Publishers v. Freedom

P:"The press will become free when its owners permit it to become free."

P: "What the press in America needs is a constitutional revolution . . . a transfer of power from publishers as kings to publishers and editors as prime ministers."

P: "Instead of waging constant war against an enemy without, the newspapers would do well to take steps against the enemy within. They would do well, too, to take warning from the widening gulf that separates the conception of freedom held by themselves and that held by the people."

These dicta helped win for their author a $1,000 prize offered by the Atlantic Monthly for an article on freedom of the press. Victor over nearly 700 competitors, mostly working newsmen, the author is Robert Lasch, 37, Rhodes Scholar and Nieman Fellow, now one of four editorial writers for Marshall Field's left-wing Chicago Sun. Like most modern social critics, Writer Lasch virtually absolves "the people" of moral responsibility for social ills, assigns that responsibility almost exclusively to the leaders. At times his essay suggests a private's-eye view of the generals. But every experienced journalist knows that the Lasch critique is at least partly true of the U.S. press as a whole, and wholly true of some parts of it.

Concentrated Privilege. As an instance of the divergence between people and publishers, Author Lasch cites the newspaper publishers' violent denunciation of the Government's antitrust suit against Associated Press "as a foul assault upon the First Amendment." Recalling the "frightening unanimity" of their attempt to foist this view on the public, he declares:

"Of all the outcry . . . almost none came from the uninterested public. . . . They sat jaded and silent. Perhaps they had witnessed too many invocations of the Bill of Rights to justify low wages for newspaper workers. Perhaps they had seen too many abuses of power by newspapers bent on spreading the ideas of an owner group. Or perhaps--and here is the ominous possibility--they had begun to regard the newspapers no longer as trustees of constitutional liberty, but as the beneficiaries of a special privilege tending to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands."

The character of the U.S. press has changed with the economic times. It was free in the days of small business, says Nebraska-born Lasch, when "the tramp printer and ambitious editor marched in the van of westward migration. . . . Every party, every faction had its own newspaper. A shoestring and the gift of gab were almost all a man needed to launch one." When business grew big, "personal journalism gave way to the corporation and the chain." The press became "an integral part of the economic structure. . . . Business had run politics and politics had run the press. Now the newspaper, as part of business, helped to run politics. They were in the big time."

Today "it takes a millionaire with uncommon staying power to set up a new daily in any city over 200,000"--and there are not many Marshall Fields.

Concentrated Power. Lasch's broad-stroked portrait of the newspaper owner: "In many a community the biggest single political fact may be the existence of a certain newspaper and a certain publisher. In a real sense this man is an arm of government, and a peculiarly irresponsible arm. . . . Mayors, governors, legislators and Congressmen drink at the well of his wisdom. Civic movements start or stop according as he nods or shakes his head.

"Generally this man is not a sinister character. He often has a hazy notion of public service somewhere in the back of his mind, and convinces himself, at least, that he's doing the best he can. The point is that he exercises power. . . . His cronies are the bankers, the manufacturers, the utility operators, the department-store tycoons. . . . The ideas he absorbs and the attitudes he reflects are those of the well-heeled upper crust.

"Advertiser influence, as such, has probably been overemphasized. In real life, industrialists and department-store managers do not pound on the publisher's desk and demand favorable treatment. They do not have to."

Nor is the publisher necessarily or even usually a martinet. Instead, his attitude "filters down, by well-defined channels, to his staff. . . . Without orders, without crude directives, city editors fall easily into the habit of saving their big type for safe topics like rape and burglary, and burying the 'hot' (the ideologically dangerous) news in the back pages. Reporters learn not to scrutinize too closely the sacred cows of the community, and editorial writers husband their mightiest blasts for the remotest wrongs."

Cooperative Endeavor. "In candor," writes Lasch, "redress cannot be expected from a revival of competition. The clock does not turn back. Having survived one era of jungle warfare, and facing now a new kind of rivalry in radio, the newspapers will not tolerate a further division of the spoils. And save for a few venturesome souls, the prospective rewards are unlikely to attract new enterprisers."

Hence, he concludes, "the new birth of freedom, if any, must come from within. . . . What a free press needs is an owner who recognizes . . . his responsibility to represent the unrepresented . . . a man whose passion for the general welfare overcomes his desire to impose his own ideas upon the community. . . . Such ownership would develop new methods of management. It would exploit and thereby stimulate the professional instincts of the working staff. . . . Good management would operate the newspaper as the cooperative endeavor it must be. . .

"Whether the press survives as a vital instrument of democracy will depend upon the wisdom and temper of its owners. Theirs it is to decide whether they shall . . . fight the people's battles . . . or fight the people for the interests; whether they shall administer a trusteeship or exploit a privilege."

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