On his book An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press
Cover Interview of May 26, 2021
Lastly
Just as Hutchins Commission members worked under conditions
similar to ours, they discussed ideas that people are discussing again today.
They talked of using tax money to subsidize competition in the media, an issue
that has arisen again as a result of the internet’s devastating impact on news
organizations. They discussed “rumor clinics” to debunk falsehoods, like the fact-checkers
of today, though they worried that debunking a falsehood might merely spread it
more widely, which is also a concern now. They talked of affixing warning
labels to misinformation, like the cautionary notes that social media applied to
dubious information about the 2020 election. One Commission member said that the
warning labels should tell readers where to find antidotes to falsehoods, just
as some of the cautions on social media linked to reliable information
about the election.
Commission members extensively debated how to address monopoly
and other market concentration in the media. Democracy can’t survive, Reinhold
Niebuhr said, if corporations exercise their power in a way that suppresses
ideas. Robert Hutchins outlined three policy alternatives for dealing with giant
media corporations: break them up, regulate them as common carriers, or subsidize
competing companies. Yet the members also worried about the potential politicization
of antitrust enforcement and other government interventions. (They didn’t know
about FDR’s secret campaign against the Chicago Tribune.) These
discussions bear on regulatory questions concerning big corporations today,
especially social-media and other internet platforms.
One Commission member, William Ernest Hocking, drew a contrast
between what he called the liberty of the garden and the liberty of the weeds.
He thought that political discourse should be tidier, like a neatly pruned garden.
Today, app stores, social-media platforms, and online video and book providers are
weeding their gardens by censoring some perspectives—as is their right, because
the First Amendment doesn’t constrain corporations, only the government. More
and more of our political discourse now takes place in these online gardens
where the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Speakers still have full-fledged
liberty of the weeds when they’re in a public forum, like the plaza around a
city hall, but it may be harder to draw a crowd there when everybody is online.
Hutchins Commission members didn’t come up with foolproof solutions.
As Niebuhr said in one meeting, “all great problems are insoluble.” But their
work does, I think, provide a framework for thinking about the problems and
potential solutions. The issue at the heart of their work, how a media system
can best serve democracy, is an eternal one.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
Just as Hutchins Commission members worked under conditions similar to ours, they discussed ideas that people are discussing again today. They talked of using tax money to subsidize competition in the media, an issue that has arisen again as a result of the internet’s devastating impact on news organizations. They discussed “rumor clinics” to debunk falsehoods, like the fact-checkers of today, though they worried that debunking a falsehood might merely spread it more widely, which is also a concern now. They talked of affixing warning labels to misinformation, like the cautionary notes that social media applied to dubious information about the 2020 election. One Commission member said that the warning labels should tell readers where to find antidotes to falsehoods, just as some of the cautions on social media linked to reliable information about the election.
Commission members extensively debated how to address monopoly and other market concentration in the media. Democracy can’t survive, Reinhold Niebuhr said, if corporations exercise their power in a way that suppresses ideas. Robert Hutchins outlined three policy alternatives for dealing with giant media corporations: break them up, regulate them as common carriers, or subsidize competing companies. Yet the members also worried about the potential politicization of antitrust enforcement and other government interventions. (They didn’t know about FDR’s secret campaign against the Chicago Tribune.) These discussions bear on regulatory questions concerning big corporations today, especially social-media and other internet platforms.
One Commission member, William Ernest Hocking, drew a contrast between what he called the liberty of the garden and the liberty of the weeds. He thought that political discourse should be tidier, like a neatly pruned garden. Today, app stores, social-media platforms, and online video and book providers are weeding their gardens by censoring some perspectives—as is their right, because the First Amendment doesn’t constrain corporations, only the government. More and more of our political discourse now takes place in these online gardens where the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Speakers still have full-fledged liberty of the weeds when they’re in a public forum, like the plaza around a city hall, but it may be harder to draw a crowd there when everybody is online.
Hutchins Commission members didn’t come up with foolproof solutions. As Niebuhr said in one meeting, “all great problems are insoluble.” But their work does, I think, provide a framework for thinking about the problems and potential solutions. The issue at the heart of their work, how a media system can best serve democracy, is an eternal one.