Monitoring Media: Who Shall Guard The Guards?
Rivers, William L.
MONITORING MEDIA 'Who Shall Guard the Guards?' by WILLIAM L. RIVERS It is ironic that just when the mass media have won important vic- tories over their historic adversary, government, they...
...The important matter is that the Council, which is made up of both journalists and laymen—and is headed by a layman—has improved the per- formance of the press by accepting and adjudicating complaints...
...What all this means is that the pro- prietors of the mass media must now weigh a serious fact: They are almost alone in considering their press free- dom a kind of synonym for the public interest...
...few institutions are as powerful or as in need of judgment as journalism itself...
...And even though I am a non-expert in this non- science, most everybody else is in the same canoe...
...Over a peri- od of several years, the U.S...
...As timely as this concept seems, it is almost twenty-five years old, dating from a 1947 report by the Commission on Freedom of the Press, a group that was financed by Time, Inc...
...If responsi- ble publishers and broadcasters believe, as I do, that tinkering with the First Amendment is dangerous, they will promote a national press council, not oppose it...
...if morals and art deterio- rate, justice will go astray...
...What kinds of complaints should be considered by the U.S...
...It was fashionable to quote Milton: "Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encoun- ter...
...What it is about is a free society's effort to promote free expression, and journalists who are eager to judge the pivotal institutions of society must not hesitate to judge their own kind...
...There was a time when media proprietors were independent powers, and many thought they could justify almost any practice or caprice by chanting "freedom of the press" be- cause approximately that phrase ap- pears in the Constitution...
...The Society teetered on the brink of estab- lishing the grievance committee, then stepped back...
...It would probably be foolish to try to judge opinion pieces...
...What actually qualifies him is his bwnership of the Hearst newspapers, which leads some of us who are only marginally in- trigued by the things the radicals are saying to wonder about the sanctity of property rights...
...This sometimes results in active opposition...
...He related that "American tanks captured the Cam- bodian plantation town of Snoul Wednesday morning after U.S...
...We must create a "new" First Amendment, Barron ar- gues, by reinterpreting it to provide full access to the media...
...It is not surprising that Barron's thesis excited little discussion among media proprietors when it was pub- lished in 1967...
...Just the same, inflation and the problem of controlling it have become so important that today I thought I'd put in my two-bits worth...
...TV, radio, newspapers) institute a policy of asking for greater accuracy in detailed reporting from the sources of news coverage...
...The AP foreign editor cabled the AP office in Saigon: we are in the midst of a highly charged situation in unistates re- garding southeast asia and must guard our copy to see that it is down the middle and subdues emo- tion...
...A conservative group called Accuracy in Media was one of the most vocal and effective critics of the much de- bated CBS program, "The Selling of the Pentagon...
...This could lead to the discovery of a singu- lar fact: The First Amendment was quite different when this country was founded because almost any literate man could take advantage of press freedom...
...Public criticism of the newspapers is the shrillest and most widespread I have seen in eighteen years," observed Wallace Allen, managing editor of The Minneapolis Tribune...
...B—From what I have observed since then there are so many conflict- ing theories that only experts can pre- tend to understand them fully, and even then there is no general agree- ment, much less any semblance of uni- ty of opinion...
...A few have long demonstrated that they believe the public interest to be broader than their own...
...Certainly a national council would want to look at the practices of the many papers—the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Ex- aminer are among them—that run long "entertainment columns" under headings such as "After Nightfall...
...Since this opportunity exists only in the mass media, the interests of those who con- trol the means of communication must be accommodated with the interests of those who seek a forum in which to express their point of view...
...They included investigating such matters as minority access to the media, lying by the press, and govern- ment action affecting communications...
...Such battles are fought, at least in theory, to benefit the public...
...There are periodic staff rebellions on most news- papers and magazines of size and pre- tensions to excellence, and even a few television journalists, who traditional- ly keep most of their complaints to themselves, are beginning to grumble out loud...
...Printing them would have taken 135 complete issues...
...If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant...
...In one recent year The New York Times received 37,719 letters to the editor, most of them fit to print...
...This does not mean that more news- papers should start "Action Line" fea- tures and make another column avail- able for additional letters to the editor, nor should radio and television stations add yet another call-in program or talk show...
...The Supreme Court is never likely to rule that prior restraint always offends the Constitution...
...Nor do the young journalists who assess their profession in the hard-hitting journalism reviews that are now being issued in at least a dozen cities...
...The soap box is no longer an adequate forum for public discussion...
...But they are far from alone...
...and the Encyclopaedia Britanni- ca, and headed by Robert M. Hutch- ins...
...Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said...
...The effect may be pro- found...
...More important, they indicate how desperately the responsi- ble journalists need a national council to give the irresponsibles the pitiless publicity they need so badly...
...if what is said is not meant, then what ought to be done remains undone...
...These disputes, which often pit the young against the old, are sometimes about methods of reporting, with the younger journalists arguing for freer forms that will allow them to get at the truth rather than merely present facts...
...Honolulu has a large Community-Media Council that regularly brings more than twenty cit- izens together with representatives of all the media...
...The findings could not, of course, re- sult in punishment, but they would be widely publicized...
...Most members should be laymen, with no government officials involved, but the judgments of the council would take on greater force in media circles if the membership were to include journalists—selected, in Harold LasswelPs phrase, from among those "suspected of integrity...
...For exam- ple, any national council would have wanted to review the practices of Wal- ter Annenberg in Philadelphia, who before he became U.S...
...But it is difficult to see how a council member could do more with this expression of opinion than shake his head, throw up his hands, and go on to another case...
...Moreover, Roger Tatarian, vice president and editor of UPI, cited the Honolulu council's resolution approv- ingly in a newsletter circulated among UPI employes and clients...
...Consider, for ex- ample, this column by William Ran- dolph Hearst, Jr.: "Never before, to the best of my re- collection, has this column been devoted to a discussion of economics and the mysterious but enormous role it plays in our national welfare...
...The members recom- mended that the media avoid "um- brella or catch-all terms which do not accurately and in detail describe the people to which they refer, except where warranted and fully explained...
...Some are active in the local councils that bring journalists and citizens together to assess the media...
...His dispatch described the looting and re- counted that when an officer ordered the men to "get your hands off that stuff," they laughed and loaded the booty in their vehicles...
...But it is be- coming increasingly obvious that all the media must seek a broader scope of public involvement, must do much more to enable the people to participate...
...Because the public owns the airwaves and licenses their use—and because spec- trum space is limited—broadcasting must be controlled by the Federal Government quite directly, through the Federal Communications Commis- sion...
...Is a person an "enemy" simply because he has been killed by the South Vietnamese...
...The American soldiers celebrated the victory by tearing down the Cambodian flag over the district capital and loot- ing the few shops undamaged...
...MONITORING MEDIA 'Who Shall Guard the Guards?' by WILLIAM L. RIVERS It is ironic that just when the mass media have won important vic- tories over their historic adversary, government, they are deep in trouble with their historic ally, the public...
...As a creature of the press, this could not have been the independent agency envisioned by the Hutchins Commission, but weighing the estab- lishment of an apparatus to hear pub- lic complaints is also quite different from the attitude that the press owes "nothing whatever to the public...
...What organizations are in- volved...
...These terms should be avoided as much as possible in favor of more de- scriptive terms which accurately desig- nate the people or organizations to which they refer...
...Discoveries lead to changes, and there is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits amending an amendment...
...James Kunen, the youthful author of The Strawberry Statement, wrote of modern conditions: "You change them or we'll change them...
...The great danger is that the people may begin to measure their access to the media against the First Amendment guarantee...
...In fact, British journalists say that the chief flaw in their Council is that it assesses only newspapers...
...Clearly, though, the climate of judicial deci- sion-making has changed for all the media...
...has proposed licensing journalists...
...For a biographical sketch of William L. Riv- ers, please turn to Office Memo on Pag,e 2...
...What such councils can accomplish is suggested by a recent action in Hon- olulu...
...There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his fre- quency with others and to conduct himself as proxy or fiduciary with obli- gations to present those views and voices which are representative of his community and which would other- wise, by necessity, be barred from the airwaves...
...That is precisely what publishers and broad- casters are doing when they try to op- erate as though lixe old orthodoxies are immutable...
...This was epitomized during the question period after a speech by Bill Moyers when a man asked why, since Moyers had been in government and was now in journalism, anyone should ever believe anything he had to say...
...They have a scholarly champion in Jerome Barron, professor of law at George Washington University, who argued in a Harvard Law Review article in 1967: "Today ideas reach the millions largely to the extent that they are per- mitted entry into the great metropol- itan dailies, news magazines, and broadcasting networks...
...So here goes—a collection of thoughts, offered for what they may be worth, by one who was brought up to believe the essence of a sound fiscal policy is to be neither a borrower nor a lender...
...For a time, his formula for covering Phil- adelphia's professional basketball team, the 76ers, allowed his Inquirer and Daily News to give the team two paragraphs if it won, one paragraph if it lost...
...Nothing came of the proposal, in part because it was made by laymen —nearly all of them professors who had never worked as journalists—but largely because most editors and pub- lishers did not want to have their work appraised...
...Only the new media of communication can lay sentiments before the public, and it is they rather than the government who can most ef- fectively abridge expression by nullify- ing the opportunity for an idea to win acceptance...
...NBC News Director Reuven Frank wrote that the intellectual and upper middle-brow critics who had long excoriated televi- sion were now being joined by "the basic American audience, the most middle-class majority in history...
...In 1969, the UK Press Gazette pub- lished a survey showing that eighty-six per cent of the newspapermen ques- tioned thought the Press Council movement should spread throughout the world...
...council...
...It is therefore affected with no public interest...
...Not only do local councils focus almost exclusively on community concerns, commanding national atten- tion to any of their deliberations is a matter of luck...
...And yet it is quite clear that certain large and vo- cal segments of the public wonder whether the media lie more often and more shamelessly than government of- ficials or whether it's just an even match...
...if this re- mains undone, then morals and art de- teriorate...
...He and a few other editors tried to estab- lish a grievance committee to hear and judge complaints about press perform- ance...
...This is the most heavily bearded cliche in the de- bate...
...Which issues and which media should be as- sessed might be decided in part by the council's own observations and in- quiries, but most should begin with complaints from the public...
...Most aspects of journalism, how- ever, should be fair game...
...A council "committee on euphe- misms" monitored three television sta- tions, two radio stations, two daily newspapers, and two wire services for ten days in May...
...students and faculty at San Jose State College in California have formed the Com- mittee for Open Media...
...A constitutional prohibition against government restric- tions on expression is effective only if the Constitution ensures an adequate opportunity for discussion...
...No doubt, too, a council would want to review the decisions that led Associ- ated Press editors to butcher a report from Cambodia by the AP's highly re- spected Peter Arnett...
...When opposing forces meet, who actually make up the opposing forces...
...Many publishers and broad- casters, of course, have learned to sub- stitute "the people's right to know" for "freedom of the press" and pay other kinds of lip-service to the public...
...We crit- icized them, but we also had a roman- tic belief that anyone who circulated facts and thoughts, no matter how in- ane, was serving the greater good by contributing to the free market-place of ideas...
...The council had been careful to point up the fre- quent difficulties in ascertaining iden- tities in Vietnam, and Tatarian em- phasized these points, but his letter ended: "We certainly agree with the Honolulu Community-Media Council that specifics are preferable to general- ities and should be used wherever pos- sible...
...They argued before the Supreme Court in Red Lion Broadcasting Company v. Federal Communications Commission that the First Amendment protects their desire to broadcast whatever they choose and to exclude whomever they choose from using their facilities—al- most a classic of archaic thought...
...The Office of Commu- nication of the United Church of Christ (which is probably the most ef- fective critic of broadcasting) has pub- lished a valuable Guide to Citizen Ac- tion in Radio and Television...
...Thus, the gold medal of the Wharton School Alumni was pre- sented by "a university official," the guest of honor at a Penn Founder's Day luncheon was introduced by "a university spokesman," and an impor- tant letter to alumni was written by "a high university official...
...They may—and do— deny others a chance to use the only channels that can reach a complex modern society...
...The attitudes of broadcasters must necessarily be quite different...
...Most editors and publishers are still jealous of their prerogatives and suspi- cious of press councils...
...In 1969, Barron's idea was forced on the broadcasters...
...This becomes most obvious in the growing number of publications de- voted to criticism of the local media by dissident journalists in New York, Chicago, St...
...council could cope with the flood as the British Press Council did in its earliest days, reject- ing nonsense out of hand and focusing first on pivotal questions...
...Although a U.S...
...Seldom can a local council generate such impact...
...Why this is espe- cially true of the mass media is sug- gested by the many bitter letters that are reaching newspaper offices, the speeches that damn newspapers and television, and especially by the cit- izens' groups that are challenging broadcasters...
...According to the Commission, the media should pro- vide "a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day's events in a context which gives them mean- ing...
...Can everyone who is fighting against the South Vietnamese government be de- scribed as a "Communist...
...All this should excite deep sympathy for publishers and broadcasters, but it is difficult to sympathize wholly with those who resist the inevitable...
...The cable explained similar dele- tions in another story and ended: let's play it cool...
...These critics have allies...
...Today, however, freedom of the press is the only guarantee in the Bill of Rights that cannot be exercised effectively by individuals...
...air strikes destroyed ninety per cent of it...
...Editor & Publisher, the trade week- ly of the newspaper industry, recently carried an editorial that frowned on a national press council because few ed- itors "want to play judge, jury, and prosecutor over the performances of their peers mainly because that's what freedom of the press is all about...
...Are they military personnel, or are they civilians...
...What the Honolulu Community-Media Council accom- plished in this case simply underlines the need for a national body that can speak directly to the far-flung wire services and the nation-spanning net- works and magazines...
...It was a lame step...
...Skepticism runs deep, especially among the more in- formed and intelligent...
...We no longer believe that the public interest is served by freedom of the press if that means only that those who control the media can do as they like...
...Those who write in for copies are numerous and cover a wide range in the political spectrum...
...It is difficult to think of better criteria for assessing press performance...
...Nor does an increas- ingly critical public...
...They are puffery, paid for by advertising...
...As this indicates, a few editors and publishers are eager to see the work of the press audited...
...This matters above everything...
...There are two excellent reasons for this: "A—Economics was a subject I nev- er studied in college...
...It has reached the point that so clear a thinker as Dr...
...The editors who are so stentorian about "the public's right to know" kept everything secret...
...Others fared worse: Annenberg maintained blacklists that kept some people and institutions out of his news- papers altogether...
...To a large degree, the council should be the kind of grievance bureau that the British Press Council has become...
...It was as though the council agreed with Confucius that the most important concern of any so- ciety is that language be correct...
...But Justice Byron White wrote a majority opinion for the Court holding that a broadcast licensee has no constitutional right to monopolize a frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens...
...And the U.S...
...Few of them pay any attention to scholarship unless it is forced on them...
...In this regard we rec- ommend the following questions as guidelines: "a...
...Such reporting "creates and maintains certain neg- ative images in the minds of the read- ing and listening public," the commit- tee reported...
...Any- one who lectures to college students these days had better be prepared to support in detail any praise he bestows on the news media...
...He suggested that more acceptable terms would be those used by the organizations themselves: National Liberation Front (NLF), Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), Democratic Republic of Viet- nam, North Vietnamese, Peoples Re- public of China, China, Mainland China, National United Front (in Cam- bodia), and Pat he t Lao (in Laos...
...These cases suggest how narrowly some editors and publishers view the public interest...
...In 1969, Norman Isaacs, who had been one of the few newspapermen to ap- plaud the Hutchins Commission pro- posal, became president of the Amer- ican Society of Newspaper Editors...
...Ambassador to Britain was a publisher who actively exercised his whims and enmities...
...Blacks, Chicanos, and other minor- ities are, of course, the most acidly an- gry...
...council would find that many of its new cases had been settled by precedent...
...Nor is acti- vism limited to the young and liberal...
...When death tolls are an- nounced, who actually has been killed...
...press council that invited complaints about the informa- tion practices of all the media might be inundated, that would be different from the British experience only in de- gree...
...UPI has thousands of news- paper and broadcast clients in the United States and thousands of others around the rest of the world...
...The New York Times and The Wash- ington Post won a decision in the Su- preme Court in the widely publicized case of the Pentagon Papers...
...The group selected would be wise to consider adopting the criteria for re- sponsible journalism sketched by the Hutchins Commission...
...Among the findings were the fact that United Press Inter- national (UPI) used "Communist" 121 times and "North Vietnamese" only seventeen times...
...The committee report was adopted unanimously...
...The Edward R. Murrow Center of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts and WGBH- TV of Boston, one of the most active public television stations, are planning a national press review to analyze media performance...
...But the choice isn't going to be yours much longer...
...Newspapers may never face a similar ruling, at least in part because as a practical matter it might be impossible to assure public access to the print media...
...That is not, of course, what freedom of the press is all about...
...Although the stories in these re- views cover the full range of irresponsi- ble actions by newspapers and broad- casters, it is remarkable how many cases spring from the fact that man- agement favors its friends...
...Indeed, the creation of the council might proceed from the point Lasswell makes: The foundation providing the financing should select laymen and journalists who are "suspected of in- tegrity" to formulate council policies...
...Thus Barron holds that the First Amendment guarantee was meant to as- sure that every voice should be heard, but real freedom of expression has been granted only to the proprietors of the mass media...
...newspapers, all references to looting had been deleted by the editors in New York...
...Most of those who argue against a national council for the United States begin by saying that the widely her- alded British Press Council is not a proper model because Great Britain is a much smaller country with many fewer dailies, some of which are na- tional rather than local...
...I don't care...
...One council member, John Witeck, complained at the April meet- ing that the news media mislead their readers and listeners by reporting the conflict in Indochina in such objection- able terms as Vietcong, enemy, Com- munist forces, Reds, Communist Chi- na, and Red China...
...Does the word "Communist" accurately describe who they are...
...Last year, the British Press Council re- ceived 497 complaints, but it had to judge only forty-five cases, largely be- cause a vast "case law" has been built during the seventeen-year life of the Council...
...What is required is an inter- pretation of the First Amendment which focuses on the idea that restrain- ing the hand of government is quite useless in assuring free speech if a re- straint on access is effectively secured by private groups...
...They appear to be reports...
...The major functions en- visioned for the agency are applicable today...
...More than two-thirds of the British editors who responded in a survey a few years ago approved the Council and its actions...
...The Court ruled only about broad- casting, which was the focus of the case before it...
...But when the story reached U.S...
...These are cosmetics...
...Can everyone who is killed be accurately described as an "enemy...
...The major mission, the Commission argued, is to raise social conflict "from the plane of violence to the plane of discussion...
...After that, UPI reporters and editors are not likely to use "Commu- nist" carelessly...
...The pivot is the public interest, and the Court does not assume that the press always serves it...
...if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion...
...The Commission recommended that an agency independent of both press and government be created to appraise and report annually on press performance...
...The day when every publish- er was a satrap is as dead as Horace Greeley...
...Broad- casting won a decision in Congress when the House of Representatives re- fused to cite CBS President Frank Stanton for contempt in a controversy that grew out of the documentary, "The Selling of the Pentagon...
...In essence, he said that he knows nothing about economics, and that somehow this qualifies him to in- struct the millions of readers of the Hearst newspapers...
...Their attitudes were pretty well reflected by William Peter Hamil- ton of The Wall Street Journal: "A newspaper is a private enterprise owing nothing whatever to the public, which grants it no franchise...
...It is emphatically the property of the owner, who is selling a manufactured product at his own risk...
...For it is quite clear that the irresponsibles have led the media into a kind of morass of public distaste...
...ra- dio and television should also be appraised...
...specifically today we took looting and similar references out of arnett copy because we don't think it's especially news that such things take place in war and in present context this can be in- flammatory...
...Let journalists consider the conse- quences of refusing to cooperate with the inevitable, of standing by while the public asserts itself...
...In order to bring about greater ac- curacy in local news reporting on the Indochina conflict, we recommend that locai subscribers to wire services and syndicated and network materials (i.e...
...The report continued: "We are particularly concerned with the use of such terms as "Communist" and "enemy" which are too easily em- ployed to refer to a wide variety of people and organizations in Indochina...
...More often, however, the disputes turn on the existence of al- liances between the management of the newspaper or broadcasting station and the local power structures...
...Ideally, to avoid entanglements with either press or gov- ernment, the national council should be financed by a foundation or a con- sortium of foundations...
...The foreign editor did not include in his cable what he had told the desk- men who edited Arnett's story: "We can't let the Agnews seize upon this sort of thing...
...Louis, Honolulu, Denver, Philadelphia, Providence, and other cities...
...The media should serve as a "forum for the exchange of comment and criticism," give a "representative picture of the constituent groups in society," help in the "presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society," and "provide full access to the day's intelligence...
...But change is slowly invading the editorial sanctums...
...Walter Menninger, asking, "Who shall guard the guards...
...Readers, listeners, and viewers are no longer content to be passive consumers of whatever the media package for them...
...When The New York Times and The Washington Post won in the recent case of the Pentagon Papers, The Post regretted in an editorial that the Supreme Court had failed to "come to terms with the tormenting issue at the heart of this dispute—the Government's right of prior restraint of the press...
...Now we know too much about monopoly journalism, establishment influence, government manipulation, and the stifling of minorities—intellec- tual as well as economic and racial— to believe that Truth and Falsehood ever grappled in quite the way Milton envisioned...
...When the president of the prestigious University of Penn- sylvania, Gaylord Harnwell, was placed on Annenberg's list, the editors were especially hard put to avoid men- tioning him...
...The more such reviews are issued, the angrier the public becomes...
...Minnesota is establishing a statewide council...
...Hearst went on to report that he had become both a borrower and a lender and continued on and on through a full double column of homilies...
...Clearly, the time has arrived to give the public a voice through a national press council...
Vol. 35 • September 1971 • No. 9
