I wrote a long piece revisiting the Commission on the Freedom of the Press, an extraordinary panel that convened in the 1940s, as democracy seemed imperiled, and wrestled with truth in reporting, the free market of ideas, and a free and responsible press. newyorker.com/news/the-futur…
Their deliberations are remarkably relevant to the debates dividing journalism today. Commission members worried about the forces of division in American society, the power of tribalism to warp political debate, and the press’s role in provoking discord.
The slim volume that the commission eventually produced, “A Free and Responsible Press,”...would go on to become a part of journalistic canon because it did what Niebuhr suggested: articulate the complexities of establishing and maintaining a free and responsible press.
Today, those complexities have deepened. And yet the work of the Hutchins Commission remains a touchstone, in part because of the way it lays out the virtues to which journalism can aspire in a democracy.
Nearly seventy-five years after the publication of “A Free and Responsible Press,” we face a crisis similar to, and perhaps deeper than, the one contemplated by the Hutchins Commission.
Confidence in the media is at a nadir, the country’s political divisions are driving disagreement over basic facts, and half-truths, falsehoods, and propaganda have overrun digital platforms and polluted the news ecosystem. The press itself is also shrinking.
In the midst of all of this, some of journalism’s foundational practices are being reconsidered.
This is a disorienting, destabilizing moment for members of the press—or, as some have it, the “mainstream media.” The decline of truth in American democracy can feel irreversible, and seem to be the product of forces that extend far beyond journalism.
But any hope of halting that decline must begin with a renewal of journalism’s commitment to its public responsibility, and with an examination of how its methods might best adapt to new circumstances.
During the twentieth century, the press came to understand that its highest obligation was to the public it served. Of all the risks that trouble journalism today, the greatest may be that editors, publishers, and other people in charge of media lose sight of this truth.
