Liberty and the News

INTEREST

Preface

Robert W. McChesney

The United States is now widely acknowledged to be in the midst of a stunning collapse of journalism as it has been known for the past century, if not the nation’s entire history. The number of paid working journalists per capita declined gradually over the past two decades and then fell off a cliff beginning around 2007. Advertising, which provided the vast majority of revenues to news media for a century, has many new options in the digital era and is in the process of jumping ship. The prayer that new technologies would magically create a business model for a sufficient and viable democratic journalism is not panning out. There is no turnaround in sight, nor is there any reason to expect one.The United States—and indeed every nation in the world to varying degrees—faces a fundamental problem: how to create a viable independent news media, or consider what the world will be like without a Fourth Estate.

In The Death and Life of American Journalism (Nation Books, 2010), John Nichols and I argue that an important understanding of how to generate solutions to the current crisis of journalism can be found in our own rich and largely overlooked press history. The framers of the Constitution—most famously Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—and the first several generations of Americans had no illusions that the market would provide sufficient journalism.They deployed massive public subsidies to spawn an independent free press, and these subsidies were crucial for the survival and growth of American democracy and the liberties we cherish. In the present era, in which the market has too little interest in producing sufficient journalism, it is a rich legacy we need to appreciate and study. In our view, the fate of self-governance and our Constitution hang in the balance.

Regarding the current crisis,Americans would also be wise to turn to the work of Walter Lippmann, one of the great journalists and most distinguished intellectuals of the twentieth century. Although he played an outsized role in scholarly assessments of journalism for decades, based upon his two classic works, Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), the choice of Lippmann as prospective sage might, in fact, surprise some contemporary media scholars. Based on these works, in the past two decades Lippmann sometimes has been caricatured as one who was skeptical, if not downright hostile, toward popular democracy. At the most extreme, Lippmann is seen as a proponent of having experts guide the bewildered herd and use the news media to manufacture consent for political positions that serve elite interests. By this reasoning, Lippmann’s work might be the last place to look if we want to learn why and how to’establish news media that would throw logs on the fire of democracy.

Although I recognize Lippmann’s growing skepticism toward democracy in the 1920s, following Michael Schudson’s defense of Lippmann, I do not think a close reading of Public Opinion or The Phantom Public supports such crude generalizations. These works raised important concerns about the problems facing democracy and the capacity of journalism to generate the informed self-governing citizenry postulated in democratic theory. Some, perhaps much, of the writing and concerns in these books—e.g., his discussion of depoliticization in the opening of The Phantom Public—is nothing short of brilliant and applies all too well to the current era.

Concerning journalism and the news, however, these books do not age especially well; journalism is but a supporting character within a much broader plotline. Moreover, the context for these books was the historical moment when professional journalism was in ascension and the commercial news media system was functioning. In our current crisis, the approach Lippmann takes is somewhat orthogonal to the great journalism issues before us.

It is therefore to our considerable good fortune that Lippmann authored two largely unknown pieces in 1920 that deal directly with journalism and its relationship to self-government. These are: Liberty and the News (1920) his three-chapter book, two chapters of which had been published in The Atlantic Monthly, and A Test of the News, his lengthy essay, co-authored with Charles Merz, that appeared in The New Republic in August 1920. A Test of the News systematically evaluated the coverage of the Russian Revolution from 1917 to 1920 by the New York Times. It is trailblazing research that anticipates by decades some of the best news media content analysis of recent times. Liberty and the News is Lippmann’s only direct encounter with the relationship of journalism, democracy and liberty. It contains some of his most astonishing prose and by any reckoning is an extraordinary work, with many dimensions of analysis. One cannot read these works and dismiss Lippmann as an anti-democratic elitist.

These works are even more important because they were written at the climax of the last truly great defining crisis for journalism. It is during times of crisis and upheaval that a disproportionate number of our greatest breakthroughs in social science are made, as tried-and-true formulations are subject to far greater scrutiny (consider John Maynard Keynes and the Great Depression, for example). Faced with a crisis, our greatest thinkers often become more critical, creative, and original, providing us with insights and lessons for the ages. So, this particular period was an extraordinarily fecund time for the development and crystallization of Lippmann’s thinking about the press and self-government. As times changed, his work would rapidly move in somewhat different, and more politically conservative, directions. He turned from structural concerns to greater emphasis upon human psychology as the key variable, with the institutions of society taken more or less as a given; but that does not alter the power or importance of what he wrote in 1919 and 1920. Indeed, Lippmann never renounced the research and arguments in A Test of the News or Liberty and the News, even if he never quite returned to them in letter or in spirit. They were of a moment.

Contemporary observers often fail to appreciate how, by 1919 and 1920, the credibility and legitimacy of the news was very much in question by much of the American public. It is admitted that a sound public opinion cannot exist without access to the news, stated Lippmann and Merz. There is today a widespread and a growing doubt whether there exists such an access to the news about contentious affairs. This doubt ranges from accusations of unconscious bias to downright charges of corruption, from the belief that the news is colored to the belief that the news is poisoned. p. 39) The primary, though not exclusive factor, explaining the threat to the news and democracy was the rapid emergence of organized propaganda, or what would today be called public relations. During the First World War, Lippmann saw firsthand the successful use of such propaganda by the U.S. government and a compliant press to drive public opinion. Lippmann argued that propaganda made much worse an already extremely refractory and increasingly disserviceable commercial journalism of the times. (p. 17)

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Lippmann and Merz’s detailed examination of the New York Times’ coverage of the Russian Revolution. Though hardly sympathetic to the revolution, they were appalled at what they found—basically, the news conveying the wishes, distortions, and lies of anti-revolutionary forces as gospel truths.The biggest liar was the United States government itself.The Times was seriously misled by its reliance upon the official purveyors of information. (p. 143) Lippmann and Merz concluded: The reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all. Journalists were performing the supreme duty in a democracy of supplying the information on which public opinion feeds, and they were derelict in that duty....Whatever the excuses, the apologies, and the extenuation, the fact remains that a great people in a supreme crisis could not secure the minimum of necessary information on a supremely important event. (p. 44)

Lippmann emphasized the way government propaganda altered the traditional democratic equation. He found the emergence of such propaganda nothing short of frightening—it created an existential crisis for the entire notion of a free press, and therefore self-government. Government tends to operate by the impact of controlled opinion upon administration. This shift in the locus of sovereignty has placed a premium upon the manufacture of consent....Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evidence, without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation. (p. 21)

The implications of the corruption and degradation of the news could not be more severe. As Lippmann put it, people increasingly "are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise. For in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis of journalism. (pp. 1–2) [my emphasis] News media were therefore institutions of singular importance: For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.... Now the power to determine each day what shall seem important and what shall be neglected is a power unlike any that has been exercised since the Pope lost his hold on the secular mind. (p. 16) Hence, what Lippman and Merz termed a fundamental task of the Twentieth Century: the insurance to a free people of such a supply of news that a free government can be successfully administered." (p.44)

What is striking in these works is the conviction that journalism and the institutions that produce journalism are not to be thought of as private enterprises, but rather as public institutions. A great newspaper is a public service institution, Lippmann and Merz wrote. It occupies a position in public life fully as important as the school system or the church or the organs of government. (p. 44) Lippmann noted that The news columns are common carriers. When those who control them arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable. (p. 3) In short, the people and the government have a direct stake in seeing that the news media system functions properly, and the owners have no right to claim it as their private property and of no public concern. In Liberty and the News Lippmann suggests that public money could be spent to improve the quality of information.

In 1920 Lippmann was not at all certain that the crisis in journalism would be resolved satisfactorily. In a few generations it will seem ludicrous to historians that a people professing government by the will of the people should have made no serious effort to guarantee the news without which a governing opinion cannot exist. ‘Is it possible,’ they will ask,‘that at the beginning of the Twentieth Century nations calling themselves democracies were content to act on what happened to drift across their doorsteps; that apart from a few sporadic exposures and outcries they made no plans to bring these common carriers under social control’ [?] (p. 5)

Lippmann had an ambiguous attitude toward the commercial news media system and toward newspaper owners.The first two decades of the twentieth century constituted an existential crisis for them, as brazen partisanship, sensationalism, corruption, and scandal undermined the legitimacy of the commercial system. Some publishers feared for their very existence. Lippmann, acknowledging this threat, had little sympathy for most of the owners. In some form or other the next generation will attempt to bring the publishing business under greater social control.There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled. Lippmann concluded that some day Congress, in a fit of temper, egged on by an outraged public opinion, will operate on the press with an ax. (p. 27) He never even entertained the notion that competition in the free market would of its own volition provide the journalism necessary for self-government to succeed. Although fiercely opposed to censorship, Lippmann exhibited no apparent concern for how public involvement would infringe upon publishers’ First Amendment rights.

That being said, Lippmann did not regard the newspaper owners as an insurmountable barrier to reform. In his analysis he routinely assumed that the actual power to control the news rested with editors, not publishers. He cared little how the commercial and political concerns of owners determined or influenced who became editors and what values guided the editors’ work. Lippmann had little apparent interest in the collusion of government with big business, nor was he especially concerned with how journalism affected different sectors of the population. Not everyone outside of the highest reaches of government lost if the news failed to create an informed and participating citizenry. Surprisingly, for one who had been a socialist just a few years earlier, he did not entertain the idea, fundamental to Jefferson and Madison, that those with property and privilege greatly benefited by an ignorant and ill-informed populace. He had, to be blunt, no class analysis.

At almost the same time that Liberty and the News and A Test of the News appeared, Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check was published. Sinclair excoriated newspaper publishers for the corruption and anti-labor bias of their news. The book is filled with example after example, and makes it impossible to regard actual ownership over media as insignificant to newsroom operations or the content of the news as Lippmann presupposes. It, too, is a seminal work in journalism history. But Sinclair used a hammer where at times Lippmann’s scalpel would have been preferable. Both Sinclair and Lippmann would have benefited mightily from an encounter with each other’s work. Regrettably they mostly spoke past each other, probably due to political differences, as Lippmann’s cursory dismissal of The Brass Check in Public Opinion (Dover edition, pp. 182-183) demonstrates.

Even a socialist like Sinclair had difficulty imagining a different news media system than the private ownership model in place in the United States, so one can hardly chastise Lippmann for internalizing as a given the dominant commercial system not only of his time but for the balance of the century. Good publishers did exist; Lippmann dedicated Liberty and the News to C. P. Scott, legendary owner and editor of the Manchester Guardian since 1872. In light of his career, Lippmann wrote, it cannot seem absurd or remote to think of freedom and truth in relation to the news. (p. xxiii) It may be some indication of the importance of commercial pressures upon the news that after Scott’s death, his family placed the Guardian in a non-profit trust beginning in 1936. The trust’s stated core principle was to "preserve the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity, while its subsidiary aims are to champion its principles and to promote freedom of the press in the UK and abroad." (McChesney and Nichols, p. 176) (The non-profit course has served the newspaper well. As commercial news media have floundered in the current crisis, the Guardian, by many accounts, is arguably a greater and more important source of quality journalism, both traditional and now digital, than ever before.)

In Liberty and the News, Lippmann was not taking the radical step of calling for non-profit newspapers; instead, he was primarily cautioning newspaper owners to acknowledge that they had to change course. He was hoping that the fear of extinction would encourage those publishers less principled than Scott to do the right thing. [W] ise publishers will not pooh-pooh these omens, he wrote. The regulation of the publishing business is a subtle and elusive matter, and only by an early and sympathetic effort to deal with great evils can the more sensible minds retain their control. (p. 27)

The solution, to Lippmann, was clear, and he was emphatic: newspapers needed to embrace professional training and standards for reporters and editors to assure the highest quality of factual, accurate, and contextually honest information, unpolluted by personal, commercial, or political bias. Primarily, Lippmann and Merz wrote in A Test of the News, we believe professional standards of journalism are not high enough, and the discipline by which standards are maintained not strong enough. (p. 143) Reporting, wrote