Enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and thereby the US Constitution, is the first amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. America was not the first nation to make the freedom of speech a core part of its citizens’ rights, but it may be unique in the extent to which the individual freedom of speech has become a core part of its national identity. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are often conflated, but it is notable that the first amendment does not settle merely for protecting the freedom of speech, but also calls out a specific industry for protection from government interference.
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville observes that the freedom of the press tends to result in a proliferation of biased, low-quality speech, but that the nascent nation compensates for this by such an immense profusion of presses that the danger is mitigated. Such was his perception at the turn of the nineteenth century; by the middle of the twentieth, the press, and its role in American society, was fundamentally altered, or so prominent thinkers of the time believed. Henry Luce, owner of Time, then one of the most significant media publications in the country, conceived a committee to study the issue of freedom of the press, a philosophical version of collecting and sponsoring a group of eminent scientists to study and solve a technical problem. Thus, the Commission on Freedom of the Press was born, a convening of intellectuals, mainly university professors, to “research” the notion of freedom of the press.
There’s a good reason for those quotation marks, as the amount of research the commission conducted was somewhere near none. Instead, over the course of seventeen meetings, with a budget of almost three million dollars in today’s money, these professors debated the nature, impact, and means of preserving the freedom of the press in the America of 1947 in an entirely rationalistic fashion, eschewing suggestions they should collect and analyze actual data, or even interview or include people actually involved in journalism. Do you think I could get paid $4,300 (inflation-adjusted) per meeting to discuss Constitutional philosophy? Because that sounds like a pretty nice deal to me, and I certainly have a thought or two on the Commission’s output, a book-length paper called A Free and Responsible Press.
Bates, who wrote An Aristocracy of Critics, which covers the Commission’s work and reactions to the report, ends on a largely positive note regarding the affair. The report was largely panned after its initial publication for being vague, lacking in rigor, and insufficiently assertive to the point of contradicting itself, but Bates depicts it as positive that, years afterward, the report began to gain more influence. Essentially, as journalism and journalists became more academic, they were more sympathetic to the findings of a predominantly academic commission. Having read A Free and Responsible Press, I am more inclined to side with its initial critics, but it is not surprising that it would be well-perceived by modern journalists and intellectuals, as it is undergirded by a paternalistic approach to the citizens of a democracy which is generally accepted by the intellectual and academic circles of the present day.
Committee members, tempered in the fires of the Depression and two World Wars, saw the press as a key pillar of successful democracy, imbued with special responsibilities in order to produce, maintain, and educate the masses into effective citizens – effective meaning, in this context, engaged in the civic process, objectively informed of national and world affairs, and coming to reasonable conclusions based on the facts provided by the media. The press has these responsibilities to provide objective news, avoid sensationalism, and so forth because, the committee members implied, citizens will not do it themselves, and the inevitable result will be some form of tyranny and authoritarianism. It is the same logic that leads to modern efforts to restrict speech on social media under the guise of misinformation control – after all, we peons surely cannot be trusted to come to our own conclusions or identify misinformation for ourselves.
Despite some members asserting that they might be confronting an unsolvable problem, Hutchins, who led the commission and whose voice is dominant in A Free and Responsible Press, believed fundamentally that all reasonable people would come to reasonable, shared conclusions if given sufficient time to debate and discuss the matter. A Free and Responsible Press’s vagueness, many platitudes, generalities, and internal contradictions are the result of this implicit expectation, which prioritized consensus over staking a stronger position which may have resulted in other committee members publishing dissenting opinions. The final product reminds me of nothing so much as the results of the design-by-committee architecture satirized in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
For all their supposed erudition, and Hutchins’ focus on the “Great Books” (think Aristotle, Plato, et cetera), A Free and Responsible Press demonstrates a surprising lack of historical perspective. It repeatedly refers to a mythical “golden age” of press freedom of colonial and post-Revolutionary America, which, as commentators observed at the time, never really existed. The whole reason for the commission’s existence required accepting the assertion that the press of 1947 was fundamentally altered in essence and role from the press of 1787, an assertion which is never properly examined. True, press technology was different, the means of production perhaps more expensive, more concentrated, but was the press ecosystem really fundamentally altered in its essence and role? Perhaps the prevalence of large, corporate presses like Time made it seem so, but the committee relied upon anecdotal evidence and no historical or contemporary analysis. We see the same happening today, with observations that social media and the internet have radically reshaped what freedom of the press means. I don’t buy it. Mainly, I don’t buy it because people are still people, and the behaviors that we see arising in the Information Age are not so different from behaviors exhibited throughout history. The difference is in the details, not the fundamentals.
Perhaps, if it had come earlier in history, A Free and Responsible Press could have been more significant. As it is, its claims of “out-areo-ing the Pagitica” (a reference to Milton’s Areopagitica) are grossly exaggerated. Its design-by-committee approach generated an intellectually insipid document which created its own following by appealing to the paternalistic instincts of journalist-scholars who want to believe their words are part of a grand Mission to Change the World, and that democracy would fail but for their ability to provide citizens with the “right” answers. Where Milton called for promiscuous reading, the Commission on Freedom of the Press would rather a non-governmental organization oversee the press telling us what we should or shouldn’t be reading. Frankly, I could do without such an aristocracy of critics.
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