Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time Inc., first proposed engaging a panel of scholars on the state of the American press in December of 1942. He suggested the idea to his friend Robert Maynard Hutchins, a legal and educational philosopher who, just over a decade earlier, at the age of thirty, had become the president of the University of Chicago. With the country mobilized for the fight against totalitarianism, Luce envisioned a philosophical inquiry that would reaffirm the foundations of freedom in the United States. Distrust of the media had become pervasive, and Luce believed that the public needed to better understand the purpose and function of the press. At first, Hutchins demurred, contending that the project would be too difficult to organize. Finally, in the fall of 1943, after months of Luce’s cajoling, he agreed to lead the effort.
On December 15, 1943, a group of academics and policymakers gathered for the first time at the University Club, in New York. Luce’s initial idea had been to enlist the University of Chicago’s philosophy department, but Hutchins went in a different direction, selecting luminaries from a range of disciplines. The group included Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian and ethicist; Charles E. Merriam, one of the nation’s leading political scientists; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., a Harvard historian; Archibald MacLeish, the librarian of Congress and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; and William Ernest Hocking, a renowned philosopher of religion. None were journalists; Hutchins believed that the industry needed to be excavated by outsiders. The thirteen Americans and four international advisers, whom Hutchins called the Commission on the Freedom of the Press, would spend nearly three years evaluating American journalism. In a statement of principles, Hutchins told them that their purpose was to answer three questions: “What society do we want? What do we have? How can the press . . . be used to get what we want?”
In “An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee that Redefined the Freedom of the Press” (Yale), Stephen Bates, a journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, re-creates the panel’s deliberations. As fascism advanced in Europe, there was a palpable sense that liberties were imperilled at home; in a Times Op-Ed, Henry A. Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Vice-President, compared fascism to an “infectious disease” and warned against the “deliberate, systematic poisoning of the public channels of information.” Commission members worried about the forces of division in American society, the power of tribalism to warp political debate, and the press’s role in provoking discord. Americans were inhabiting “different worlds of fact and judgment,” John M. Clark, a Columbia University economist, said. Hocking, the philosopher of religion, considered the way a publication and its readers could create a closed system that was rage-filled, self-reinforcing, and profitable; another commission member, George Shuster, the president of Hunter College, warned that a one-sided press could “pull the house apart.”
The Hutchins Commission, as it came to be known, met seventeen times, usually over two or three days, mostly in Chicago and New York, and heard from fifty-eight witnesses; its staff conducted two hundred and twenty-five additional interviews. On nearly every subject, it struggled to find consensus. In January of 1946, as the committee gathered to review a draft of a final report, Niebuhr suggested that it was facing an “insoluble problem”; perhaps definitive answers were out of reach. “If you have an insoluble problem of great complexities, and you illumine the complexities, you may be able to make quite a great contribution,” he said. The slim volume that the commission eventually produced, “A Free and Responsible Press,” is maddeningly contradictory in some places and impractical in others. Even so, it would go on to become a part of journalistic canon because it did what Niebuhr suggested: articulate the complexities of establishing and maintaining a free and responsible press.
Today, those complexities have deepened. And yet the work of the Hutchins Commission remains a touchstone, in part because of the way it lays out the virtues to which journalism can aspire in a democracy. The committee’s report begins by going back to first principles and making the case for the special status of the freedom of expression. It is the political liberty from which all others spring—the one that “promotes and protects all the rest.” “Civilized society . . . lives and changes by the consumption of ideas,” the report argues. “Therefore it must make sure that as many as possible of the ideas which its members have are available for its examination.” It’s because the press is the primary conduit through which people engage with the ideas they need to function as democratic citizens that it must be both protected and scrutinized.
In the mid-twentieth century, when the world was becoming more interconnected in unprecedented ways, the commission believed that society’s requirements for the press were “greater in variety, quantity, and quality than those of any previous society in any age.” It identified five essential mandates: first, providing “a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events”; second, furnishing a forum for discussion of “all the important viewpoints and interests in the society”; third, offering a “representative picture” of society and its various groups; fourth, educating the public on “the ideals towards which the community should strive”; and fifth, making information available to everybody.
The press, the commission found, was failing to meet all of these requirements. To some degree, the problem was that journalists were driven to focus on “firstness, on the novel and sensational,” by the pressures of the market. But the news was also being skewed by the biases of the owners of media outlets, and by pressure from interest groups. The report ends with a series of broad recommendations, including raising the professionalism of the industry, encouraging journalists to hold each other accountable, and establishing an independent governmental agency to report regularly on the performance of the press. If these bland proposals have largely been forgotten, the committee’s ultimate conclusion—that the responsibility for fixing the press must fall most heavily upon the press itself—remains a bracing admonition. “The urgent and perplexing issues which confront our country, the new dangers which encompass our free society, the new fatefulness attaching to every step in foreign policy and to what the press publishes about it, mean that the preservation of democracy and perhaps of civilization may now depend upon a free and responsible press,” the report concludes. “Such a press we must have if we would have progress and peace.”
Nearly seventy-five years after the publication of “A Free and Responsible Press,” we face a crisis similar to, and perhaps deeper than, the one contemplated by the Hutchins Commission. Confidence in the media is at a nadir, the country’s political divisions are driving disagreement over basic facts, and half-truths, falsehoods, and propaganda have overrun digital platforms and polluted the news ecosystem. The press itself is also shrinking. According to a new report by the School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, between 2004 and 2019, nearly one in four American newspapers closed.
In the midst of all of this, some of journalism’s foundational practices are being reconsidered. The radicalism of the Trump era, with its populist, race-baiting President and a Republican Party that embraces deception as a political strategy, has caused a reëxamination of “objectivity” as a journalistic ideal. It has also ignited a debate about whether the press’s commitment to publishing a diverse set of ideas should be more circumscribed. Last month, the controversy over the decision by the Times’ Opinion section to publish an Op-Ed by the Republican senator Tom Cotton, which called for a mobilization of the military and an “overwhelming show of force” to quell “riots” in American cities, came to embody both disputes. On social media, the piece set off a rare open revolt among reporters and Opinion department staff. The NewsGuild of New York, which represents many Times journalists, issued a statement castigating what it called the “irresponsible choice” to publish the piece: “Its lack of context, inadequate vetting by editorial management, spread of misinformation, and the timing of its call to arms gravely undermine the work we do every day,” the statement read.
