Luce's Values--Then And Now

By WALTER ISAACSON

When Henry Luce and Briton Hadden founded TIME 75 years ago, they felt that folks were being bombarded with information but were nevertheless woefully underinformed. They set out to create a magazine that would sift through the clutter, synthesize what was important and preach their cheeky prejudices.

We're now faced with a world that is far more saturated with information than they could have imagined: scores of TV networks, hundreds of magazines, thousands of electronic sources--all brimming with headlines and hype, news and sleaze, smart analysis and kooky opining.

What is the role of a general-interest newsmagazine in such an environment? Obviously, it's changed a lot in 75 years. We no longer try to do a recap or digest of last week's news, since we assume our readers are familiar with most of the headlines. Instead, we try to put events into context, anticipate trends, add new insights and facts, tell the behind-the-scene tales and explore the questions others forgot to ask.

But one aspect of our original mission has been, we believe, strengthened. The proliferation of magazines, channels and services means that much of the media has become narrowly focused on special interests and niches. Yet we hold to the faith that intelligent people are curious about what's new in all sorts of fields, from politics to art, religion to technology. Just like us, they can be interested in both Saddam Hussein and Monica Lewinsky, Andrew Grove and Princess Diana, Toni Morrison and Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, Ken Starr and Matt Damon.

So each week we have the joy of bringing together a mix of stories that conveys the excitement of our times in all its diversity. This mission helps us promote the rewards of serendipity, such as when a reader who is most interested in our Nation and World sections stumbles across something intriguing in Medicine or Music. It also helps us play a role that has become increasingly valuable in a world in which so many endeavors are hyperlinked: providing the common ground of information and knowledge that all informed folks should share and in fact enjoy sharing, whatever their specialized interests may be.

We also offer, or at least try to, a philosophical common ground. Since the great left-right struggles of the 1960s through '80s, the world has entered a millennial period in which common sense plays a greater role than knee-jerk ideological faiths. Although our stories often have a strong point of view, we try to make sure they are informed by open-minded reporting rather than partisan biases.

Yes, that represents a change from the days when Luce's global agendas infused these pages. The son of a Presbyterian missionary in China, Luce inherited a zeal to spread American values and Christianize the communist world. He was very up front about his approach. In the prospectus that he wrote with Hadden, he noted that "complete neutrality...is probably as undesirable as it is impossible," and he proceeded to lay out a litany of what would be the new magazine's "prejudices."

As TIME matured, it began to place more emphasis on reporting than on these prejudices. Nevertheless, there are certain prejudices--perhaps it's best to call them values--in the original prospectus that still inform TIME's journalism.

The foremost of these is the one Luce listed first: "A belief that the world is round." Luce was allergic to isolationism. In his famous 1941 essay, "The American Century," he urged the nation to engage in a global struggle on behalf of its values, most notably "a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of cooperation."

As the American Century draws to an end, these values are now ascendant. The main, albeit unfinished, story line of the century is the triumph of freedom (and its corollaries: democracy, individual liberty and free markets) over totalitarianism and communism. When America has been willing to stand firm for its values, that willingness has proved to be, even more than its military might, the true source of its power in the world. TIME thus remains rather prejudiced toward the values of free minds, free markets, free speech and free choice. This reflects our faith that people are generally smart and sensible; the more choices and information they have, the better off things will be. To the extent that America remains an avatar of freedom, the Global Century about to dawn will be, in Luce's terminology, another American Century.

In a world that is not only round but also wired and networked, we remain committed to another prejudice in the original prospectus: "an interest in the new." The digital revolution, in particular, has the potential to change our world like nothing else since the invention of television.

Because we believe in the value of information, we have celebrated the explosion of sources that is the hallmark of the digital age. It is not only healthy for the public, it is also healthy for us. In a world of a thousand voices, people will gravitate to those they trust. That encourages us to stick to a formula that is clear yet demanding: good reporting, good writing, authoritative and fair analysis. In addition, a continually refreshed diversity of sources helps counterbalance the trend (of which TIME and its parent, Time Warner, are a part) toward media conglomeration. We wouldn't be in this business if we didn't believe that more information and more opinions will eventually lead to more truth. That is why we were among the first journalists to go online and on the Web, and why we have pushed for open systems, like the Internet, that allow a diversity of voices to join the fray.

TIME's emphasis on narrative storytelling as a way to put events into context is something that suits a weekly magazine. TV and the Internet are good for instant headlines and punditry. The Web is great for allowing people to explore links at their whim and drill down for raw data. But TIME can play the storyteller who comes to your front porch with the color and insights that turn facts into coherent narratives. Part of the process is telling the news through the people who make it. As TIME's prospectus put it: "It is important to know what they drink. It is more important to know to what gods they pray and what kind of fights they love."

Through narrative and personality, analysis and synthesis, we try to make a complex world more coherent. The ultimate goal is to help make sure that the chaotic tumble of progress does not outpace our moral processing power.

A classic example came the week that World War II ended. TIME's cover stories, led by the writing of the great James Agee (excerpted earlier in this issue), focused on the dropping of the atom bomb. Later in that issue, in a new section called Atomic Age, TIME wrestled with the historic and moral implications of what passed for progress: Pain and a price attended progress. The last great convulsion brought steam and electricity, and with them an age of confusion and mounting war. A dim folk memory had preserved the story of a greater advance: "the winged hound of Zeus" tearing from Prometheus' liver the price of fire. Was the world ready for the new step forward? It was never ready. It was, in fact, still fumbling for the answers to the age of steam and electricity. Man had been tossed into the vestibule of another millennium. It was wonderful to think of what the Atomic Age might be, if man was strong and honest. But at first it was a strange place, full of weird symbols and the smell of death.

The vestibule of this new millennium continues to have intruders that TIME tries to wrestle into moral and historical context. The digital age, for example, has brought not only the excitement of more democratic forms of media but also the specter of invasions of our privacy and the spread of false information and poisonous ideas to every nook of a networked world. The impending biotech age promises not only the ability to engineer an end to diseases but also the weird prospects of cloning our bodies and tinkering with the genes of our children.

Nevertheless, the prejudice that we most firmly share with Luce and Hadden is a fundamental optimism. For them, optimism--a faith in progress--was not just a creed, it was a tactic for making things better. The challenges of a new millennium as well as today's fin-de-siecle scandals require that reporters be skeptical. But we must avoid the journalistic cynicism--as a pose, as a sophomoric attitude--that reigned in the '70s and '80s. Intelligent skepticism can, and should, be compatible with a basic belief in progress and a faith in humanity's capacity for common sense.

Our goal is to be a touchstone for this common sense. Rather than strike a pose of pessimism about all values, we must hew to certain basic ones, such as doing what's best for our kids. Rather than view individual rights as being at odds with a compassionate sense of community, we must understand that America's historic magic has been to create a social fabric that is strong because it weaves these two strands together.

"As a journalist," Luce once said, "I am in command of a small sector in the very front trenches of this battle for freedom." Above all, we continue to share his belief that journalism can be, at its best, a noble endeavor. It can make people think--and make them think differently. It can be empowering and liberating. And, of course, it can be fun and exciting. That's what Luce sought to impart in his new magazine, and what we seek to impart in our new one each week.