The People and the Press

...A brief look at the history of the press in America shows the limitations of this approach...

...Only in 1798, when the Federalists tried to muzzle their opponents with a sedition act, did there emerge a broader construction of liberty, justifying the right of individual expression...

...James Aronson contends that journalism "has to a large degree become a voluntary arm of established power," but finally declares himself "a realistic optimist" about its future...

...But in fact The Press and the Cold War and Free Press/Free People are based on a common, simplistic assumption: that the press at its truest represents "the people," and its perpetual opponent is "the government...

...It is not accidental that the emphasis in the news has switched from politics to sex and violence...

...This was due in large measure to the pressures brought to bear on recalcitrant editors—attempts to buy, scare or drive their papers out of business...

...Perhaps it is no more than an accident of history, but it is nonetheless true that newspapers (and now radio and television) offer much the same kind of entertainment as public hangings or a visit to the local gaol...

...As sociologist Kai T. Erikson observed in Wayward Puritans: "We no longer parade deviants in the town square or expose them to the carnival atmosphere of a Tyburn, but it is interesting that the 'reform' which brought about this change in penal practice coincided almost exactly with the development of newspapers as a medium of mass information...

...The First Amendment was intended as a restraint on Federal power, not an enlargement of the freedom of the press...

...Clearly, an understanding of the press in the 20th century must come through a broadly cultural, not a narrowly political, examination...

...The major headline of the Sunday edition where it appeared was wire loop around slain coed's neck...

...This is not, of course, to deny the existence of official pressures, withholding of information, duplicity, and so forth...

...Even when the press was freed from censorship prior to publication, it was subject to legal action afterward...

...Aronson, from a different political perspective, employs the same structural analysis: "The American press does not reflect the American mind —it reflects the view of established power which in turn seeks to mold the American mind to accept its prejudices...

...In Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, Eric McKitrick writes: "It is very likely at a time of high feeling that the state of public opinion had a great deal more effect on the formation of editorial opinion than the reverse...

...There may appear to be a healthy variety in the contrast between Aronson's determination to prove that the press has promoted the government's policy at every opportunity, thereby abdicating its responsibility to the people, and Hohenberg's vision of the medium's constant progress toward freedom since the 15th century—not to mention the difference between Aronson's sharp, sometimes tendentious argumentation and Hohenberg's bland narrative...

...In 1860, for example, a minority of Southern editors favored secession...

...But between the spring of that year, when the Democratic party split into Northern and Southern wings, and the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861, virtually all the South's papers fell in line with the secessionists...

...majority opinion backed a less radical version of Southern rights, and there was also strong unionist sentiment...

...The Revolution brought no change in the position of the press...

...Moreover, Hohenberg's assertion that the 23 colonial newspapers were "the forge of American liberty" should emphasize "American," since the Patriot newspapers were intolerant of any opposition...

...Salvation, he claims, will come through such publications as the pro-Communist National Guardian (of which he was a founder) and through the underground press...

...the oppressive governors...

...Much of the current discontent with journalism, he says, can be traced to a general malaise rather than to defects in the medium...

...recently wrote a front-page paean of editorial praise to "Our Free Press," attributing it to "the basic freedoms of our democracy...

...Neither Aronson nor Hohenberg aspires to this difficult task...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Associate Professor of History, San Francisco State College ALTHOUGH the press is daily denounced by both Left and Right for real and imagined failings, no one?certainly not the authors of these books—will deny the vital relationship of a free press to a free society...

...A considerable portion of what we call 'news' is devoted to deviant behavior and its consequences...

...In the 17th and early 18th centuries, there was no questioning the idea that the government should punish seditious libel...

...John Hohenberg, a newsman turned professor of journalism (Columbia), states flatly that "the accomplishments have outweighed both the errors and the lapses in watchfulness since the beginning of World War II, and the area within which the press operates has substantially increased...

...it has rather to do with the concerns of our national community...

...But as the people found their voice, a free press emerged, "by its very nature . . . an independent critic of the manifold processes of government...

...The restraint on freedom of the press in the 19th century was not governmental...

...Actually, there were few such prosecutions of the press during the colonial period...

...Having plowed through these accounts by two men whose combined working experience is 60 years, I must confess to being worried...

...William Randolph Hearst Jr...

...It would be interesting to speculate on the sort of society which feeds on the "news" we receive, but that is not the point here, except insofar as such speculation leads to the inescapable conclusion that a single-minded concern with governmental threats to a free press does not lead to a full comprehension of the medium...

...Judges were far more restrained, according to Leonard Levy in Freedom of the Press from Zenger to Jefferson, than "the intolerant public—or...

...Thus, Hohenberg begins his rush through history with a glimpse of Hammurabi's Code: "The power of a written language was used primarily by the rulers of men to glorify themselves as superbeings, not to communicate wisdom...

...No one had yet thought of giving a voice to people in the mass...

...he was, of course, but the law was not altered by this trial...

...The defense of John Peter Zenger in 1735 rested on the argument that if the alleged defamation could be proved true, the defendant should be freed...

...The most suppressive body by far . . . was that acclaimed bastion of the people's liberties, the popularly elected assembly...

...Today newspapers are less partisan and less concerned with politics, despite Aronson's contention...