there is local monopoly over local news. This approaches the position of the post office and the telephone company, which are not generally considered to be in a position to raise much of a holler about private enterprise.

Morris Ernst, in The First Freedom, has documented this tendency of the press. It has been further illuminated by the recent spotlight of newspaper strikes focused on two cities. In Springfield, Massachusetts, all four newspapers were revealed to be under one control. In Philadelphia the sale of the Record to the Bulletin leaves the third city of America at this writing with just one morning and two evening papers.

This monopolistic trend underscores the commission’s point:—

Through concentration of ownership the flow of news and opinion is shaped at the sources; its variety is limited; and at the same time the insistence of the consumer’s need has increased.

The core of the report is a penetrating examination of the performance of the press. The commission challenge the whole rigamarole of newspaper cliches as to what is news, and the silly game of scoops and headline hunting. They recall unkindly that the war was ended with a scoop and they think they could do with fewer of them.

The news is twisted by emphasis on the novel and the sensational. . . . Too much of the regular output consists of a succession of stories and images I hat has no relation to the typical lives of real people anywhere. The result is meaninglessness, flatness, distortion, and the perpetuation of misunderstanding.

They find the press preoccupied with the sensational and trivial “to such an extent that the eitizen is not supplied tlve information and discussion he needs to discharge his responsibilities to the community.”

Every newspaperman knows bow generally tins is true. With a few notable exceptions, which I be commission might, well have emphasized more than they did, newspapering is pretty sloppy business casual, trite, almost ritualistic in the stereotypes that leave the individual differences among papers in widely differing communities hardly more distinctive than among the different brands of canned corn. The easy flow of such stuff as comes off the police blotter gets so much of the at lent ion of the press as to squeeze out most of the information on public affairs that makes any sense.

The honorable exceptions are easily identified. The commission may have had their own reasons for making so little distinction between good and bad newspapers. One that suggests itself is their citing of the reporting of the San Francisco Conference as an example of malpractice by the press generally: —

So completely was the task of manufacturing suspense performed that, when after some weeks au acceptable charter was signed, the effect on newspaper readers was one of incredulous surprise.

They might also have noted the practically universal sensationalism of the newspaper reporting from Russia of Ilya Ehrenburg’s articles on his observations in America. When the full translation of his articles came out in Harper’s for December, 1946, they were utterly unrecognizable as the same on which such inflammatory reports had been cabled to the American press.

The commission reject the alibi that good journalism doesn’t pay. “As the example of many ventures in the communication industry shows, good practice in the interest of public enlightenment is good business as well. . . . They have an obligation to elevate [tastes] rather than to degrade them.”

It may be worth noting that half the jury viewed the press from Chicago, where the malevolent Tribune dominates, or from Cambridge, in the sterile environment of Boston journalism. Only a minority live in. the area of the New York Times and Herald Tribune. Whether, had they been conditioned by the quality of the papers in Louisville and St. Louis, they might have had a less jaundiced view, is an interesting speculation. But if they had, their situation would have been abnormal. You cannot bracket three other cities as well newspapered as these latter two. The central finding is buttressed on a quotation from William Allen White, candid publisher and, in his later years, the conscience of Ins class. White said: —

Too often the publisher of an American newspaper has made his money in some other calling than journalism. He is a rich man seeking power and prestige. He has the country club complex. The business manager of this absentee owner quickly is afflicted with the country club point of view. Soon the managing editor’s wife nags him into it. And they all get the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth. Therefore it is hard to get a modern American newspaper to go the distance necessary to print all the news about many topics.

This doesn’t mean the deck is always stacked. That situation exists when the Chicago Tribune gets hold of the Army’s secret defense plans and publishes them just ahead of Pearl Harbor. But mostly it is just the way the weather sets with Mr. While’s rich man. His stake is all on one side with the big employer, the big investor, the big taxpayer. For practical purposes that is the only side the press represents. This is sometimes unfortunate.

So it happened that in all Massachusetts, through all the four elections Mr. Roosevelt carried in the Bay State, only one small newspaper gave support to his side. That one might be discounted. It was owned by the same publisher in Springfield who ran editorials against Mr. Roosevelt in some of his other papers.

It looked as if the newspapers of Massachusetts were almost universally out of sympathy with the social revolution going on in the country and supported by the majority of their readers. It was in this anti-New Deal framework that its reports to the people of the operations and policies of their government Mowed.

This example illustrates in some degree the commission’s judgment that the press fails to meet the needs of the people. When government, acting to meet a public crisis, needed full reporting and careful interpreting, the press was mostly not in a mood to give it. Its mood was not the mood of t he people.

A great editor, the late O. K. Bovard, put up the score on his city room bulletin board after the 1936 election when his rich publisher had voted the paper editorially for Landon: Country 40, Country Club 2. That roughly was the score against the press and fairly measured the gap between the publisher and the readers, and between the publisher and his own writers.

Members of the commission were disturbed by finding that many able reporters and editorial writers displayed frustration — the feeling that they were not allowed to do the kind of work which their professional ideals demanded. . . . A continuation of this disturbing situation will prevent the press from discharging its responsibilities toward society.

The vital necessity of the consumer to have access to clear channels of adequate information on public affairs is insistently put: —

No democracy . . . will indefinitely tolerate concentration of private power irresponsible and strong enough to thwart the aspirations of the people.

Here the commission come to a sticking point. They shy away from public regulation to make the press accountable, lest other freedoms be endangered. This is the dilemma of a modern society enormously dependent upon a press in private hands, inevitably controlled by large capitalists whose Interests are not always in the public interest.

That the commission have not taken us out of that dilemma is both the weakness of the report and the riddle of the problem. To refuse the public the traditional, democratic protection of its interests by public regulation leaves little but hope and prayer. The commission pray that the press will make itself more responsible. They hope it will restore the professional status of journalism, long a captive to the publisher’s business. They insist that the press cease shielding its own miscreants by the device of refusing publicity to the malpractices and libel suits of its fellow members. They ask a sense of trusteeship by publishers. These are indispensable reforms. But the only means that the commission recommend are public concern, public appraisal, public criticism of press performance. They propose an endowed agency to supply continuing appraisal of the press. This is a very mild poultice to apply to I he organic and spreading disorder of irresponsible giantism which they find in the press. But the report is not to be judged by failure to find the cure. Its value is in alerting the public and warning the publishers. Its definition of “common carrier of public discussion" as the function that a responsible press must accept, is one for all journalism to paste in its hat.

What the heck,”an old press hand comments sardonically. “Bill White said it all long ago. Why write a book about it?”

The commission has its own answer to that.

They leave the issue, as They must, in the lap of the public, with these final words:—

We have the impression that the American people do not realize what has happened to them. They are not an are that the coinmumeations revolution has occurred. They do not appreciate the tremendous power which the new instruments arid the new organization of the press place in the hands of a few men. They have not yet understood how far the performance of the press falls short of the recpiirements of a free society in the world today. The principle object of our report is to make these points clear.