The Press: Free & Uneasy

Like many another thinker, Poet John Milton was everlastingly confident that if truth and falsehood were to grapple in free and open encounter, “who ever knew Truth put to the worse?” Last week, 300 years further on in the unending conflict, the question whether truth and falsehood should meet in free and open encounter was still an issue:

¶ At Lake Success, the U.S.S.R.’s Alex, ander P. Morozov (a non-Miltonian) told a UNESCO committee that it was all very simple: “a small group of monopolists” kept most of the world press in chains; “communal ownership” (state monopoly) kept the Russian press free (by which a Russian means faithful to the Party dogma). There ought to be a law, he said, to make the capitalist press behave.

¶ At Williamsburg, Va., the A.P.’s Kent Cooper told a newsmen’s banquet that it was not that simple: government control of the press would obviously mean political control. The U.S. press would stay free, he said, provided it kept nothing from the people, and kept “defending the right of all to express their views through the printed word.”

That had always been the Western idea: everybody had a right to speak his piece, and anybody had the right to be wrong. Unfortunately, behind the grand Miltonian facade, scalawags could and did bore from within. Last week a 20th Century philosopher tried to get at the termites without tearing down the house of freedom. As a member of the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press,* William Ernest Hocking, professor emeritus at Harvard, had thoughtfully poked around the structure for three years. In Freedom of the Press (University of Chicago Press; $3), he took some bold steps beyond John Milton.

The babel of the modern press and radio, Hocking thought, was hardly a free and open encounter; “public debate” had become a euphemism. He doubted that many readers tried or even wanted to hear all sides of an issue. He asked: “How many editors . . . cite each other to open debate; what Hearst has flung down the gauntlet to what New York Times—or vice versa? . . . I fear it is simply not the case that in the profuse and unordered public expression of today the best views tend to prevail.”

Not Right to Lie. Hocking would cut the moral props out from under the liars and strengthen the conviction of moral responsibility in the free press: “The right to be in error in the pursuit of truth does not include a moral right to be deliberately in error. . . . Since the claim to the rights of free speech and free press rests on duty of a man to his thought and to his social existence, when this duty is ignored or rejected—as it is rejected when the issuer is a liar, an editorial prostitute whose political judgments can be bought, a malicious inflamer of unjust hatred—the ground for his claim of right is abandoned.” Prosecution of such betrayers of freedom might be awkward, he conceded, “but the first step toward dealing with them is to recognize that the ground upon which they could make a claim of right is gone; they have forfeited it.”

Philosopher Hocking was no more anxious than Kent Cooper to shout for the law. But he felt sure that if society—or the press itself—limited “the liberty to degrade,” it would be doing a favor to the offenders as well as to itself. Lest his idea of a “light touch of government” sound too frightening to the press, Hocking drew an analogy to another kind of freedom which submitted to self-discipline and gained by it: “There is nothing freer, in our age, than the inquiry of science. Yet no one is free to be a scientist on his own version of the multiplication table. . . .”

Editors will feel an urge to jump on Hocking, especially for his parallels, for truth in politics and morals is no matter of applying a multiplication table. But critics can profit by reading his argument to the end, at least for his insistence on the principle that freedom of the press presupposes a specific acknowledgement of moral responsibility by the press. His argument is a rocky path, but along the way he has strewn some bright pebbles of comment and criticism:

¶ “There could be no right of free speech if there were not a corresponding right not to listen.”

¶ “The interest of the citizen who wants to get his views into the paper [is] a genuine and important interest though not a right. . . .”

¶ “The reporter who substitutes romance for fact runs an awful risk of lying; but the reporter who offers the facts without their inherent romance is surely lying.”

¶ “Much of the propaganda in the contemporary press is simply counter-propaganda, the work of well-meaning men who distort facts because they no longer know how to get a hearing for sober truth.”

¶ “The press has tended to discount its own validity, and, as a result, the morale of its readers is low. They have been fed on too constant a diet of superlatives and excitements. . . . From public slogans and party platforms, shrill editorials and spiced-up news, to the insistent din and pretense of advertising, the reader . . . comes to believe that the careers of newsmen depend on the illicit transformation of narrative into melodrama. . . . He imagines propaganda both where it is and where it is not.”

* Under a $200,000 grant from TIME Inc. and $15,000 from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.