Reluctant to Criticize: Media,Academia,and the Press Council Without a Home

Abstract

The earliest recommendation for an American press council appears in A Free and Responsible Press (1947), the report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press. Few people know that Commission chair Robert Maynard Hutchins and two allies between 1959 and 1962 tried to create the press council. They wanted an organization that would evaluate television as well as print, and entertainment as well as news, with Adlai Stevenson as chair, Edward R. Murrow as staff director, Henry R. Luce as a major funder, and an elite university as a base. In substantial part because of resistance from the universities, they failed.

Keywords

history education press performance

A Free and Responsible Press, the report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947), is renowned for its prestigious authors, its pointed critique of American journalism, its list of requirements for media in a democracy, and its recommendation for a national press council. But scarcely anyone has taken note of the subsequent efforts to implement that recommendation, led by Commission chair Robert Maynard Hutchins and one of the Commission’s funders, William Benton.

The council they envisioned would evaluate the quality of news as well as entertainment offerings in the media, including television. Hutchins and Benton envisioned Adlai Stevenson as chair, Edward R. Murrow as staff director, Henry R. Luce as a major funder, and an elite university as a base. Finding a university proved to be the biggest hurdle. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago all said no. So did Columbia School of Journalism. Only the University of Notre Dame proved welcoming; indeed, the university offered to help pay for the organization, but Benton resisted.

The story behind the failure to establish a press council represents much more than a postscript to the oft-told tale of the Commission on Freedom of the Press. It illuminates important facets of academia’s attitude toward the media circa 1960, an attitude that, based on the experience of Hutchins and Benton, might be summed up as fear and loathing: fear of newspapers, loathing for television. The story also illuminates the Zeitgeist of the times. Media criticism became a growth industry by the late 1960s, with journalism reviews, press councils, ombudsmen, a media-reform movement, and foundation support. At the same time, the rise of adversary culture made universities more willing to criticize the institutions of society in general. Hutchins and Benton, with their efforts to create the national press council from 1959 to 1962, were a few years ahead of their time—and that proved fatal. Finally, the story of the failed efforts serves as a reminder of history’s contingencies, “the paths not taken, the deferred options,” as Victor Pickard (2010, p. 184) puts it.

This article chronicles and analyzes the men’s attempts to launch a press council, with particular focus on their dealings with universities. The article is based on letters, memos, and reports located in archives, particularly the William Benton Papers, at the University of Chicago; the Robert Maynard Hutchins Collection, at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB); the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Collection, also at UCSB; the Fund for the Republic Records, at Princeton University; and the Edward R. Murrow Papers, at Tufts University. After a literature review, the article briefly recounts the Commission on Freedom of the Press and the media work of Benton. It next examines Benton’s and Hutchins’s attempts to launch a council in the 1950s and 1960s, especially their concerted attempt, aided by journalist Harry S. Ashmore, from 1959 to 1962. Although many schools turned them down, the article concentrates on their dealings with three elite universities: a university with no journalism school, Harvard; a university with a journalism school, Columbia; and a Catholic university, Notre Dame. The article then considers factors behind the failure of the project.

Literature Review

Since a pioneering monograph by Margaret Blanchard (1977), scores of works have analyzed the Commission on Freedom of the Press. Of published works relying on primary sources, the most notable are the studies by Jerilyn S. McIntyre (1979, 1987), Stephen Bates (1995, 2018), and Victor Pickard (2015), as well as more narrowly focused works by Roger Simpson (1995), Jane S. McConnell (1997), David Goodman (2011), and Sam Lebovic (2016). In addition, Robert M. Hutchins is the subject of biographies by two associates, Harry S. Ashmore (1989) and Martin Mayer (1993). After leaving his position as chancellor at the University of Chicago in 1951, Hutchins worked for the Ford Foundation and then for the Fund for the Republic; the foundations are subjects of books by Dwight Macdonald (1955/1989), Thomas C. Reeves (1969), and Frank K. Kelly (1981). William Benton is the subject of a biography by Sidney Hyman (1969) and a media-focused study by Cynthia B. Meyers (2009).

This article goes beyond the published literature. Of the works on the Commission on Freedom of the Press, only Simpson focuses on the proposed press council. He provides thorough accounts of its genesis in Commission deliberations and of Hutchins’s initial efforts to launch it, but he reports that these efforts largely ceased after 1957, whereas this study finds that Hutchins and Benton devoted the greatest attention to the project from 1959 to 1962. Several of the biographies and the studies of the two foundations discuss Hutchins’s and Benton’s attempts to create various sorts of media-monitoring entities between 1951 and 1958, but Ashmore and Kelly alone discuss the post-1959 efforts, and only briefly. Meyers, finally, discusses Benton’s 1951 efforts to create a governmental advisory board to study broadcasting, but not his later efforts to start a nongovernmental entity.

Commission on Freedom of the Press

Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry R. Luce came up with the idea for the Commission on Freedom of the Press, and the corporation provided US$200,000 to fund the study. Robert Maynard Hutchins, president (later chancellor) of the University of Chicago, organized and chaired the 13-man group. After 17 meetings between late 1943 and 1946, and an additional US$15,000 from William Benton’s Encyclopedia Britannica, the Commission published A Free and Responsible Press in 1947 (Hutchins, 1947a).

The report concluded that “the performance of the press falls short of the requirements of a free society in the world today” (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947, p. 97). Its chief recommendation called for “a new and independent agency to appraise and report annually upon the performance of the press” and to undertake a long list of other tasks (pp. 100–102). In deliberations, Commission members talked of recommending that the organization be affiliated with a university, perhaps the University of Chicago, but ultimately opted not to mention the issue (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1945a, 1945b). After going back and forth, they also decided not to lay the groundwork for the organization themselves before disbanding (McIntyre, 1979).

Scholars have identified A Free and Responsible Press as the first-ever call for a national press council in the United States (Ritter & Leibowitz, 1974). The Commission on Freedom of the Press did not use the term press council, but Hutchins later did so (1970). A press council generally is a nongovernmental body, comprising journalists and nonjournalists, which evaluates performance of the media and issues public reports (Balk, 1972; Gerald, 1968; Ritter & Leibowitz, 1974; Rivers et al., 1972). The Hutchins Commission, as well as Benton and Ashmore, seemed principally interested in big-picture reports on the state of the media, whereas press councils often concentrate on adjudicating disputes over particular coverage.

Hutchins, Benton, and the Press Council

William Benton, an ad-maker turned philanthropist, was one of Hutchins’s closest friends. Through his partial ownership of Encyclopedia Britannica, he gave the Commission on Freedom of the Press US$15,000 to complete its job when Henry Luce declined to go beyond US$200,000. He also claimed to have “sat up all one night in Washington rewriting” the manuscript of A Free and Responsible Press before it went to Luce. “I made hundreds and hundreds of changes . . . Thank God I did. If I hadn’t, the criticisms would have been far more severe” (Benton, 1959a, 1963). After publication of A Free and Responsible Press, he became a tireless champion of the report and its press council recommendation.

Benton’s first effort deviated in an important respect from A Free and Responsible Press: the body would be governmental rather than private. After being appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1949, he sponsored a bill to create a National Citizens’ Advisory Board on Radio and Television in 1951, with members nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate (Hyman, 1969; Meyers, 2009). As he envisioned it, the board would study the state of broadcasting and issue annual reports, including recommendations for action by Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Benton (1967) later observed that the idea “derived wholly and absolutely from the Hutchins Commission.” Broadcasters denounced the proposal, and the bill was shelved after hearings in 1952. Benton lost his seat in the Republican landslide later that year. Had he won, he maintained, he could have passed the bill (Hyman, 1969). Thereafter, Benton undertook many efforts to create a private press council, but periodically returned to the idea of an official body.

Simpson (1995) recounts Hutchins’s and Benton’s efforts to launch the organization in the 1950s, first through the Ford Foundation and then through its spinoff, the Fund for the Republic. He writes that the efforts petered out after 1957. Actually, the most concerted attempt began in 1959, when the Fund for the Republic established a think tank, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, in Santa Barbara, California, with Hutchins as president.

To get the press council going, Hutchins told Benton, all that was needed was US$25,000, for 6 months’ work by Harry S. Ashmore, a Pulitzer-winning journalist and friend of Hutchins. Despite misgivings about Ashmore, Benton (1959c) agreed to provide the funds, but he wanted clarification of the deliverable; “$25,000 sounds to me like quite a lot for a study.” Hutchins (1959b) assured him that Ashmore would “bring us to the point of actually getting the commission into operation.” From 1959 to 1962, Ashmore wrote proposals and did most of the legwork; Hutchins often conferred with Ashmore and Benton, but mostly remained backstage; and Benton met and corresponded with many people who might help the project while sending torrents of letters to Hutchins and Ashmore.

To launch the press council, the three men believed that they needed to line up personnel (members and a staff), donors, and a university base. Partly because much of the press had complained about the Hutchins Commission’s exclusion of journalists, their lists of possible members included such media people as former CBS correspondent William Shirer, columnist Walter Lippmann, and Newsday publisher Alicia Patterson, plus ad-maker Raymond Rubicam. They also wanted eminent figures from politics and government, such as former Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson (Benton’s choice for chair) and former Socialist presidential nominee Norman Thomas; as well as academics, among them the former Hutchins Commission members Harold D. Lasswell, Archibald MacLeish, Reinhold Niebuhr, and George N. Shuster (Ashmore, 1961c, 1963b; Benton, 1957, 1960c, 1960d, 1961a). For staff director, Benton favored Edward R. Murrow, who seemed to take the possibility seriously, but ultimately said no (Ashmore, 1961a, 1962; Benton, 1959b, 1960a, 1960b, 1961b). Benton admired the critique of television that Murrow (1958) articulated in a speech to Radio Television Digital News Association (RTNDA), just as he later admired the “vast wasteland” speech that FCC chair Newton N. Minow (1961) delivered before the National Association of Broadcasters. (Indeed, Benton (1961d) said the Minow speech could constitute “the launching platform” for the press council.)

As for financing, Benton (1962b) was willing to provide US$500,000 over a 5- or 10-year period, but he insisted that other donors sign on too. Prospects included Joseph P. Kennedy, David Rockefeller, CBS president William Paley, the New York Times Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and, above all, the principal funder of the Commission on Freedom of the Press, Henry Luce (Ashmore, 1960c, 1961a). Luce seemed open to the idea in 1959 (Benton, 1959d). In 1960, he told Benton that he might make a small contribution and lean on others for more substantial ones, but only if the press council focused solely on broadcasting at first and consisted of media professionals, with no academics (Benton, 1959d, 1960f). Benton (1960b) took that as a yes. But, limited and conditional as it was, Luce’s interest soon ebbed. He passed the project to Hedley Donovan at Time Inc., who said no (Ashmore, 1960a; Donovan, 1960).

Benton, Hutchins, and Ashmore were confident that they could get personnel and funding, if not necessarily their top choices. The major stumbling block proved to be a university.

In Search of a University

Why a University?

The project needed, in Hutchins’s words, “a sanitary pipeline” for tax-exempt donations (Ashmore, 1963b). The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions was headed by Hutchins, who was still a bête noire in the eyes of much of the press because of A Free and Responsible Press. It would be possible to create a free-standing tax-exempt entity, but Ashmore (1960d, 1966b) favored a university affiliation for several reasons: to enhance the press council’s reputation for expertise and nonpartisan objectivity, to supply it with researchers and other assistance, to add weight to its proposals for improving journalism education, and to make it eligible for grants from foundations devoted to education. Ashmore, Benton, and Hutchins discussed the press council with administrators and professors at many schools. Yale, Princeton, and Chicago said no (Ashmore, 1960c, 1963a; Goheen, 1961). This article will focus on their dealings with three other elite universities—Harvard, the Columbia School of Journalism, and Notre Dame—as examples of a university with no journalism school, a journalism school, and a Catholic university.

Harvard University

When Joseph Pulitzer decided to create a school of journalism, in 1903, he sounded out Harvard president Charles W. Eliot and Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler. James Boylan (2003, p. 13) suggests that Pulitzer had already decided on Columbia; he may have included Harvard “to keep Columbia on its toes.” Eliot responded with a proposal for a curriculum that stressed skills for the workplace, including classes on advertising and circulation (“Founds School of Journalism,” 1903). Pulitzer (1904, p. 18) rejected the curriculum—per Boylan, he may already have rejected Harvard—because he found the inclusion of business classes “repugnant,” and he moved ahead with Columbia.

Some three decades later, another Harvard president contemplated the role of journalism in higher education and reached a very different conclusion from that of Eliot. The issue arose in 1936, when Agnes Wahl Nieman, whose husband, Lucius, had been editor of the Milwaukee Journal, left US$1.4 million to Harvard “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism in the United States and educate persons deemed specially qualified for journalism” (Jones, 2013). The bequest came as a surprise to university president James Conant, who had no intention of starting a journalism school (Lyons, 2013). After consulting with Harvard alumnus Walter Lippmann and others, Conant decided on a fellowship program that would give working journalists a year-long sabbatical to study at Harvard, with no academic requirements and no course credit. Conant persuaded Archibald MacLeish, later a member of the Hutchins Commission, to leave his job at Henry Luce’s Fortune and get the program launched. MacLeish served during the program’s first year, 1938–1939, succeeded by Louis M. Lyons, who had been one of the inaugural fellows (Lyons, 2013).

Several years later, Conant wanted a reunion of former fellows, which, according to Lyons (2013), led to the founding of Nieman Reports in 1947. Lyons does not specify how the reunion spawned the publication; perhaps the magazine was viewed as an outlet for current and former fellows to muse about journalism. In any event, Nieman Reports began without much focus. The inaugural issue declared that it would follow “no pattern, formula or policy” beyond the Nieman Foundation’s mission “to promote standards of journalism in America”; some early issues featured short stories (Lyons, 1965, pp. 18, 49). The journal began to find its voice with its second issue, which was largely devoted to the just-published A Free and Responsible Press. Gradually, according to Lyons (1965), “the theme of press responsibility became the touchstone” (p. 22).

When Benton, Hutchins, and Ashmore sought a home for the press council, Harvard possessed considerable advantages. It had prestige. It had the Nieman program, praised in A Free and Responsible Press. It had Commission alumni on its faculty—Archibald MacLeish, who had returned to Harvard in 1949 as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. (Zechariah Chafee Jr. had died, and William Ernest Hocking had retired). And it did not have a school of journalism. Hutchins (1959a) remarked that “Harvard foiled the Niemans in a pretty intelligent way.”

In November 1960, Ashmore went to Cambridge to pitch the idea to Lyons, MacLeish, and the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, McGeorge Bundy. According to Ashmore (1960b), Bundy expressed interest in a center that would conduct studies and hold seminars, but its mission would have to be research rather than criticism so that it could attain “the highest degree of acceptability by the media.” MacLeish, “who bears scars” from the Hutchins Commission, according to Ashmore, “generally agrees with this view.” Bundy said they would resume their discussions after he consulted with members of the faculty. Ashmore recognized the distance between the Hutchins–Benton and the Bundy visions, but thought he might be able to broker a compromise. Unexpectedly, though, Bundy left to join the Kennedy administration.

Without Bundy as intermediary, Ashmore outlined the idea to Harvard president Nathan M. Pusey, Conant’s successor. Pusey (1961) turned it down in a fashion that seemed to leave no room for compromise:

It seems to me that a commission of the sort proposed—that would sit in judgment over the press, radio, and television—is an inappropriate activity for a university, or at least it seems to me inappropriate for Harvard . . . I am sorry not to be more encouraging.

Pusey suggested that Ashmore and Benton forget about the press council and back the Nieman Foundation and Nieman Reports instead. Bundy’s departure from Harvard, Ashmore (1966a) later said, “was the worst break we had.”

Columbia School of Journalism

Although A Free and Responsible Press sharply criticized journalism schools, Hutchins (1947b) told journalism educators that they should take on the press council project:

The next report on the Freedom of the Press should be written by the teachers of journalism. The Commission recommends that an independent agency appraise and report annually upon the performance of the press . . . I do not see why a new agency should be created. I do not see why the function of this agency should not be performed by this association, if not by concerted formal action, then by the individual action of its individual members.

He was being disingenuous. In discussions with Benton and Ashmore, Hutchins (1961) insisted that the press council not be headquartered at a school of journalism, because “the press and the criticism of the press are too important and too broad a subject to be handled . . . by a group as narrow as a school of journalism.” Ashmore agreed. Benton, as on many topics, went back and forth.

The journalism school to which the men gave their most sustained attention, Benton in particular, was the Columbia School of Journalism. The school opened in 1912, with an undergraduate curriculum that stressed the liberal arts and the bulk of journalism coursework reserved for the senior year. In 1934, it shifted from an undergraduate program to a graduate program (Boylan, 2003). In 1962, the school started publishing Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), out of a conviction, in the words of dean Edward W. Barrett, that Columbia “has a duty not only to educate young professionals but also to help spur improvement in the profession” (quoted in Abel, 1971, p. xii).

When he heard about the proposed press council, Barrett asked Benton for details. Benton said they were looking for a university without a journalism school. “Ed naturally bridled at this,” recounted Benton (1961f). “And I don’t blame him.” Barrett made a strong case for Columbia, but it increasingly became apparent that he did not want a press council; he was intent on getting an endowment for CJR (Boylan, 2003). Just as Pusey had pushed Nieman Reports instead of a press council, Barrett maintained that supporting CJR would be the best way to improve American journalism. Benton went back and forth. In October 1961, Benton (1961c) told Hutchins he was thinking of giving his money to CJR. Hutchins (1961) replied that the magazine would never amount to anything more than “a very good trade paper.” Benton (1961c) said Hutchins was right. After lunching with Barrett a few months later, Benton changed his mind again. Benton (1962c) said he might fund a board of editorial consultants for CJR. The board would produce an annual State of the Press Report, which could be an issue of the magazine. Hutchins and Ashmore set aside their opposition to Columbia—the seed money, after all, was Benton’s—but they continued to argue that CJR was no substitute for a press council. They persuaded Benton, who returned to Barrett and said he would fund a press council but not CJR.

Perhaps exasperated by the vacillation, Barrett (1962) told Benton that he would make “one more serious effort” to find common ground. Echoing Pusey, he said that

[t]here is much feeling at Columbia that it would appear rather presumptuous for this University—or any university—to stand up and announce to the world that it was setting up a commission to review the performance of radio, television, press and all of the news media.

He proposed forming an Advisory Committee on the Mass Media, which would advise CJR and issue reports on media issues relevant to education, but not pronounce on media performance broadly. The Committee would have a minimum US$100,000 annual budget, with Benton donating US$50,000 “and tak[ing] the lead in raising the other $50,000.” That, Barrett indicated, somewhat imperiously, was his best offer.

In response, Benton (1962a) dismissed CJR as a “low road” approach, which appraised the media by “trade association standards” rather than considering the public interest. He expressed dismay over Barrett’s view of the university’s role, too. “How can any program in the public interest be presumptuous for a great university like Columbia?” he wrote. “You are in business to seek the truth.” For the time being, negotiations ceased. Hutchins (1962), sounding pleased, told a friend: “Mr. Benton has finally told the Columbia School of Journalism to go to hell.”

University of Notre Dame

One campus was eager to quarter the press council, thanks to an alumnus of the Commission on Freedom of the Press: the University of Notre Dame. In the 1940s, George N. Shuster, at the time the president of Hunter College in New York, had served on the Hutchins Commission. Later, in the 1950s, he also served as an officer of Hutchins’s Fund for the Republic, and when he stepped down as Hunter’s president in 1960, he agreed to spend a year raising money for the Fund (Blantz, 1993). In early 1961, he went to work as a special assistant to Notre Dame president Theodore M. Hesburgh (Blantz, 1993). Notre Dame had no journalism school, though its Department of Communication Arts offered a few skills classes on writing, editing, and broadcast production (University of Notre Dame, 1960a, 1960b).

When he heard about the press council, Shuster wrote to Hutchins. “[T]here are some very good reasons why you might consider Notre Dame . . . even though it is Catholic and Middle Western,” he said. For one thing, “a good many people around here like you and hold you in esteem.” Furthermore, Notre Dame could partially match donations from Benton and others, using a Ford Foundation grant (Shuster, 1961b). In a conversation with Benton, Shuster also tried to appeal to Hutchins’s renowned distaste for university sports. Shuster said that Notre Dame had shut down its Physical Education Department, which would mean—he offered this as a selling point—that the Fighting Irish would no longer be as successful (Benton, 1961e). In addition, Shuster (1961a) alluded to controversies of the 1950s, when Hutchins, as head of the Fund for the Republic, had been accused of being soft on communism: a Catholic connection for the press council “may well be a distinct advantage” as “proof against charges of subversive activity.”

It was a pivotal time for American Catholics in general and Notre Dame in particular. Anti-Catholic prejudice in the United States had declined markedly, partly as a result of the factor that Shuster cited, the Catholic Church’s strong opposition to communism. In 1962 and 1963, President John F. Kennedy, Speaker of the House John W. McCormack, and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield all were Catholic (Glazer & Moynihan, 1963). Meanwhile, Father Hesburgh was trying to raise the profile of Notre Dame. Hesburgh and Shuster may have believed that the press council would help anchor the university in the American mainstream. They seemed willing to endure press hostility in exchange for public visibility.

Hutchins and Ashmore initially took the position that the press council should not be affiliated with any religious school, but Shuster convinced them (Ashmore, 1961b; Kelly, 1961). Edward R. Murrow (1961), Newton N. Minow (1964), and others advising Benton also backed Notre Dame. “I believe,” Ashmore (1961b) told Benton, “we are now in position to get into business.”

Benton, however, worried about the Catholic connection, and his longtime aide John Howe fueled his concerns. Notre Dame is not merely a religious institution, Howe (1962) said; it is a Catholic one, and the Catholic Church “is far more interested in propagating its own beliefs than in getting a hearing for other beliefs.” He was raised Catholic, according to his daughter (Rowland, 2017), but he left the church as a teenager and became an atheist. Benton continued to vacillate. Notre Dame spent its Ford money on other projects.

“Harry Ashmore wasted a tremendous amount of time and money trying to find a university,” Hutchins (1968) later said, but “the only one he found was Notre Dame, and John Howe succeeded in vetoing that.”

The Press Council Without a Home

Universities’ Receptivity

Universities turned away the press council for a host of reasons, spoken and unspoken. Some administrators wanted to avoid antagonizing the press, as Hutchins (1970) observed. Although some in the media industry supported the council, others were strongly opposed, including university donors. Benton (1960e) recounted a conversation with media magnate Samuel I. Newhouse Sr.:

He says that such a Commission could only raise questions that would cause problems for him and his radio and TV stations and his newspapers. When I spoke to him of the public interest, he says this is of concern only to his two sons who will inherit control over his Foundation. Let them devote themselves to philanthropy and to public interest. This is not Sam’s role.

The sensitivity was greater at universities with journalism schools, which needed durable relationships with the media industry for the sake of donations—such as Newhouse’s gift of US$15 million to Syracuse in 1964—as well as jobs for graduates. If they feared the print press, some university administrators loathed television. In the early years of the medium, James Baughman (2007) notes, many professors and other intellectuals made a point of boasting that they did not own TVs. In those universities that had journalism schools, in addition, the journalism faculty may have resisted having their field lumped in with TV entertainment, just as journalists of 1947 complained when the Commission on Freedom of the Press lumped newspapers in with movies and radio. More broadly, administrators who rejected the press council may have differed with Hutchins on the proper role of the university. He maintained that the university must be “a center of independent criticism” (“Hutchins Says Colleges Make Democracy Futile,” 1962), whereas Pusey and Barrett seemed to believe that a university had no business evaluating the performance of institutions in society.

Too Early?

Perhaps Benton and Hutchins would have succeeded, or at least come closer to succeeding, a few years later. On campuses during the 1960s and 1970s, journalism faculties grew more vocal in their criticism of the press and, according to Jean Folkerts (2014, p. 261), “created a culture of press criticism” in academia. In addition, the serious study of television gained legitimacy on campuses (Thompson, 2011), though the process was slow and remains incomplete.

More broadly, the Zeitgeist shifted with regard to criticism of the media. Lee Brown (1974, p. 53) refers to a “paroxysm of criticism” of the press starting in the 1960s. Other than CJR, most of the paroxysm occurred after 1962, the last year of Benton’s and Hutchins’s dedicated efforts to start a press council. During around a dozen years following 1963, press councils were widely discussed and periodically launched. A bibliography published in 1972 listed 27 works, published and unpublished, about press councils; all but one appeared in 1964 or thereafter (Rivers et al., 1972). At the local level, the Mellett Fund financed experiments with press councils starting in 1967, and at least a dozen were proposed by the early 1970s (Rivers et al., 1972). At the national level, the Association for Education in Journalism (AEJ) explored the possibility of establishing “a nation-wide citizens committee” to evaluate the press, and Ashmore addressed the 1967 AEJ convention (Markham, 1967). (Hutchins (1969) said that an AEJ press council “would not be very good, at least not at the start.”) In CJR, James Boylan (1967) summarized the Hutchins Commission’s recommendation and said that “[t]he time seems ripe, after two decades, for its advocates to give it a try.” In 1973, the Twentieth Century Fund created the National News Council; despite misgivings, Benton served on the founding committee and donated US$10,000 (Brogan, 1985). But he ultimately thought the News Council was too timid (Howard, 1973). For a variety of reasons, including opposition from The New York Times and a failure to attract major funding on an ongoing basis, it ceased operations in 1984 (Brogan, 1985).

Beyond formal press councils, the broadcast reform movement achieved significant momentum in the mid-1960s, with support from the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and Benton’s foundation, among others (Fratkin, 2002). Starting in 1969, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Survey of Broadcast Journalism published an annual report on broadcast news, accompanied by a series of essays (Boylan, 2003); Benton (1970) fleetingly thought it might become the equivalent of a press council. The Markle Foundation and the Benton Foundation helped launch the Aspen Program on Communications and Society in 1971 (Cater, 1996). In print, Chicago Journalism Review began publishing in 1968 (Benton gave it US$2,500 [Dorfman, 1968]), followed by [More] and Washington Journalism Review (later renamed American Journalism Review) in the 1970s. As some of these examples attest, leading foundations grew increasingly interested in media issues in this period; foundation interest, as several scholars show (e.g., Buxton, 1994), can influence the paths of media research and activism. To be sure, the majority of these organizations and projects came and went. The same might have been the case for the Benton–Hutchins press council. Nonetheless, Benton and Hutchins probably would have had an easier time getting the project off the ground had they waited a few years.

A broader factor that deserves consideration is the rise of what Lionel Trilling termed adversary culture. Adversary culture in essence held that institutions of American society perpetuate injustice and that the proper stance toward them is opposition rather than neutrality (Hollander, 1988). In this respect, adversary culture legitimized and even incentivized challenging the system. Adversary culture shook up the elite media, according to Michael Schudson (1978), with some journalists arguing for devaluing objectivity and seeking social justice. Adversary culture affected campuses as well starting in about 1964, according to Clark Kerr (1995), as students, then faculty, and finally university leaders began calling for schools to challenge exploitative institutions of society, in keeping with Hutchins’s view of the university as social critic. Perhaps establishing a university-based press council would have been more feasible in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, when adversary culture was a noteworthy (though never dominant) force in elite academia and elite media.

Other Factors

Perhaps, though, factors other than timing doomed the project to failure. First, Hutchins was a divisive figure. His outspoken criticism of higher education alienated some university administrators, and his outspoken criticism of the media alienated some industry executives. With the press council project, Benton and Ashmore took the spotlight, but Hutchins’s involvement was unhidden.

Second, the project was disorganized. Benton periodically castigated Hutchins for neglecting it (Simpson, 1995), but mostly he blamed Ashmore for wasting time and money (Benton, 1961d). For his part, Ashmore (1967) believed that the best way to move the project forward would be to sideline Benton. Much of the fault for the failed press council does seem to lie with Benton. He repeatedly changed his mind about the ideal university base, the amount of money he was willing to donate, the council’s members, its structure and operations, and even whether it ought to be governmental or nongovernmental. The last is a particularly important issue. Advocates of press councils generally stress the importance of independence from government; one argument for a press council, in fact, is that it can help preempt government intervention through a sort of self-regulation. Benton was temperamental, too. Although fond of him, Hutchins (1972, 1973) considered him irascible and capricious. Also, his interest in the project came and went. In the mid-1960s, at his direction, Howe asked Ashmore for a list of potential members. Testily, Ashmore (1965) replied that Benton’s files doubtless contained many different lists dating back to 1959, “although it seems likely that some of these have died in the interstices of our correspondence.” Benton privately acknowledged that he took on too many projects and failed to give some of them the attention they required (Hyman, 1969). His secretary, Anne Cronin (1962), reviewed the files on the proposed press council and advanced what seems to be a shrewd diagnosis: Hutchins and Benton, she said, were perfectionists reluctant to commit to any option for fear that a better one might appear; “meanwhile the days and weeks race by and nothing is accomplished” (p. 6). Although Benton continued toying with the idea for the rest of his life (he died in 1973), concerted efforts came to an end after 1962.

Third, a university may not have been essential. Hutchins (1968) ultimately believed that their emphasis on a university base had been “fatal.” In his view, the University of Chicago’s “prestige added nothing to that of the Commission on Freedom of the Press.” Most press councils were not based at universities, though the deputy director of the National News Council later suggested that a university affiliation might have helped it survive (Brogan, 1985).

Fourth, if a university base was necessary, Hutchins and Benton insisted on an elite school. Hutchins in particular was a snob. While critical of all institutions of higher education (except for Great Books-centric St. John’s College), he could be especially scathing about schools that lacked an elite pedigree. Once, when asked to lecture at the University of Toledo, he told a friend, “What can you say at the University of Toledo except that it should never have been established, that it should be discontinued as soon as possible?” (Hutchins, 1972). Hutchins and Benton might have met with greater receptivity at less prestigious schools, where leaders might be more willing to take a gamble—as, indeed, was the case with up-and-coming Notre Dame.

Finally, it may have been unwise of Benton and Hutchins to try to create a single institution, with one board and one staff, to evaluate the news as well as entertainment. Columbia’s Barrett (1962) pointed out to Benton that those qualified to evaluate news may be unqualified to evaluate entertainment, and vice-versa. Furthermore, some prospective council member, including Adlai Stevenson and Alicia Patterson, were uninterested in TV entertainment (Ashmore, 1961a; Benton, 1959c).

In the end, Benton passed the task of creating a press council on to the next generation. He drafted “Guidance Notes in Case of My Death,” which said in part, “No foundation was ever prepared to put up money to implement the Report of the Commission on the Freedom of the Press. This has been most unfortunate. The idea will remain a good one and should be financed” (quoted in Hyman, 1969, p. 587). Benton died in 1973. The Benton Foundation has largely disregarded its founder’s admonition; instead, it has focused on other strategies for “ensur[ing] that media and telecommunications serve the public interest and enhance our democracy,” according to executive director Adrianne Benton Furniss, Benton’s granddaughter (Furniss, 2016). Reflecting its focus, it changed its name in 2019 to the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society (2019). In death as in life, Benton was unable to establish a press council.

Conclusion

This article has examined the efforts of Robert Maynard Hutchins and William Benton, backed by Harry Ashmore, to create a prestigious, high-profile national press council. Despite a good deal of time and money, their efforts flopped—victims of unpropitious timing and perhaps of other hindrances: grudges against Hutchins in both media and academia, a haphazard organization, a misguided insistence on securing a university base, and a wrongheaded notion that a single entity should criticize both news and entertainment.

Had the press council found a university home, it might have raised the academic standing of journalism as a field of research, by bringing prestigious figures to campus and issuing well-publicized reports. It also might have brought greater attention to journalism education, given the plans for the council to issue critiques of journalism instruction, though in keeping with Hutchins’s implacable beliefs about a proper education, the attention probably would have been unfavorable, along the lines of the criticisms in A Free and Responsible Press.

Whether a press council would have raised public confidence in journalism is a more difficult issue. Planning for the National News Council took place against the backdrop of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the press. Advocates argued that a news council would defuse such criticism, by showing that the press wanted accountability. Opponents argued that a news council would reinforce the criticism, by showing that others shared Agnew’s belief that the press deserved rebuking. Lending support to the latter interpretation, Agnew said in one of his speeches that a press council “might go far toward restoring some of the eroded public confidence in your profession” (Coyne, 1972, p. 430).

Perhaps a press council could have aided the press in other ways. First, it could have issued regular reports on legal threats to the press, a function mentioned in A Free and Responsible Press. Second, it might have pressured critics of the press to present a bill of particulars. When President Nixon excoriated network news in 1973, the National News Council tried to get the administration to file a formal complaint; White House aides never followed through (Lowenstein, 1974). Third, on its own initiative, the press council might have defended the press against baseless accusations, just as fact-checking organizations have debunked some of President Trump’s accusations. Finally, the council might have explored new avenues for financing press coverage in the internet age, as has been done by a Hutchins Commission successor, the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy (2019).

Finally, the story of the failed efforts of Benton and Hutchins serves as a reminder of history’s oft-forgotten contingencies. The Hutchins Commission’s principal recommendation might have been implemented in the 1960s if McGeorge Bundy had not left Harvard for the Kennedy administration, or if Edward Barrett had been less single-minded about getting an endowment for CJR, or if Benton’s assistant had been someone other than Catholic-turned-atheist Howe, or if Benton and Hutchins had held off for a few years. In the words of the historian Eric Foner (2003, p. 4), “events are inevitable only after they happen.”

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Stephen Bates, JD, is an associate professor in the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His book about the Hutchins Commission is forthcoming from Yale University Press. His articles have appeared in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the International Journal of Communication, Journalism History, and American Journalism, as well as The Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, and American Heritage.

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