The Professionals Reply

The press had been put on warning. The danger to its freedom came not from external pressures but from internal excesses, said the $215,000 report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press (TIME, March 31).

Had the report hit home? If so, it was a glancing blow. Some of the best papers regarded the commission's warnings as a challenge; others spoke up with more vehemence than penitence, and some of the worst chose to ignore the whole thing. Sample reactions:

"Totalitarian arguments," huffed Robert R. McCormick's Chicago Tribune. A work of amateurs and professors, said Wilbur Forrest, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (which the report had criticized as a do-nothing group). But Forrest's own paper, the New York Herald Tribune (he is its assistant editor) argued that the commission's findings could not be dismissed as "mere professional whimsy." Said the Trib: the press does have a responsibility to its public, a responsibility that outweighs a publisher's caprices, and "this responsibility is often neglected or flouted."

In the New York Times, Critic R. L. Duffus examined the commission's complaint that papers judge news by " 'recency or firstness, proximity, combat, human interest and novelty.' . . . Such recommended items as 'decrease of intolerance' or 'increase in the sale of books of biography and history' do get attention when you can put a finger on them. ... A newspaper devoted largely to undramatized 'significant' news would not last long. This is human nature."

Should the press, as the commission suggested, "engage in vigorous mutual criticism?" No, answered Columnist Walter Lippmann, admitting to membership in the country-club school of newspapering, in which club members do not discuss each other aloud. Wrote Lippmann: "For there is a fellowship among newspapermen as there is in other crafts and professions. They have to see each other . . . work together. ... I may say that I have tried [such criticism] and have had it tried on me, and my conclusion is that the hard feelings it causes are out of all proportion to the public benefits it causes."

So, had the commission's report been worth its effort? Perhaps some of the mealymouthed editorial reaction to it could properly be laid to timidities and tenuousness in the report itself. But the way the press responded (or failed to respond) to the commission's criticism indicated more than that. The job of improving the U.S. press, the commission had said, was largely up to the press itself. The method, said the commission, was in self-examination and "vigorous mutual criticism." So far the U.S. press (or a sizable part of it) was plainly demonstrating that it didn't want the advice.

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