How Wilful Is Wayward?
Peretz, Martin
THE PaFss, by A. J. Liebling. Ballantine Books, 1961. $.95. From his "Wayward Press" articles in the New Yorker, A. J. Liebling has put together a damning book. But it will hardly surprise his...
...Might not a trade union with some vision, or a group of them, a foundation or a cooperative, turn its energies to the unmet tasks of the press...
...But he has at the same time dispelled the notion that this is the publishing world's indemnity to the advertisers...
...In truth, we could no more conceive of such an utterance from our government than from Franco's or Khrushchev's...
...The President thus endorsed that view of the relationship of newspapers to the national interest which envisions the continued narrowing of the boundaries of public discussion...
...They distort because their economic motivations and partisan affiliations are what they are...
...When the history of American-Cuban relations is written, the irresponsibility and deceptiveness of our newspapers, by sins of omission and commission, may appear no less ignominious than the Hearst empire's preceding the war with Spain...
...Liebling is aware of how far we have come since official and semi-official scrutiny of the press was a respectable enterprise...
...And Mr...
...For surely Kennedy has been given a better press than any of his recent Democratic predecessors...
...And at the same time, a committee of the U. S. Senate, in the "do-nothing" 80th Congress, was studying the conditions for the "Survival of a Free, Competitive Press," with implicit and explicit conclusions about government initiatives somewhat like those of the Hutchins' unit...
...Most important, however, new entrants into the field of publishing from sources such as these could alone provide the counter-cultures of value and thought without which the nation is destined to have its critical sense atrophied and the effective possibilities of discussion damned up...
...If it is true that direct government control of the press is not desirable, the government can surely enforce legislation against monopolies in the "opinion industries" and create congenial conditions for new enterprises in them, as it is prone to do in other and less vital areas...
...Our newspapers distort, deliberately —even the best of them...
...Understanding this as well as he does, Liebling seems unduly exercised over the short shrift meted out to the Democratic Party...
...omist...
...P Mr...
...Fifteen years ago Robert Hutchins' Commission on Freedom of the Press, ironically a child of Henry Luce's beneficence, was urging that the legal liberties of the press should stand unaltered only as its clearly defined moral and social duties were performed...
...Nor will it provoke the publish ers—America's House of Lords, Harold Ickes once called them—either to selfappraisal or a mending of their ways...
...Indeed, as he points out, were an agency of the U.S...
...More likely, Liebling will be accorded those faint praises the Establishment wisely accords its antagonists...
...the number and variety of voices speaking to the public through the press" it would be accused of some infamous heresy...
...And even if there were a press fair in its treatment of Democrats, would it be any more open to points of view on war and peace, on the content of our life and culture, that lie outside the immediate consensus which the press itself has so carefully shaped...
...government simply to express concern, as the British Royal Commissions of Inquiry of 1949 and 1961 did in a far less monopolistic situation, that recent developments "lead inevitably toward concentration of ownership and a reduction in...
...Yet that, as Liebling fully documents, is precisely what is happening in this country...
...The one major pronouncement by President Kennedy dealing with the press asked for a measure of self-censorship at the very moment, immediately upon the abortive Cuban invasion, when the most reasonable plaint would have been that the press had already so censored itself that it had almost totally surrendered its obligation to provide information...
...But there is much more that needs to be said...
...But it will hardly surprise his readers who, after all, also read the newspapers, even if with less professional involvement...
...Liebling has only glimpsed the wider implications of his critique, but despite his forced humor and slick posture, he compels us at least to turn our attention to one of this country's most servious and least discussed problems...
...their mentality is the very same as that of corporate business, and they share the same moral and intellectual universe, financial interests and social blindness...
...Only recently has the press felt itself so secure that it would not label the enemies of its privilege as foes of freedom or Communists...
...Even today, when government activity is so unlikely, there are unexplored alternatives...
...Since the decline of the press has been paralleled by a decline of press criticism, the publishers are not likely to be driven to anguish by one lone voice...
...It is hardly to be expected that one of his older, and not entirely unserious, suggestions, a school for publishers, will be taken up...
...Liebling has marshalled impressive evidence of their sorry records on such representative matters as the Hiss case and Senator McCarthy, developments within Soviet Russia and domestic election campaigns, welfare fund "scandals" and trade union strikes...
...For such groups several million dollars is no longer an insurmountable obstacle, and they might find a surprisingly large, hitherto discontented readership, grateful to any paper that would, for example, add to the canned coverage of the wire services, the valuable and otherwise unavailable news now carried by London's Sunday Observer and Econ...
...Liebling, alas, admits to abandoning himself to hope, which is not at all the same thing as indicating any solutions to the problems he poses...
Vol. 9 • July 1962 • No. 3
