How free is the “freest press in the world?” Who can get a hearing in it, and who cannot? Is its freedom really in danger? Is it giving the country the kind of service that the times require?
This week, 13 men* who had spent three years and $215,000 in quest of the answers brought in their report. A Free and Responsible Press (University of Chicago Press; $2) was the work, not of newspapermen, but of educators, philosophers, lawyers, a poet, a banker. They, and a handful of assistants, had met 17 times, heard 283 witnesses, reflected and argued as the Commission on Freedom of the Press. They were financed by grants from Time Inc. ($200,000) and Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. ($15,000). But their conclusions were strictly their own.
Dangerous Age. They decided—and the decision troubled them—that press freedom (meaning radio and movies as well as newspapers and magazines) is indeed in danger. It always had been, might always be: but the present danger seemed to lie within the press, not outside. They were amazed by the bigness and badness they had seen. Said the report:
“These agencies can facilitate thought and discussion. They can stifle it. … They can debase and vulgarize mankind. They can endanger the peace of the world; they can do so accidentally, in a fit of absence of mind. They can play up or down the news and its significance, foster and feed emotions, create complacent fictions and blind spots, misuse the great words, and uphold empty slogans. [They] . . . can spread lies faster and farther than our forefathers dreamed. . . .” They can, said the Commission, and they do.
In the old days, the Commission reflected, “the only serious obstacle to free expression was government censorship. . . . Protection against government is now not enough to guarantee that a man who has something to say shall have a chance to say it. … Through concentration of ownership the variety of sources of news and opinions is limited. . . . Freedom of the press . . . can only continue as an accountable freedom.”
Big Order. How did the accounts balance? The U.S. now required five things of its press: “1) a truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning; 2) a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism; 3) a means of projecting the opinions and attitude of the groups in the society to one another; 4) a method of presenting and clarifying the goals and values of the society; 5) a way of reaching every [citizen] by the currents of information, thought and feeling which the press supplies.”
And just what was the U.S. getting? Fine service, said the Commission—from a few leaders in each field. But from the rank & file, deplorable performance. The movies were out to entertain, and nothing else; the radio was out to sell soup, soap & cereals, period; the press was out for scoops and sensations.
In this dreary, low-level accomplishment, the Commission saw “the greatest danger” to freedom. The giants of communication would either have to put their houses in order, or people might one day ask the Government to do it for them. Obviously government interference, “a last resort,” would be a remedy worse than the evil. But the press’s own record in self-regulation had not been good. The Production Code had merely made the movies inoffensive (in one sense); the radio was regulated by the unwritten code of advertisers “who will not risk making a single enemy. . . .” The American Society of Newspaper Editors had a fine code of ethics, but had never used it.
How Now? “What can be done?” the Commission asked—and confessed that its conclusions were not startling. Its plan was full of hope that the press might still add a cubit to its stature.
This week FORTUNE, in its April issue, reprinted the report as a supplement. FORTUNE found it “an important, balanced, meaty, difficult document,” whose obscurities and overcondensations were, considering the source, “inexcusable.”
It was a difficult document in more ways than one. The first draft was written by Archibald MacLeish, the final one by Chairman Robert Maynard Hutchins and Robert D. Leigh (director of the Commission staff). In between, every line was “hammered out in conference and correspondence.” What survived was, presumably, the most that all 13 could agree to.
Many an editor would wonder why the Commission failed to name names, except in obvious or innocuous cases of the misuse of freedom. He would note many a contradiction (e.g., in its preoccupation with the evils of monopoly, the Commission overlooked such cities as Boston, where eight competing papers give poorer fare than Louisville, whose Courier-Journal and Times are a monopoly).
For the time and money, and the caliber of the men, it was a disappointing report. But in its peroration, written by Philosopher Hocking, the Commission for once rose to the level of its argument. “The journalist,” said he, “sometimes reflects that his art is one of improvisation, and that its products, being destined to pass with the interest of the moment, require no great care in their workmanship. Yet, just because it is the day’s report of itself, it is the permanent word of that day to all other days. The press must be free because its freedom is a condition of its veracity, and its veracity is its good faith with the total record of the human spirit.”
* The 13: Robert M. Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago, Commission chairman; Zechariah Chafee Jr., professor of law, Harvard, vice chairman; John M. Clark, professor of economics, Columbia; John Dickinson, professor of law, Pennsylvania; William Ernest Hocking, professor of philosophy, emeritus, Harvard; Harold D. Lasswell, professor of law, Yale; Poet Archibald MacLeish, deputy chairman of the U.S. delegation to UNESCO; Charles E. Merriam, professor of political science, emeritus, Chicago; Reinhold Niebuhr, professor of ethics and philosophy of religion, Union Theological Seminary; Robert Redfield, professor of anthropology, Chicago; Beardsley Ruml’, ex-chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and board chairman of R. H. Macy & Co.; Arthur M. Schlesinger, professor of history, Harvard; George N. Shuster, president of Hunter college.
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