To Fix The Press (October 1994 | Volume: 45, Issue: 6)

To Fix The Press

AH article image

Authors: Stephen Bates

Historic Era:

Historic Theme:

Subject:

October 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 6

During a board meeting at Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1942, Henry Luce, editor in chief of Time Inc., passed a note to the educator Robert M. Hutchins. “How,” Luce asked, “do I find out about the freedom of the press and what my obligations are?” Hutchins said he didn’t know. Luce persevered: What would Hutchins think of impaneling a committee of experts to analyze the rights and duties of the press? “If you’ll put up the money,” Hutchins replied, “I’ll organize the committee.”

Like Luce, who had cofounded Time magazine at twenty-four, Hutchins had made his mark early in life, becoming dean of Yale Law School at twenty-eight and president of the University of Chicago at thirty. Also like Luce, Hutchins had a vigorous intellect, a fondness for unorthodox ideas, and the self-assurance to implement them. “There are two ways to have a great university—it must either have a great football team or a great president,” he declared in 1939, and proceeded to abolish Chicago’s football program.

To study the American press, Hutchins recruited a dozen intellectual luminaries, including the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the poet (and Librarian of Congress) Archibald MacLeish. At seventeen meetings over the next three years, Chairman Hutchins and the other members refined their critique of American journalism. The Commission on Freedom of the Press, as Hutchins named it, considered its subject perilously shallow, sensationalist, closed-minded, and at times dishonest. Assessing its performance, Hutchins later remarked, the members “felt a little sad.”

How could the press be improved? The philosopher William E. Hocking considered “the service of news” too important to leave entirely to private enterprise; the government should step in. Hocking also floated what he termed a “quixotic” proposal to add a preamble to the Bill of Rights that would stipulate that “the enjoyment of all rights in a free community depends on the good faith of those who claim them.” Niebuhr replied that making freedoms conditional would “destroy the Bill of Rights.”

Though most members weren’t inclined to retool the Bill of Rights, they did ponder an assortment of possible curbs on the press. Beardsley Ruml, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, recommended a licensing scheme: newspapers would obey an agency modeled on the Federal Communications Commission or lose the legal benefits of incorporation. Llewellyn White, a member of the Hutchins group’s staff, proposed making the intentional publication of falsehoods a federal crime, a notion he rather grandiosely likened to Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.” Some commission members thought newspapers ought to be legally required to publish corrections or rebuttals. When the University of Pennsylvania law professor John Dickinson cautioned that such a law might discourage editors from publishing controversial columnists like the pugnacious conservative Westbrook Pegler, Niebuhr rejoined, “Let’s have it!”

In the end, though, the members decided against such legal strictures. Instead they sternly admonished the press to reform itself and warned