PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF FREE EXPRESSION IN SOCIETYBy Edward C. Pease©1991
[Excerpted from Pease, E.C., STILL THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE: Job Satisfaction of Minority Journalists at U.S. Daily Newspapers (Athens, Ohio: E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, 1991)]
In a society based on individual rights and participation, democracy may be defined as a process of dialogue among all constituent groups. The philosophy on which this nation was founded holds as central to its basic democratic structure the importance of the individual vis a vis society. This includes a presumption of the individual’s power of rational thought and concepts of individual natural rights – including religion, speech and press.[1] These concepts were the prevailing notions of Locke, Milton, Mill, Paine and other 17th- and 18th-century thinkers whose writings combined eventually into marketplace-of-ideas theory, from which the First Amendment developed.
Central to the theory is the entirely free and unfettered exchange of ideas, including a free press operating within a social system in which all opinions had equal chance to be heard, the assumption being that truth would emerge from a robust and wide-open debate on issues of public importance. As Milton put it in his Areopagitica, “Let Her and Falsehood grapple; who ever heard of Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”[2] From Milton’s perspective, and that of other libertarians, it was preferable to permit false opinion in the marketplace of ideas than to limit open exchange of ideas, any one of which might contain or lead to truth; free discussion was a self-righting process from which truth eventually would emerge. As social philosopher Carl Becker explained it:
The democratic doctrine of freedom of speech and of the press ... rests upon certain assumptions. One of these is that men desire to know the truth and will be disposed to be guided by it. Another is that the sole method of arriving at the truth in the long run is by the free competition of opinion in the open market. Another is that, since men will invariably differ in their opinions, each man must be permitted to urge, freely and even strenuously, his own opinion, provided he accords others the same right. And the final assumption is that from this mutual toleration and comparison of diverse opinions the one that seems the most rational will emerge and be generally accepted.[3]
Drawing on the work of his father, James Mill, and that of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill’s brand of 17th-century libertarianism was pragmatic and utilitarian: To achieve the greatest good for the greatest number in society, he said, society must insure that all its members have the right to think and act for themselves. Limiting expression, Mill suggested, would limit society members’ ability to think for themselves. Mill made a four-part argument: First, suppressing opinions – however disagreeable they might be to others – might result in suppressing the truth, he said. Second, even an erroneous opinion might contain a kernel of truth, leading to the larger truth. Third, even if the generally held opinion is truth, the public may cling to it irrationally, solely because of rote and tradition, unless forced to defend it. Finally, Mill said, unless the commonly held opinion is challenged occasionally and those holding it are forced to reaffirm it, even truth loses its strength and positive effects on individuals and society.[4]
As Mill wrote in his essay,
On Liberty:
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. ... If the opinion is right, [people] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.[5]
By the beginning of the 20th century, however, pure libertarianism was on the wane as newspapers and other media grew in size and influence, and the concept of the wide-open debate among individuals was supplanted by the reality of mass communication driven by technological advances. Public resentment of the size, scope, influence and excesses of the press gave rise to efforts to legislate limits on them; the media’s occasionally irresponsible exercise of their First Amendment freedom thus threatened all rights of individual free expression. Media scholar Theodore Peterson argues in his seminal
Four Theories of the Press that, just as libertarian theory was founded on the principle of a “negative freedom” – that is, freedom
from external restraint – new thinking in the 20th century saw a need for a press both free from restraints but also responsible to larger society.[6] What became known after publication of the Hutchins Commission report as social responsibility theory rests equally on a negative freedom from restraints, as well as on a positive freedom of the press to be proactive – freedom for social good, freedom to help society attain its goals.[7] J. Edward Gerald agreed: “Mass communications media are social institutions, the product of social demand,” which include predictable expectations of performance.[8]
The new social responsibility perspective of the press added to libertarianism the concept of the public’s right to know, at the same time placing moral responsibilities on publishers, who themselves had begun to link responsibility to overall public good with their constitutionally mandated freedom. Because liberty carries with it obligations, the greater freedom accorded the press in a democratic system carries with it responsibilities to fulfill certain functions in society.[9]
Leading newspaper publishers already had come to similar conclusions on their own regarding the role of the press in the new, industrial age. Joseph Pulitzer, legendary publisher of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, told his staff in 1907 that his paper should be
an institution that should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice and corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.[10]
In the inaugural issue of his
Detroit Evening News in 1873, James Scripps enunciated a similar vision of the role of the crusading press that was reminiscent of Milton:
Nineteenth Century Americans need not have their opinions molded for them by the newspaper press. Give the public the facts and arguments on both sides, and they will quickly determine the right or wrong in each case as it occurs. The
vox populi, in the long run, will pretty certainly be found to be the
vox Dei.[11]
His younger brother, E.W. Scripps, in his first issue of the
Cleveland Penny Press in 1878, addressed these same issues of independence from special interest pressures and voiced libertarian confidence in the rational abilities of the reading public. He wrote: “The newspapers should simply present all the facts the editor is capable of obtaining, concerning men and measures before the bar of the public, and then, after having discharged its duty as a witness, be satisfied to leave the jury in the case – the public –to find the verdict.”[12]
Adolph S. Ochs, upon assuming control of
The New York Times in 1860, had a similar vision for his paper: “. . . to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interest involved; to make the columns of the
New York Times a forum for the consideration of all public questions of importance and, to that end, to invite intelligent discussion for all shades of opinion.”[13]
But despite the sensibilities of publishers such as Pulitzer, Scripps and Ochs, as the press grew in size and influence, it came under increasing criticism. By 1900, the criticisms had fallen into seven basic themes:
1) The press and its press barons had wielded power to their own ends, at the expense of opposing views and discussion.
2) The press had become subservient to big business and advertisers.
3) The press resisted social change.
4) The press stressed the superficial and sensational over the significant.
5) Press content endangered public morals.
6) The press invaded individuals’ privacy.
7) And the press was controlled by a single socioeconomic class, further endangering any chance for robust and wide-open debate in the free and open marketplaces of ideas.[14]
Following World War II, the American public was frightened by the images of thought manipulation through mass communication, brought on by the Nazi propaganda machine. Those fears, coupled with the growth of the mass communications industry and the social and technological changes that followed the industrial revolution, led Henry R. Luce, founder and publisher of
Time, to commission a group of scholars in 1947 to examine the prospects for a free press in America.
The Hutchins CommissionEchoing Mill, the chairman of the Commission on Freedom of the Press, Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago, described concerns about the role of the mass media in the 20th century this way: “The tremendous influence of the modern press makes it imperative that the great agencies of mass communication show hospitality to ideas which their owners do not share. Otherwise, these ideas will not have a fair chance.”[15]
The commission said freedom of the press in 1946 was in danger for three reasons. First, the press’s importance to society had increased with its capacity to communicate to mass audiences; at the same time, however, the proportion of people able to communicate their opinions and ideas through the press had decreased. Second, those with access to the press “have not provided a service adequate to the needs of society,” the commission said. Third, press performance had so outraged some segments of society in the 1940s that threats of regulation had surfaced.[16] The commission said:
When an instrument of prime importance to all the people is available to a small minority of the people only, and when it is employed by that small minority in such a way as not to supply the people with the service they require, the freedom of the minority in employment of that instrument is in danger.[17]
More precisely, Gerald wrote, as the press evolved into big business, its priorities also shifted, from dissemination of diverse ideas to bottom-line economic issues. The Hutchins Commission concluded that such emphasis on profits threatened the media’s likelihood of providing “the variety of information and debate that the people need for self-government,” he said. Further, he said,
[i]n such media, entertainment takes precedence over matters of importance to social understanding and self-government. The urgencies of conciliation between nations and between racial and religious groups at home are minimized or overlooked by media with such a distributive goal. Salestalk through advertising and propaganda in the news constitutes a hazard to clear description and understanding of human problems.[18]
Press barons for years had recognized that shift themselves. E.W. Scripps, for instance, who never was shy about making a buck, wrote a year before his death in 1926:
There was a time in this country when newspapers were run for the purpose of moulding public opinion and their owners were deemed lucky if they gained an incidental profit. Now newspapers are run for profit and only incidentally are moulders of public opinion, leaders of the people in politics, and teachers.[19]
The Hutchins Commission considered free expression the central freedom of American democracy, but feared that a press seen by public and government as both unfettered and irresponsible risked losing its First Amendment franchise. To preserve its freedom, the report concluded, the press must serve the society that has accorded it that freedom. “The freedom of the press can remain a right of those who publish only if it incorporates into itself the right of the citizen and the public interest,” the commission wrote.[20] After four years of hearings, the Hutchins Commission released a five-point guideline for press performance that represented a new view of the relationship between the mass media and society. The American press should provide
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 representative picture of the constituent groups in the society;
4) presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society; and
5) full access to the day’s intelligence.[21]
Consistent with the thinking of some newspaper leaders, as indicated by the statements of Ochs, Scripps and Pulitzer, the recommendations outlining changes in the way journalists should look at their jobs and at the media’s role in society. The five points also provide the first of two frameworks here for evaluating press practices and performance.
The Hutchins Commission Charge to the PressThe Hutchins Commission’s guidelines were, on the one hand, direct, straight-forward and commonsensical. At the same time, they enunciated a press function from which the media had sometimes strayed: “The first requirement is that the media should be truthful. They should not lie,” the commission report said.[22] The commission also cautioned the press to separate fact from opinion, while acknowledging that that requirement cannot be absolute: “There is no fact without context and no factual report which is uncolored by the opinions of the reporter.”[23]
The second recommendation, that the press provide “a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism,” underscored the commission’s view of the media’s responsibility as “common carriers of public discussion.”[24] These public discussions should include even – perhaps especially – ideas with which the media owners might not agree. “Their control over the various ways of reaching the ear of America is such that, of they do not publish ideas which differ from their own, those ideas will never reach the ear of America,” the report said.[25]
The third recommendation, particularly relevant to the issue of minorities and the media, underlined the media’s responsibility to present “a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society.”[26] “People make decisions in large part in terms of favorable or unfavorable images,” the report said. “They relate fact and opinion to stereotypes. [The media] are principal agents in creating and perpetuating these conventional conceptions. When the images they portray fail to present the social group truly, they tend to pervert judgment.”[27] Such representations of all segments of the American society was seen as a means toward greater understanding and harmony: “The Commission holds to the faith that if people are exposed to the inner truth of the life of a particular group, they will gradually build up respect for and understanding of it.”[28]
The fourth press function, as the Hutchins Commission saw it, was one of education, “the presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society.”[29] The press had both an opportunity and a responsibility to help maintain community standards and preserve the society’s values. Finally, the commission said, the press must provide the public with “full access to the day’s intelligence,” something with which no journalist would disagree. “We do not assume that all citizens at all times will actually use all the material they receive. ... But [that] does not alter the need for wide distribution of news and opinion,” the report said. The press must provide the public with enough complete and truthful information that citizens can, “by the exercise of reason and of conscience,” make the decisions necessary to maintain an orderly society, the commission concluded.[30]
After 1947, the press reassessed its role and responsibilities, increasingly operating from the Hutchins Commission’s vision of a two-way relationship between the press and society, encompassing both the rights of free expression ascribed to Milton and marketplace-of-ideas theory, as well as a new expectation of the media’s responsibility to the social system that had accorded such rights. In one way, however, little had changed, the commission report said: “We need a market place for the exchange of comment and criticism regarding public affairs. We need to reproduce on a gigantic scale the open argument which characterized the village gathering two centuries ago.”[31]
In the Hutchins Commission’s view, press freedom was balanced by the press’s responsibility as a public servant. “We suggest that the press look upon itself as performing a public service of a professional kind. ... that the press must take on
the community’s objectives as its own objectives.” [emphasis original][32]
It was with this image of the media-as-public servant that America entered the 1960s and their growing clamor for racial equity. In very many ways, the events of that decade represented the first test of the Hutchins Commission vision of press performance. It was a test the media failed.
Press Performance in the Civil Rights ContextThe summer of 1967 forced America finally to acknowledge a spreading sickness within its society that most Americans had done their best to ignore. Certainly, violence and “inter-racial unpleasantness”[33] already had accompanied the Civil Rights movement; since Rosa Parks, resolutely clutching sacks and purse, had refused to move to the rear of that bus in the mid-sixties, the numbers of both blacks and whites recognizing discrepancies between the Bill of Rights and American social reality had grown.
After the Civil Rights marches and demonstrations of 1964-66, largely in the South, the urban violence that rocked the country in 1967 should have come as no surprise to American society. But it did. “The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear and bewilderment to the nation,” the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders recorded in 1968. “Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.”[34]
The violence of June and July 1967 swept inner-city neighborhoods in more than 27 cities from Florida to New York, Massachusetts to Michigan, Illinois to Missouri. The issue was race and opportunity; the reason, the Kerner Commission concluded, was America’s inexorable movement “toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”[35]
In July 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the 11-member panel that would be known as the Kerner Commission to look into the root causes of the violence sweeping America. The threat, said the president, was “the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.”[36] LBJ’s charge to the commission was three-fold and simple: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?”[37] In appointing his blue-ribbon commission, President Johnson delivered this charge:
...The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack – mounted at every level – upon conditions that breed despair and violence. All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. We should attack these conditions – not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is simply no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America. [38]
Over the next nine months, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders undertook what remains among the most comprehensive and wide-ranging sociological studies ever of American society. The result was a compelling laundry list of recommendations for America’s people and institutions. High among them were recommendations and blame for the news media, which – the panel found – had shown a systemic institutional myopia toward the plight of minorities in American cities on nearly every level.
Entrenched American Attitudes Toward RaceAs the Kerner Commission report acknowledges, the events of the summer of 1967 were not just the next stage of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, but rather the logical culmination of American attitudes toward persons of color that dated back three centuries.
Since 1776, when every sixth person in the newborn United States was a slave, nonwhites – blacks in particular – have had to come to terms with their de facto status as second-class citizens in American culture. The Declaration of Independence holds that all men are created equal, but rarely in America’s history has this seemed true in practice. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court in
Plessy v. Ferguson approved a state law recognizing the legality of “separate but equal” facilities, acknowledging segregation by race as an established fact by law as well as by practice. Separate but equal extended not only to the lunchrooms, restrooms, buses, hospital and churches well known from events of the 1950s and ’60s, but to the law and death; in many courtrooms, whites and blacks were administered the oath on separate Bibles, and, even in death, “undertakers for Negroes” aided survivors in burying their dead in cemeteries far from the burial plots of whites.[39]
And the violence occurring in the mid-1960s was nothing new, although for the most part, Americans had tried to ignore the black underclass; in most communities in both the North and South, “Negroes” were invisible to whites. By the 1960s, a pattern had long been set between American society’s dominant whites and the black underclass. Conditions were ripe for open revolt, and some historians and contemporary commentators point out that, had the violence of 1963-1968 been more systematic and organized, America might have seen a new civil war, based on race, that could have threatened the Union along the same lines as does the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland or Lebanon today.[40] Three sociologists examining the violence of the mid-60s wrote,
There was a people who had outgrown their slave history, but not its bonds. Though they were “free” under the law, blacks were still slaves to a political, economic and social system that would not acknowledge them as free. Forced to live in the ghetto tenements that were the government’s 20th century equivalent of slave shacks, the “projects,” given second-class status in education, jobs, their role in American society, blacks in the 1960s were little better off than their fathers had been under “massuh.” [41]
In March 1965, nationally syndicated columnist Alice Widener described the growing racial conflicts as a threat to the nation’s middle-class morality. Widener’s column expressed a view not uncommon among whites, either in the 1960s or before, a sort of tremulous hand-wringing that was one response of a white American society that didn’t understand why black Americans were so dissatisfied. “Our nation is in the throes of a social revolution, and nobody can predict whether we will be the better or worse for it,” she wrote. That was in 1965, two years before the worst of the urban violence that spawned the Kerner Commission. The society’s narrowness of view and lack of understanding of the conditions and pressures under which blacks in America lived and had long lived were manifest in Widener’s statement that “future historians ... [will] have to determine why it was that a nation grown so great as ours is today was plunged into such disorder.”[42]
That “disorder” was the civil rights movement and the freedom marches of Alabama, Mississippi and other largely Southern states. Like Alice Widener, most of white America didn’t understand.
Los Angeles in 1965 was an example of how much white America – and the white press – didn’t understand. What began as a traffic infraction grew into days of widespread rioting and looting in Watts. John D. Lowry, UPI bureau chief in Los Angeles in 1965, recalled it this way:
The enormity of Negro rioting that erupted in South Los Angeles Aug. 11 caught by surprise a city that had been proud of its race relations. ... In a holocaust that kept the city tense for more than a week, 37 lives were lost, 900 persons were injured and 4,270 Negroes were jailed. Damage was estimated at $50 million.[43]
Concluded the Kerner investigators, “The Los Angeles riot ... shocked all who had been confident that race relations were improving in the North, and evoked a new mood in Negro ghettos across the country.”[44] That “new mood” was grim.
From the following description of day-to-day conditions in Tampa, characteristic of the straits of blacks nationwide, it is not difficult to understand how frustration, anger and violence might result. Kerner Commission investigators filed this report:
Although [Tampa] officials prided themselves on supposedly good race relations and relative acceptance by whites of integration of schools and facilities, Negroes, comprising almost 20 percent of the population, had had no one of their own race to represent them in positions of policy or power, nor to appeal to for redress of grievances.
There was no Negro on the city council; none on the school board; none in the fire department; none of high rank on the police force. Six of every 10 houses inhabited by Negroes were unsound. Many were shacks with broken window panes, gas leaks and rat holes in the walls. Rents averaged $50 to $60 a month....
The majority of Negro children never reached the eighth grade. In the high schools, only 3 to 4 percent of Negro seniors attained the minimum passing score on the State’s college entrance examination, one-tenth the percentage of white students.
A difference of at least three-and-a-half years in educational attainment separated the average Negro and white. Fifty-five percent of the Negro men in Tampa were working in unskilled jobs. More than half the families had incomes of less than $3,000 a year. The result was that 40 percent of the Negro children lived in broken homes and the city’s crime rate ranked in the top 25 percent in the Nation.[45]
The summer of 1967 was the peak of racial violence that had spread throughout that country over the previous few years. The worst violence took place in Newark and Detroit over a two-week period in June-July 1967; in 14 days, 66 people were killed in rioting and confrontations between blacks and police and National Guardsmen in the two cities. In Newark, 1,454 people were arrested and millions of dollars in damage was done by fire. In five days in Detroit, 7,253 people were arrested; 43 people died, including 33 blacks; initial damage estimates in the $500 million range eventually were scaled down to about $85 million. Hundreds of homes and businesses were burned and thousands of heavily armed National Guardsmen patrolled the streets. An Associated Press dispatch from Detroit on the fourth day of the riots paints this graphic picture of an unreal scene more to be expected in a war zone or a Hollywood movie than on the streets of a major American city:
DETROIT, July 27 (AP) – Two National Guard tanks ripped a sniper’s haven with machine guns Wednesday night and flushed out three shaggy-haired white youths. Snipers attacked a guard command post and Detroit’s racial riot set a modern record for bloodshed. The death toll soared to 36, topping the Watts bloodbath of 1965 in which 35 died and making Detroit’s insurrection the most deadly racial riot in modern U.S. history....[46]
Reports of snipers were rampant, and National Guardsmen, tanks and police roaming the Detroit streets fired indiscriminately at the slightest provocation. One night close to midnight, hearing shots, a tank machinegunner fired on a house where he had seen a flash of light, which turned out to have been the cigarette lighter of 19-year-old Bill Hood, who was standing at a window. The Kerner testimony read: “The machine-gunner opened fire. As the slugs ripped through the window and walls of the apartment, they nearly severed the arm of 21-year-old Valerie Hood. Her 4-year-old niece, Tonya Blanding, toppled dead, a .50-caliber hole in her chest.” Ten blocks away, Helen Hall, a 51-year-old white businesswoman, opened the drapes of her fourth-floor hotel window, said to a friend, “Look at the tanks!” and was gunned down from the street by a passing National Guard unit.[47]
Much of Detroit’s violence was attributed to poor relations between the predominantly white police force and ghetto blacks. Back in 1961, then-Detroit Police Commissioner George Edwards predicted, “Detroit is the leading candidate in the United States for a race riot.” Four years later, then a federal appeals court judge, Edwards explained why; his assessment is particularly troubling 26 years later in the wake of the videotaped beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. Edwards wrote in 1965:
It is clear that in 1965 no one will make excuses for any city’s inability to foresee the possibility of racial trouble. Although local police forces generally regard themselves as public servants with the responsibility of maintaining law and order, they tend to minimize this attitude when patrolling areas that are heavily populated with Negro citizens. There, they tend to view each person on the streets as a potential criminal or enemy, and all too often that attitude is reciprocated. Indeed, hostility between the Negro communities in our large cities and the police departments is the major problem in law enforcement in this decade. It has been a major cause of all recent race riots. [48]
Kerner’s Assessment of Press PerformanceIt was the Kerner Commission’s task in 1967 to explain these events, both to a strong-willed and increasingly embattled president and to an apprehensive nation. The national reluctance to acknowledge racial pressures in society was reflected in the press, whose indecision over how to cover what clearly in every traditional sense was news, but about a formerly inconsequential and ignored segment of society – blacks – was painfully evident.
The press did cover the events themselves fully, the Kerner Commission found, although some sensationalism and inaccuracies did occur. The commission said the media had tried to give a balanced view of the 1967 disorders, and that many of the factual errors occurring in published reports of the violence were the result of inaccurate facts handed out by authorities. In fact, most of the shooting was by National Guardsmen and police, the commission found.
The commission had more criticism for the press in how it had prepared the nation for the kind of events that rocked it in 1967. Like Alice Widener, most Americans were shocked and confused by the rising violence, at a loss to explain and understand it because they knew little or nothing about the issues and concerns existing in the black ghetto; few, in fact, had any idea of what life was like in the ghetto and, naturally, preferred not to think about it. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,” the Kerner Commission wrote in 1968. [49]
As a result, America was a nation with its head buried, ostrich-like, in the sand, preferring not to know rather than to acknowledge the facts of civil unrest and race issues confronting the United States in the 1960s. The American ostrich was shocked, surprised and scared when the Civil Rights movement burst into violence and death in 1967 and could be ignored no longer. Widener’s 1965 column may be representative of a nation; Americans were surprised and confused by the racial violence of the mid-1960s – how could this have happened and where did it come from? The press played a role in that confusion by failing fully or completely to fulfill its function of watchdog and surveiller of the societal environment; society was uninformed.
From the perspective of the five-point Hutchins Commission guidelines for responsible press performance, the press in the 1960s had failed miserably when evaluated in terms of its function as a public servant of society, whether black or white. Although the Kerner Commission found that the press had provided “a truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account of the day’s events” during the events themselves, there was practically no “context which gives them meaning.” Clearly, perspectives of black Americans were foreign to the newspaper pages whose job it was to provide a “forum for the exchange of comment and criticism” on issues affecting society, and the media had not at all offered the “representative picture of the constituent groups of society” that might have headed off the violence and certainly would have forewarned people like Alice Widener. Finally, newspapers had for years failed in the fourth Hutchins Commission requirement of a responsible press, to “present and clarify the goals and values of the society.”
Echoing the concerns about the media’s role and responsibility in society, urban expert Shepard Stone testified before the Kerner Commission in 1967 that the press might “... be responsible in part for erosion and disintegration” of American cities and the multiple societies that knit them together if it did not drop its social blinders and expand its coverage. “A race riot is news,” he said. “But there was news, significant news, in the city before the riot, news of the conditions and forces that led to it. The U.S. press generally . . . has not reported the underlying facts.”[50]
Stone’s remarks touched on a long-standing and continuing dilemma in news reporting, the distinction between spot-news coverage and process-oriented coverage what lay behind the Hutchins Commission’s distinction between half-truths and whole truths. As mass communications scholar Maxwell McCombs and others have noted, the media tend to respond well to individual, isolated, time-bounded and distinct events, “[b]ut when it comes to reporting the broad secular sweep of history, the major trends and thrusts of the times, the press often lags significantly behind other public institutions.”[51]
This clearly had been part of the problem when the fires and violence of 1967 and earlier broke out. The press had not noted the growing pressures building in the black community. Even as the Congress had been working for years on legislation to improve equality for blacks in areas of housing and voting, among others, the press had been satisfied simply to cover developments, without probing beneath the surface, without reporting the time-bound facts in any kind of context that might give them meaning.
In convening the Kerner Commission, Johnson also specifically it to examine and evaluate the influence and performance of the news media in the events leading up to and including the summer riots of 1967. In its March 1968 report, the Kerner Commission said the media had
...failed to report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorders and the underlying problems of race relations. They have not communicated to the majority of their audience – which is white – a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of life in the ghetto. [52]
Like those of the Hutchins Commission 21 years before, the Kerner report’s conclusions in 1968 remain good today. In many of those conclusions, the Kerner Commission echoed issues and concerns raised by the Hutchins report:
Our . . . fundamental criticism is that the news media have failed to analyze and report adequately on racial problems in the United States and, as a related matter, to meet the Negro’s legitimate expectations of journalism. By and large, news organizations have failed to communicate to both their black and white audiences a sense of the problems America faces and the sources of potential solutions. The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man’s world. The ills of the ghetto, the difficulties of life there, the Negro’s burning sense of grievance, are seldom conveyed. Slights and indignities are part of the Negro’s daily life, and many of them come from what he now calls the “white press” – a press that repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America. This may be understandable, but it is not excusable in an institution that has the mission to inform and educate the whole of our society.[53]
Kerner Commission Criticisms of the PressThis core criticism by the Kerner Commission of the press in 1968 may be broken down into five basic areas, all echoing in the specific context of press coverage of race in America the more general, philosophical concerns enumerated in the Hutchins Commission’s five guidelines for a responsible media in a free society:
1. Performance. From a standpoint of both minority groups and society as a whole, the press “failed to analyze and report”; white America was taken by surprise when black Americans exploded in anger. The press had failed in its surveillance role.
2. Lack of depth. When the press did report race issues, it failed to communicate – to black and whites alike – much depth or insight about the problems or possible remedies; the media did not – in the Hutchins Commission language – provide full access to the day’s intelligence. Said Kerner: “The ills of the ghetto, the difficulties of life there, the Negro’s burning sense of grievance, are seldom conveyed.”
3. Exclusion. “The media report ... [from] a white man’s world,” the Kerner report found; new, nonwhite perspectives were needed. In its corresponding recommendation, the Hutchins Commission had stressed the media’s obligation to open its communications channels to provide access to discussion of comments and criticism from all perspectives. The press in the 1960s and before had largely ignored the black community, both as a source of news and as an audience. From the pages of America’s newspapers, the Kerner report said, one would think racial and ethnic minority groups didn’t even exist; they were people separate and unequal in the eyes of the white press, as they were in the eyes of other American institutions.
4. Bias. Beyond the need for new viewpoints, the Kerner report said, the “white press” is too often biased, reflecting “the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America.” The third Hutchins recommendation had been for a full and representative picture of the constituent groups in society to appear in the media. “Far too often,” the Kerner report said, “the press acts and talks about Negroes as if Negroes do not read newspapers or watch television, give birth, marry, die or go to PTA meetings.”[54]
5. Social responsibility. As discussed, the Hutchins Commission formulated a view of the press’s responsibility to society. The Kerner Commission said the press had failed in its “mission to inform and educate the whole of our society” or, in Hutchins Commission language, failed in its responsibility to give society a context for the events of the 1960s that would give them fullest meaning.
Further, the Kerner Commission recommendations in 1968 included two specific charges for the press with which newspapers still struggle today:
1) Expand coverage of minority communities and of race issues through permanently assigned reporters and establishment of more and closer links to and with the minority community. And,
2) Integrate minorities into all aspects of news coverage and content, recognizing the various multi-ethnic and multicultural influences and constituencies within newspapers’ larger circulation and coverage areas. [55]
Echoing the Hutchins charge of a concomitant responsibility to accompany the socially-given right of press freedom, the Kerner Commission said the press’s shortcomings in the 1960s were “not excusable in an institution that has the mission to inform and educate the whole of our society.” In short, the Kerner Commission urged the newspaper industry to acknowledge the existence of racial and ethnic minority groups within their communities, to recognize their needs and to provide coverage of issues about and for those groups as aggressively and fairly as the newspaper covers the rest of the community. Clearly, such coverage had not been standard.
Applying Hutchins & Kerner RecommendationsIt was easy for the media in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s to subscribe – genuinely and wholeheartedly – to the five-point Hutchins Commission plan for a more socially responsible press. For one thing, there was nothing in the recommendations to penalize newspapers that did not follow the Hutchins precepts. But there was little not to like, in the abstract, in the commission’s charge to newspapers to report fully, provide context to make news more understandable, promote wide-open debate among all members of society, and to do a better job of covering the society’s constituent parts. Agreeing to those recommendations in theory is a lot like pasting the Golden Rule on your refrigerator – does anyone not subscribe, in principle, in the Golden Rule? But there’s a long step between saying you’ll do unto to others, and actually putting it into practice.
So the press continued doing things pretty much as it had been, pretty much unaware – like the rest of white America – of conditions in black America, such as those described from Tampa by the Kerner investigators. Lacking a mechanism to put into practice the Hutchins Commission precepts for press responsibility, newspapers required events such as those of the 1960s to get the message. Because newspapers had failed to project for the larger society a picture of other constituent groups – who they were, how they lived, what injustices they endured – the larger society was able to ignore their existence.
The press’s potential to ignore the concerns of those groups out of the white “mainstream” is just as great in the 1990s as it was in the 1960s, despite generally wider awareness of at least the existence of America’s growing pluralism. Living far – attitudinally and geographically – from cultures unlike their own, human beings become and remain insular, isolated, unaware of news, attitudes, concerns, trends and topics of interest that are not their own. The Hutchins Commission told the press that it was its job in a free society to help isolated subgroups in society learn about one another, to help them communicate and understand one another. The Kerner Commission told the press that it had failed in that task, that in order to help society learn about itself, newspapers themselves had to become less insular and more interactive, less isolated and more inclusive, less monocultural and more multicultural.
It is with that goal that newspapers in America have undertaken to diversify their newsrooms, to become more inclusive and less exclusive in their hiring and promotion practices, to bring into their newsrooms journalists whose perspectives can help readers broaden theirs. The goal is nothing less than to change the way newspapers cover America, to change the content of American newspapers to provide more of that representative coverage of constituent groups, to open their pages to more and different opinions.
• • • • •
NOTES1. Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson & Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1956).
2. John Milton, Aeropagitica, 1644.
3. Carl L. Becker, Progress and Power. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), p. 33, as cited in Siebert, op. cit., p. 44.
4. Siebert, op. cit., p. 46.
5. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, edited by Alburey Castell (New York: F.S. Crofts and Co., 1947), p. 16.
6. Theodore Peterson, Four Theories of the Press, op. cit., p. 93-4.
7. Ibid.
8. J. Edward Gerald, The Social Responsibility of the Press. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), p. 7.
9. Peterson, op. cit., p. 74.
10. Joseph Pulitzer, message to his staff, April 10, 1907, cited in Edward L. Bernays, Public Relations Problems of the American Press. (New York: National Newspaper Promotion Association, 1952).
11. James Scripps, Detroit Evening News, Aug. 23, 1873. Cited in draft of Vance Trimble, The Astonishing Mr. Scripps. (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press), in press.
12. E.W. Scripps, The Cleveland Penny Press, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 2, 1878, p. 1.
13. Adolph S. Ochs, The New York Times, August 18, 1896, cited in Bernays, op. cit.
14. See Peterson, op. cit., p. 78.
15. Robert M. Hutchins, Foreword, in The Commission on Freedom of the Press, A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines and Books. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), p. viii.
16. Ibid., p. 1.
17. Ibid., pp.1-2.
18. Gerald, op. cit., p. 104.
19. E.W. Scripps, “The Wisdom of an Old Penman,” June 1, 1925, p. 6. (The Scripps Archive, Alden Library, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio)
20. A Free and Responsible Press, op. cit., p. 18.
21. Ibid., pp. 20-29.
22. Ibid., p. 21.
23. Ibid., p. 22.
24. Ibid., p. 23.
25. Ibid., p. 24.
26. Ibid., p. 26.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., pp. 26-27.
29. Ibid., p. 27.
30. Ibid., p. 29. Peterson suggests that this recommendation assisted in the evolution of the principle of freedom of information and the public’s right to know; if the press has a mandate to provide the fullest possible access to the day’s intelligence, it must also possess a right of access to such information. It is the logical underpinning of press demands for free flow of information from the public sector. See Peterson, op. cit., p. 91.
31. A Free and Responsible Press, op. cit., pp. 67-68.
32. Ibid., pp. 92, 126.
33. The Hartford Courant. “Storm Warnings.” September 19, 1965. p. 24.
34. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968) p.1
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p. 4.
37. Ibid., p. 1.
38. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Address to the Nation,” in ibid., p. iii.
39. Ibid., p. 100.
40. Paula B. Johnson, David O. Sears and John B. McConahay, “Black Invisibility, the Press and the LA Riot,” American Journal of Sociology, 76: 698-721 (January 1971).
41. Ibid.
42. Alice Widener, “A New Revolution: Social Upheaval a Danger to Middle Class Morality,” The Columbus Dispatch, March 25, 1965, p. 2B.
43. John D. Lowry, “Worse than War,” The Quill, October 1965, pp. 16-19.
44. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders , op. cit., pp. 20-21.
45. Ibid., p. 23.
46. The Associated Press, July 7, 1967.
47. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders , op. cit., p. 57.
48. George Edwards. “The Role of Law Enforcement in Race Troubles.” The Michigan Law Review. 57: 42-51 (November 1965.)
49. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, op. cit., p. 1.
50. Shepard Stone, “The U.S. Press: A Critical View,” in Raymond L. Bancroft, ed., City Hall and the Press. (Washington, D.C.: National League of Cities, 1967.) p. 30.
51. Maxwell McCombs, “All the News...,” in Maxwell McCombs, Donald L. Shaw and David Grey, eds., Handbook of Reporting Methods. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1976) p. 30.
52. The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, op. cit., p. 111.
53. Ibid., p. 203.
54. Ibid., p. 10.
55. Ibid., pp. 10, 14.
