"I have given you my opinion that newspapers today are in many ways stronger than they have ever been," reflected Christian Science Monitor editor Erwin D. Canham in 1946. But while newspapers were financially sound, "there are shakings and quiverings beneath the surface which should warn us that complacency is ruinous." Criticism of journalism was on the increase, Canham observed, and readers seemed more and more inclined to distrust the press. "They don't think we tell the whole story," Canham said. "They think we are reckless and careless. Well, sometimes we are."⁽¹⁾

Canham, like many other editors, recognized that newspapers desperately needed to improve. The postwar world seemed to demand it: The rapid social change in the United States during and after World War II, the nation's emergence afterward as one of the world's premier powers, each pointed to a need for improved newspaper content, more accountability to readers, and greater service to the nation and its voters.

Efforts to improve newspapers after the war blossomed both at individual newspapers and on a national scale through newspaper organizations, particularly the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME), and the wire services. At the same time, newspapers were increasingly the targets of press critics who charged that they were irresponsible, monopolistic, and out of touch with readers' concerns. This criticism came both from inside the industry and from outside it, from editors themselves, from government officials, from press critics, and from journalism schools. It reached a crescendo in the 1947 report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press and after Harry S. Truman's surprising victory in the 1948 presidential election.

The irony of it all, as Canham himself pointed out in 1948, was that the rise in newspaper criticism coincided with editors' and publishers' own increased efforts to improve the content of newspapers. The criticism seemed to reinforce the need for improvement, even if editors and publishers did not always agree with their critics. "There is not such a great gulf between the newspapers publishers and their critics as it might seem," Canham said in a 1948 speech before journalism educators. "The publishers are striving to remedy their product where the criticism applies even while the critics are hollering the loudest about it."⁽²⁾

The end of the war, and the complex world that emerged from it, pushed editors to improve their editorial product. A nation recovering from a world war and now coping with a booming postwar economy, returning veterans, and international tensions seemed to require a revision of the old tried-and-true formulas for news. Crime, sex, money, and politics still made headlines, of course, but now the sensational was crowded by labor, industrial, and science news emerging from a rapidly changing world. "We have a depression-New Deal-World War legacy of so much that is not entirely new but is obviously stamped `new and lasting,'" declared Cleveland News editor and ASNE president N.R. Howard in 1947. "With all these new types of news pouring in on us and with newsprint becoming rare, something obviously has had to give from the old standard of content for the great majority of provincial American daily newspapers."⁽³⁾

Before the turmoil of two world wars, "People were interested in love, murder, and money," observed Detroit Free Press editor Malcolm W. Bingay shortly after World War II ended. "Today even the poorest of our newspapers give over 70 percent of space to economic and industrial problems."⁽⁴⁾ Editors and publishers believed that these new kinds of news, tied as they were to the nation's well-being, placed a greater responsibility on newspapers to better serve the public by presenting fuller, more understandable news accounts. "The assignment of the newspaper in these days is greater than ever before," said Lester Markel, Sunday editor of the New York Times, "[N]ever has the news been so complex and the need of understanding it more urgent."⁽⁵⁾

Postwar problems seemed to pose great challenges to journalism. Getting the story right was more important than just for accuracy's sake; postwar peace now seemed in the balance. Moreover, the new kinds of news--economic problems and world tensions, to name just two--were much more difficult to explain than the sensational news of the past, a murder, say. "Editors and commentators are still punch drunk from the terrific story of war and victory," an editorialist remarked in The Quill, the magazine of Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalistic fraternity. "Now we must fight the peace and none of us is really good enough. We can only try."⁽⁶⁾ In the postwar era, concluded Toledo Blade editor-in-chief Grove Patterson, "Ordinary, uninspired newspapers can no longer do what needs to be done in a confused world."⁽⁷⁾

Improvements to newspapers were overdue, believed many publishers. "Newsmen have known for a long time that their papers have fallen short of serving the public as they should, despite their commendable work," said John H. Biddle, publisher of the Huntingdon (Pa.) Daily News and president of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Publishers Association. Biddle, addressing fellow publishers in 1948, said newspapers and their owners had far too long clung to "horse-and-buggy techniques" in both production and content. But after the war, "modern inventions and new responsibilities in the Atomic Age forced them to see the headline writing on the wall," he said. "It said in bold-face type: `The Deadline for Improvement is Here.'"⁽⁸⁾

One improvement drive in newspapers was the effort to make newswriting easier to read. "There is ever increasing emphasis on simpler newspaper writing," a Quill editorial pointed out in 1946. "[T]his demand is something more than a plot to sell newspapers to people who read with their lips. It is born, in part, of a desperate need to make an atomic age society--with too little time and patience--read enough to know how to preserve itself."⁽⁹⁾

The postwar move to improve writing had its roots in World War II, when the shortage of newsprint combined with a glut of news forced editors to shorten news articles. "The paper was small and space at a premium" during the war, recalled Boston Globe copy editor Joe Levin. "The long story died in the second world war. The copy desk had to be merciless in cutting."⁽¹⁰⁾ Other editors believed writing was overdue for improvement after having slipped in wartime, when newspapers faced an abundance of news but were short of staff and space.⁽¹¹⁾

During and after the war, editors found that the shorter stories, born of necessity, were easier for readers to understand. Moreover, the continued newsprint shortages and postwar rise in advertising continued to crowd "news hole," the proportion of the newspaper devoted to editorial matter. The trend toward shorter writing appeared irreversible, agreed a panel of editors at the 1946 ASNE convention. "I, for one, would certainly never want the papers to go back to the size that they once were," declared George A. Cornish of the New York Herald Tribune, expressing a common sentiment among editors. "I think a tighter, better edited paper is, in the long run, a better one."⁽¹²⁾

Not only was newswriting shorter, but there was a concerted effort to make it more understandable. Readability experts such as Robert P. Gunning and Rudolph Flesch contracted with newspapers and wire services to help them improve their editorial product. The two experts emphasized, as Gunning once pointed out, what good city editors had been saying to their reporters for decades: "[W]rite simply and directly." But the readability studies were significant because the nation's leading newspapers and largest wire services used them, and the vast majority of newspapers received all their national and international news from the wire services benefiting from them. The formulas devised by Flesch and Gunning gave editors, for the first time, an objective yardstick to measure readable prose. This new yardstick, Gunning told the ASNE convention in 1946, "is of use to you and to me, it is of use to newspapers, and it is a step in better communication; it is of great importance to the survival of democracy itself."⁽¹³⁾

Beginning in 1944, Gunning's company, Readable News Reports, worked with wire services and newspapers all over the country to make their prose more readable. A former reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal, Gunning had devised a formula for readability--his so-called Fog Index--that counted words in a prose passage and noted the frequency of multisyllable words. Through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, Gunning was hired by a wire service, United Press, and by more than sixty newspapers to evaluate the readability of their prose, offer suggestions, and train writers in his techniques. The newspapers included the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Washington Star and the Wall Street Journal.⁽¹⁴⁾ "Write as you talk," Gunning advised his clients. "Why should a Washington correspondent write `bilateral concordance' when he means `two-way pact?' Why should a police reporter say an accident victim suffered `contusions and abrasions' when he really means `cuts and bruises?'"⁽¹⁵⁾

Gunning wrote in 1952 that as a result of readability studies at newspapers across the United States, "The styles of the writers at these papers have altered markedly." In fifty newspapers Gunning had advised, the average difficulty of reading content improved from eleventh-grade level to ninth-grade level. Put another way, newspaper articles once written at the Atlantic Monthly level were now written, on average, as if for Reader's Digest.⁽¹⁶⁾

"Good editors, since newspapers began, have used whatever means they could to influence writers of news to be simple and direct," Gunning wrote. "With the help of readability research they have made more rapid progress in recent years than they ever have before." Editors had become more interested in readability research, Gunning observed, after surveys found that readers often ignored wordy, overly complex news articles in favor of comics and other features. The surveys were part of advertising research undertaken by the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA).⁽¹⁷⁾

While Gunning worked with newspaper clients and the United Press, Flesch was working with the Associated Press, which hired him as a consultant in 1948. "Too frequently it seems that we contrive the hardest way to say some of the simplest things," complained AP assistant general manager Alan J. Gould early in Flesch's study.⁽¹⁸⁾ Flesch's readability formula took into account average word and sentence length and the human interest content of news stories. Flesch found that AP copy tended to be too long, with larger words often preferred over shorter ones.⁽¹⁹⁾

By the time Flesch had completed the first year of his two-year study of the AP, executive director Kent Cooper had hailed the effort as one of "the most intensive and fruitful endeavors ever undertaken by this association." The APME study committee spearheading the drive to improve writing concluded that the successful effort would serve both newspapers and democracy. "The whole aim of this effort is making newspapers more useful to their readers and creating a better informed public," declared William P. Steven of the Minneapolis Tribune.⁽²⁰⁾ Almost every editor answering a 1948 APME poll said the readability project had made AP copy easier to read. Lee Hills of the Miami Herald believed the AP study was quickly showing results. "It's a great joy to read newspapers these days," he said in 1948.⁽²¹⁾

That's not to say that Gunning's and Flesch's ideas met no opposition, at least at first. Gould said that AP newsrooms were full of writers who had at first opposed Flesch's innovations because they seemed too restrictive, overplayed human interest, and "dumbed-down" newswriting. But he said the readability principles had quickly gained acceptance. "It is no exaggeration to say," Gould concluded, "that the impact of Doctor Flesch's ideas on simpler, clearer ways of writing represents one of the most significant developments of our journalistic times."⁽²²⁾ Longtime journalism educator Roland E. Wolseley, who was teaching journalism at Northwestern University when Flesch published his first book, believed that Flesch's work had far-reaching consequences. "He and later scholars were good medicine for the media's language ills," Wolseley recalled.⁽²³⁾

Another effort to improve newspaper content was interpretive reporting. At professional conferences and in trade journals, editors debated the merits of interpretive reporting for bringing the subtleties of a complex world into focus. By no means an innovation of the postwar years, it nonetheless took on increased importance as editors prepared to cover postwar events. For many editors, interpretation seemed to go hand-in-hand with clearer, simpler writing as a means to make a complex world understandable.

"Interpretive reporting, couched in clear, concise writing, has become more and more important in these days of the war's aftermath and its problems," said Stanley P. Barnett of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, chairman of the APME's study committee in 1948.⁽²⁴⁾ The AP's committee, the same one that had studied readability, said that interpretive material, especially more backgrounding of news articles, allowed a greater understanding of issues than simply a factual rendering of events. "What the reader wants in a news story," the committee report said, "is the essential facts plus sufficient explanatory matter to enable him to place the particular event in its true perspective and to evaluate its significance and importance."⁽²⁵⁾

Not that editors agreed exactly what interpretative reporting was. Some believed it was an objective accounting of events with additional background. Others took interpretation as including "the writer's definition of what a given development or statement may mean," a subjective judgment of the writer, according to George E. Stansfield of the Hartford Courant. The debate was evident in a University of Oregon poll of fifty editors across the country in 1947. While most of the editors favored the use of some interpretive news articles, the survey found, most also believed that such articles should be signed and that use of objective news articles should be preferred.⁽²⁶⁾

A vocal exponent of interpretive reporting was James Reston, diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, who admitted to being "nuts about the subject of explanatory reporting." Reston spoke often at editors' conferences and elsewhere on the necessity for interpretation, which he saw as necessary both for public understanding and for the survival of newspapers. Interpretation allowed newspapers to serve a need unfilled by any competitor, Reston said, either print or broadcast. "The future of newspapers depends on developing an adequate means of explaining what is going on in the world," Reston told an APME meeting in 1948.⁽²⁷⁾

Driving much of the push for writing improvement, of course, was the continued competition from magazines and radio and the impending threat of television. Television posed little of a threat for the immediate future, of course, but it held great potential to compete for readers' time as an entertainment medium over the long term. Accordingly, editors such as Vincent S. Jones of Utica, N.Y., said newspapers should consider overhauling "the whole system of writing and presenting the news." Newspapers, Jones argued, remained mediocre despite recent improvements and should expand reader studies even as readership reached an all-time high.⁽²⁸⁾

"Right now, anything that will help an editor come to grips with that vast unknown quantity, Mr. Average Reader, is invaluable," Jones told a convention of journalism educators. "We have more of him than ever before in history. Yet we are going into the biggest, toughest, roughest, freest-spending fight for a share of his time that was ever dreamed up. So the question is, `Where do we go from here?'"⁽²⁹⁾

A significant advance in helping newspapers cope with the future competition came with the founding of the American Press Institute (API). Organized in 1946 by Sevellon Brown of the Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin, with the cooperation and financial contributions of 37 publishers, API was founded as a two-year experiment as a way to improve newspapers.⁽³⁰⁾ The institute marked the first time that editorial employees had undertaken an organized effort to share ideas for improvement of newspapers. Previously, any such efforts had been informal, usually limited to occasional shop-talk sessions at ASNE conventions or to after-hours bull sessions.⁽³¹⁾

Brown, the guiding force behind API, envisioned it as a center at which newspapermen could discuss newspaper problems in seminars one to three weeks long. Seminars were to cater to all segments of newspaper content and were held at Columbia University in New York City. Better content, Brown believed, was crucial to newspapers' ability to fulfill their responsibilities to society. "Unless we improve our skills and techniques, we face a crisis of meaninglessness," Brown said at API's inaugural seminar. "Innumerable brief reports, presented without perspective or background, can only drive the reader into a mental fog--we must lift our sights."⁽³²⁾

Brown said API's founding was proof that journalists were becoming increasingly aware of their new obligations to society and to democracy. "Through clinical, self-driven study, it is our high purpose to make ourselves and the newspapers we represent of greater service and effectiveness in performing the vital function of a free press in a democracy," Brown said. "We are here because we recognize the tremendous social responsibilities which are ours, responsibilities of a scope and complexity scarcely dreamed of by newspaper men a short generation ago."⁽³³⁾ Dean Carl W. Ackerman of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia called the institute "one of the most challenging and unique educational projects in the entire history of Columbia University."⁽³⁴⁾

The first API session began September 30, 1946, and lasted three weeks. Twenty-five managing editors, assistant managing editors, and news editors, each from a different newspaper, attended. A number of mid-sized papers, such as the Sacramento Bee, the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press, and the Salt Lake Telegram, sent representatives. Most, however, were from larger papers such as the Washington Post, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. "The critique session at the close of the first seminar resembled an old-fashioned religious experience meeting," wrote W.S. Kirkpatrick, managing editor of the Atlanta Journal, in a review for Journalism Quarterly. "Enthusiasm ran high."⁽³⁵⁾

Newspapermen were quick to credit API with enriching journalism. In its first two years, the institute held twelve seminars for 275 participants from 113 newspapers. Grove Patterson of the Toledo Blade said that two years of successful seminars had had "a profound effect on the thinking and on the product of the editors, managing editors, city editors" and others who had attended. "Journalism needs new techniques, new spiritual conviction and new inspiration," Patterson continued. "The American Press Institute is providing all this." Six seminars a year were held for each of the following five years, and Patterson led the effort to endow the institute to provide it with permanent funding.⁽³⁶⁾

Twenty-one years after its founding, former New York Times executive editor Turner Catledge praised API's contributions to newspapers. "American journalism owes API a debt which would defy the capacity of any computer," Catledge said. "I shudder to think of what a hell of a mess we'd be in today, with all the problems piling upon the media, if we hadn't had the guidance, especially the infusion of the spirit and practice of self-examination, contributed by the API."⁽³⁷⁾

Another self-improvement effort in newspapers was the development of a new accrediting process for journalism programs in the nation's colleges and universities. For many journalists, the accrediting program was a crucial first step toward the professionalization of journalism. Journalists could be professionals only if they had professional training, and accreditation was a way to ensure the quality of professional preparation. As Quill editor Carl R. Kesler put it in a 1946 editorial, "For the first time since colleges started teaching journalism as a profession, a measuring stick is being designed for such training."⁽³⁸⁾

Accreditation had been discussed at professional meetings as far back as the late 1920s, but little had been done until the formation of the American Council of Education for Journalism (ACEJ) in 1938. Kenneth E. Olson, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, had lobbied newspaper organizations to take part in journalism education, and ACEJ was the result. The Council included deans of five journalism schools and representatives of each of the five major newspaper organizations--ASNE, the ANPA, the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association (SNPA), the National Editorial Association, and the Inland Daily Press Association.⁽³⁹⁾

ACEJ research found that more than 520 colleges and universities, more than half of four-year institutions, offered some kind of journalism instruction, often just a course or two. That was too many programs with no assurance of any quality, many editors complained. Stephen C. Noland of the Indianapolis News, expressing a common sentiment, said the high numbers persuaded him that "something should be done about cleaning out some of the incompetent schools of journalism."⁽⁴⁰⁾ Dwight Marvin, who headed ACEJ in the late 1940s, said doing so would benefit editors directly. "[I]f we could make the schools of journalism such that you men, you editors, knew that you could get from the schools of journalism men who knew something about journalism, then you would have a source that was worth while. ... But there ought to be some sort of school that you can trust. That is the idea."⁽⁴¹⁾

Accreditation efforts lagged during the war but picked up near its end. Marvin said the effort was pushed along by the 1944 decision in a newspaper labor dispute in Jackson, Tenn., where a judge had ruled newspaper workers were not professionals. "When we realized that the Jackson judge thought we were tradesmen, immediately something had to be done," Marvin said.⁽⁴²⁾ In 1945, the American Association of Schools and Departments of Journalism (AASDJ) approved the formation of an accreditation committee under ACEJ, which began work on standards.

A questionnaire was circulated to 120 colleges and universities with departments of journalism. Fewer than forty applied to be accredited, and a two-year process of visiting each school began in 1946. Two years later, ACEJ released its list of the first thirty-four schools to be accredited in at least one sequence, or subject area. Of the thirty-four, thirty-one were accredited in news-editorial, thirteen in radio journalism, and nineteen in advertising. Other programs were accredited in specializations such as agriculture journalism, photography, and magazines. Once accredited, schools were to be re-examined within five years.⁽⁴³⁾

Norval Neil Luxon of Ohio State University, president of the AASDJ, believed the accreditation program would have numerous benefits. He said in 1948 that the program would help professionals, students and teachers recognize worthy schools, would strengthen the relationships between educators and professionals, and would stimulate improvements in journalism. The accreditation process set standards for journalism schools in library holdings, teacher preparation, curriculum, and equipment.⁽⁴⁴⁾

But while the progress in accreditation demonstrated a degree of consensus for improving journalism education, some editors remained unconvinced that any specialized professional training was necessary. These education opponents still believed that the best place to start in journalism, as Northwestern University professor Curtis D. MacDougall once summarized this line of thought, was not in a classroom but in a newsroom, as a copy boy.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Some editors, such as V.M. Newton, Jr., of the Tampa Morning Tribune, believed that liberal arts training alone--without the technical training of journalism school--was preparation enough. "In the case of a journalism graduate it usually takes a good city editor from one to two years to knock out of him all the ridiculous theories taught in journalism schools," Newton remarked in 1948.⁽⁴⁶⁾

A Bradley University survey conducted the same year found editors about evenly split on the value of specialized journalism training. Of sixty-eight editors who replied to a questionnaire about their employees' schooling, thirty-two said they preferred to hire journalism graduates over liberal arts graduates. Still, college graduates were making inroads in the nation's newsrooms. The survey found that at some newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, college graduates outnumbered non-graduates by three to one.⁽⁴⁷⁾

Even as journalists tried to improve themselves and their newspapers through readability campaigns, API seminars, and better writing, criticism of the press seemed to rise on all fronts. The criticism reinforced the need for improvement in newspapers at the very time newspapers were already showing greater awareness of their shortcomings and undertaking efforts to overcome them. The public, it seemed, agreed with editors, reporters, and publishers that newspapers needed to improve.⁽⁴⁸⁾ The irony was that while journalists were becoming quicker to criticize themselves and each other, they nonetheless remained sensitive to, and defensive about, outside criticism. "It is a fact that newspapers in general have become the national whipping boy," an Editor & Publisher editorial lamented in 1946. "They are the target for every minority group that imagines itself wronged in the public print."⁽⁴⁹⁾ This was a commonly expressed sentiment among journalists after the war, not only in the characteristically thin-skinned Editor & Publisher but also in other trade journals, in newspapers, and in magazines. "Journalism has always had its critics, but they seem more numerous now than ever," said John M. McClelland, Jr., editor of a newspaper in Washington state, in a typical remark.⁽⁵⁰⁾ "Criticism of newspapers," reflected another editor, John R. Herbert of Quincy, Mass., in a 1948 speech, "has become a favorite indoor sport. Actually this criticism has reached the point where we in the newspaper profession cannot look blindly away or laugh off our critics."⁽⁵¹⁾ By 1949, Edwin Emery, the historian of the ANPA, would write that postwar criticism was "[t]he biggest problem which confronted the daily newspapers of America." Regardless of how many or how few newspapers actually deserved the criticism, Emery said, "the effect of the controversy was felt by all newspapers and newspapermen."⁽⁵²⁾

The criticism, as perceptively summarized by Emery, was dominated by accusations that newspapers did not fully serve the public interest, that they were dominated by pro-business, pro-Republican interests, and that the continuing trend toward newspaper monopoly threatened the marketplace of ideas essential to the functioning of a democracy.⁽⁵³⁾ These concerns about press monopoly dominated the books and articles critical of the press that multiplied in the postwar period. This criticism was noteworthy not for its novelty--such concerns had been fodder of the critics for years--but for its increasing volume and frequency. Editors and publishers believed that newspapers were too frequently criticized in the postwar years. "Anti-newspaper literature holds the stage virtually without competition," commented ASNE president Wilbur Forrest in 1946.⁽⁵⁴⁾

The Commission on the Freedom of the Press, which issued its report in 1947, was probably the era's best-known press critic. Founded by Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Fortune, and headed by University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins, the Commission of Hutchins and twelve other intellectuals took testimony and interviews from more than 275 journalists and others in the course of a four-year study. In its final report, published as a book and also in a special edition of Fortune in April 1947, the Commission called on the press to better meet its responsibilities to society and to democracy.⁽⁵⁵⁾ "Today our society needs, first, a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day's events in a context which gives them meaning," the commissioners wrote, in what was the report's most-quoted phrase.⁽⁵⁶⁾ But many newspapers were falling far short of that goal because of shallowness, sensationalism, and dishonesty, the report said. Moreover, the entire newspaper industry was subject to a growing monopoly that threatened newspapers' ability to serve the public. The Commission suggested that a press council should be formed to comment on newspaper performance and warned that failure to address the press' problems might invite government regulation.⁽⁵⁷⁾

Press response was sharply critical. Journalists accused the Commission of unfairly failing to include a journalist on the panel, of inviting government regulation, of unfairly lumping in radio and movies with the press, and of failing to conduct elaborate research. Louis M. Lyons, summarizing press reaction in an article for Atlantic Monthly, said that most newspapers either ignored the Commission's report, underplayed it, or misrepresented its findings.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Most newspapers, he said, ran brief wire stories on the report, played inside the newspaper.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Time magazine hired a clipping service to survey editorial reaction to the report and found that only ninety-nine of 830 newspapers commented editorially on the Commission report. A third of those newspapers that published editorials used the same editorial written by a National Editorial Association columnist.⁽⁶⁰⁾

"I believe the report to be wrongly conceived and badly executed," said Frank E. Gannett, president of the Gannett Newspapers, in a remark typical of many publishers' reactions. "I think it is erroneous, inconsistent, ineffective, and dangerous."⁽⁶¹⁾ The Chicago Tribune's critical news account of the report was headlined, "`A Free Press' (Hitler Style) Sought for U.S.; Totalitarians Tell How It Can Be Done."⁽⁶²⁾ An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune faulted the professorial language and impractical approach of the report but said it correctly pointed to a need for increased press responsibility. Less charitably, Herald Tribune book columnist Lewis Gannett said of the report, "[A] good $150-a-week newspaper man would have been ashamed to do as little work for a three-week assignment."⁽⁶³⁾

The Hutchins Commission's criticisms of newspaper ownership and press practices, coupled with its call for journalists to exercise greater responsibility, epitomized much of the press criticism of its day. The report reinforced journalists' sense that public criticism of newspapers was increasing, not just from the Commission but from other sources. Editor & Publisher International Yearbook said that 1947, the year of the Hutchins report, subjected newspapers "to the most searching analysis and criticism in all their history."⁽⁶⁴⁾ Editors and publishers considered the Hutchins Commission report as one more critical voice in a stream of postwar press critics. At editors' and publishers' meetings and in the pages of trade journals throughout the late 1940s, the growing press criticism was a continual topic, and the Commission was only one critic, though a very important one.

Many critics, like the Commission, focused on concerns about press monopoly. The most prominent critic of this anti-monopoly school was Morris L. Ernst. A labor lawyer specializing in civil liberties cases whose clients included the American Newspaper Guild, Ernst was a persistent and fiery critic of growing concentration of ownership in the mass media. In articles and books, he decried the declining numbers of two-newspaper towns, newspaper control of radio stations, and concentration of ownership in the film and book publishing industries. Ernst argued that freedom of the press meant freedom for citizens to have access to a variety of sources of information, not simply the freedom of newspapers to print without government control. "Only if they may hear a diversity of views," Ernst said of newspaper readers and radio listeners, "have they that opportunity of choice which is the essence of freedom."⁽⁶⁵⁾ Ernst's arguments received wide currency in his book The First Freedom, published in 1946, which was widely reviewed in the popular and trade press.⁽⁶⁶⁾

"Our press is fast evaporating," complained Ernst in The First Freedom, in which he outlined the newspaper statistics to document his charge:

Ten states have not a single city with competing daily papers. Twenty-two states are without Sunday newspaper competition. Fourteen companies owning eighteen papers control about one quarter of our total daily circulation. Three hundred and seventy chain newspapers own about one fifth of all our circulation. More than a quarter of our daily circulation is absentee owned. We have a thousand less owners than a few decades ago.⁽⁶⁷⁾

Ernst proposed changes in tax laws to discourage concentration, federal limits on chain ownership, government aid to small newspapers, and other measures. He believed that the declining number of newspapers was dangerous in and of itself but was careful to say he was not "charging the present dispensers of information with being low and destructive fellows."⁽⁶⁸⁾

Defenders of newspapers agreed with Ernst's statistics but disputed their interpretation. Raymond B. Nixon of Emory University, whose studies of newspaper ownership patterns published in Journalism Quarterly provided part of the supporting evidence used by Ernst and other critics, defended the industry in 1948 using arguments commonly touted among newspapermen: The economics of all large industries, including newspapers, made consolidations inevitable. Monopoly newspapers were most often found in towns that could support only one daily newspaper anyway, and sometimes they were of higher quality than newspapers subject to competitive pressures. "Monopoly" newspapers were in truth challenged in both advertising and newsgathering by magazines and by radio and television stations. And chain ownership, while regrettable, was declining slightly. Nixon argued that greater social responsibility among newspaper publishers, not competition, would improve newspapers.⁽⁶⁹⁾

Congressional critics threatened to investigate monopolistic practices in the newspaper industry, but the hearings never materialized. In early 1947, at the close of his chairmanship of the United States Senate Small Business Committee, Senator James E. Murray of Montana released a 71-page report, "The Small Newspaper: Democracy's Grass Roots," that criticized monopolistic tendencies in the newspaper and radio industries and called for government oversight. Murray, a Democrat, had planned hearings in 1947 on newspaper ownership trends and their effects on smaller publishers, but Republicans who took control of the Senate after the 1946 elections refocused the hearings upon newsprint shortages instead. Editor & Publisher dismissed Murray's report as a fruitless search for "bogeymen under the journalistic bed" that ignored the neutral economic forces behind newspaper consolidations.⁽⁷⁰⁾

Still, the arguments took hold, and the degree of public distrust of the press was demonstrated in several forums. About 2,500 Akron, Ohio, residents attended a panel discussion on press monopoly and press freedom on October 17, 1946. The discussion, featuring Ernst, Erwin D. Canham, and New Republic editor Michael Straight, was broadcast nationally on the radio program "Town Meeting of the Air." The discussion centered on monopoly ownership of newspapers and advertiser influence of news coverage. When the audience was asked how many believed the American press was truly free, only a scattering of hands went up. The Akron Beacon-Journal was troubled at such a lack of faith in the press. "In the belief that an opinion held by more than 2,000 or our readers deserves consideration and respect, we're giving ourselves a going-over to see if we are exercising all the freedom which the Constitution gives us," Beacon-Journal editors said.⁽⁷¹⁾ In 1948, The New York State Society of Newspaper Editors invited a clubwoman, a priest, and a businessman to its annual fall meeting to offer criticism. The clubwoman complained of one-sided columnists, sensationalism, and misrepresentation. The businessman faulted newspapers for publishing rumors, criticizing public officials, and overplaying murders and other sensational news. The assembled editors were stung by the criticism and did not take issue with it. "I have thrown away the speech I had prepared," said Paul Miller of the Gannett Newspapers. "There are no grounds for debate."⁽⁷²⁾

Other media stepped up their criticism of newspapers. Time and Newsweek had each published weekly columns on the press, including regular exposes of press practices. To these columns were added, beginning in 1945, A.J. Liebling's "Wayward Press" columns of press criticism in the New Yorker. "The Wayward Press" had been inaugurated by Robert Benchley in 1927 and published sporadically afterward. Liebling, a New Yorker veteran who had reported for New York City and Rhode Island newspapers, delighted in assailing journalists for their foibles. He focused most of his columns on the New York-area press and reserved his harshest words for publishers. "I'm not a reformer at all, but some things are just silly, and when a thing is silly, I report it," Liebling once said of his work. "The thing I point to as silly is the attitude of the publishers, who talk about their great public services while they treat a paper as if it were a drugstore."⁽⁷³⁾ Liebling's press criticism, widely read and often quoted in Editor & Publisher and other trade journals of American journalism, made him the best-known press critic of his generation.

CBS launched its own program of press criticism, "CBS Views the Press," in June 1947. The 15-minute program was broadcast every Saturday on WCBS, the CBS affiliate in New York, and was put together by veteran CBS correspondent Don Hollenbeck, himself a former newspaperman. "Hollenbeck is going to ride herd on the papers, tripping them up on their own mis-statements, misinterpretations, deficiencies and bulls of one kind or another," declared John P. Lewis, editor of New York's PM. Hollenbeck said some newspapers had been hostile to his program but that overall it had been received with "hopeful welcome tinged with cynicism." Editor & Publisher and other trade journals frequently reprinted Hollenbeck's critiques, and the program won a Peabody Award in 1948. It continued through the early 1950s.⁽⁷⁴⁾

Another persistent, if less influential, critic of the postwar years was George Seldes, whose pro-labor publication In Fact was founded in 1940 and built up a weekly circulation of 200,000 before its demise in 1950. The eight-page newspaper, subtitled "An Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press," was helped along in subscription sales by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Reporters from around the country, including Hollenbeck, supplied Seldes with information about overlooked news stories, pro-business bias, and other press misdeeds. Seldes' strong pro-labor views and vicious attacks on newspapers large and small kept him from enjoying the quasi-acceptance enjoyed by more mainstream critics such as Liebling, who was accorded a mostly positive press among rank-and-file newspaper reporters and even spoke to an ASNE meeting once. Seldes recalled that "in all the ten years In Fact was red-baited, libeled, branded `red' and generally ostracized."⁽⁷⁵⁾

A more significant contribution to American journalism criticism came with the founding of Nieman Reports, a quarterly journal published by the Nieman fellows of Harvard University beginning in March 1947, a month before the Hutchins report was issued. The Nieman program, begun in the 1930s, brought a dozen journalists each year to Harvard University for two semesters of study, and the founding of Nieman Reports provided a regular forum for press criticism from a variety of sources, though mostly from present and former Nieman fellows. Readers hailed Nieman Reports for filling a void in journalism, by providing at last a journal about newspapers and newspaper problems written by working journalists.⁽⁷⁶⁾

Nieman fellows had also produced several notable works of press criticism in the late 1940s. The Nieman class of 1945-46 published a book, Your Newspaper: Blueprint for a Better Press, in late 1947 that criticized newspapers for failing to serve readers by serving instead the class interests of their owners. The New Republic praised the book as "a work that deserves to stand with the valuable current investigations of the same subject by A.J. Liebling and Don Hollenbeck."⁽⁷⁷⁾ The 1949-50 class of Nieman fellows published a special issue of Nieman Reports entitled "Reading, Writing and Newspapers" criticizing the state of newswriting generally and applauding and encouraging postwar efforts to improve readability, interpretation, and storytelling. Demand for reprints from newspapers and journalism schools required the printing of 7,000 additional copies, and newspaper executives across the country praised the issue.⁽⁷⁸⁾

Nieman Reports, written as it was by experienced journalists still working in the profession, represented the extent to which criticism of newspapers came from inside, not just outside, the profession. Reporters and editors themselves, while often resentful of outside critics, nonetheless also viewed newspapers critically. This was evident at editors' meetings, where critics were found among both the editors and their guests.

The numerous critics included Ralph L. Crosman, director of the College of Journalism at the University of Colorado, who aired his views both at various editors' meetings and in the journalism department's publication, Colorado Editor. The vehemence of Crosman's criticism was surprising, given the traditional close ties between journalism schools and the profession. Crosman, foreshadowing criticism that would come from the Hutchins Commission the following year, issued a 10-count "indictment" of the press at the 1946 meeting of the Inland Daily Press Association in Chicago. He accused newspapers of failing to provide readers with adequate coverage of social, economic, and political conditions; of running biased and distorted news; of reflecting upper-class, Republican concerns; of guarding various sacred cows; and of overemphasizing trivial, inconsequential news. Crosman said most rich publishers wanted to serve the public but had to be taught to do so. "I do know," he said, "that this businessman-publisher has got to be waked up, jolted alive, [and] retaught his duty to the people."⁽⁷⁹⁾

Editors responded harshly yet took action. Frank Tripp of Gannett Newspapers compared Crosman to a quack selling a worthless universal remedy. "Crosman diagnoses all the ills of a far-flung, individualistic press [and] prescribes a cure-all," Tripp said, "when all the average patient needs is an enema."⁽⁸⁰⁾ What the patient needed, Inland editors decided after conducting a national survey of readers, was better public relations to meet the growing tide of criticism. The Inland survey had found that most readers believed newspapers to be unfair and subject to pressure from advertisers and big business. A committee of Inland editors proposed and carried out two national advertising campaigns to educate the public about the role of the press in everyday life. The ads, using the slogan "Your right to know is the key to all your liberties," were published in newspapers across the country and were lauded in the trade press as an antidote to growing press criticism.⁽⁸¹⁾

Newspaper criticism abounded elsewhere. At the 1948 ASNE convention, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, editor of the Tulsa Tribune, delivered his "Afghanistanism" speech that became famous in newspaper circles. He decried the common practice among newspaper editorialists to comment extensively on non-local issues in faraway places, Afghanistan, say, while ignoring crucial issues at home.⁽⁸²⁾ The same year, at a Southern editors' meeting, patrician Arkansas Gazette owner J.N. Heiskell persuaded the SNPA to pass a resolution lamenting the decline of Southern editorial pages. Southern newspapers, Heiskell complained, were publishing far too much canned material and devoting inadequate time and resources to the editorial page.⁽⁸³⁾

Such jousting between editors over journalistic issues was not uncommon in the late 1940s, and the disagreements were often vehement. Grove Patterson of the Toledo Blade blasted biased news coverage in a widely reported speech in 1947 at the American Press Institute. "Publishers who instruct or allow reporters to slant the news, in conformity with personal views and personal policy, are journalistic gangsters," Patterson said, without naming any names.⁽⁸⁴⁾ New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger and John S. Knight, editor of newspapers in Akron, Detroit, and Miami, publicly debated the strengths and weaknesses of chain newspapers at a series of individual appearances and in trade journal articles. Sulzberger said national chains often failed to become involved in local issues; Knight responded that chain newspapers were often superior to locally owned journals.⁽⁸⁵⁾ A small-town publisher complained in the ASNE Bulletin that most small-city dailies were sloppily written and edited and lacked the initiative to adequately cover their communities.⁽⁸⁶⁾

Events from 1945 to 1948 seemed to underscore the press criticism. Press coverage of the 1945 San Francisco conference to plan the United Nations and the 1946 Bikini Island atomic bomb tests prompted criticism of shallow newspaper coverage marked by sensationalism and speculative, contradictory news stories. "Much of the responsible press and outside observers feel that the media of public information must purge themselves of irresponsible sensationalism and of men who don't know how to behave a block from their own homes," complained New York Times correspondent Hanson W. Baldwin after the Bikini tests.⁽⁸⁷⁾ In reporting atomic bomb developments, most American newspapers are "unsurpassed for mediocrity," lamented Richard B. Gehman in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1948. "Today, with most American newspapers unsurpassed for mediocrity, one wonders if they could help making a mess of their coverage of Christ's arrival."⁽⁸⁸⁾ Later that year, the vast majority of press accounts predicted a comfortable win by New York Governor Thomas Dewey over President Truman in the presidential election, serving to underscore the perception that newspapers were out of touch with the public they served.

Such was the tenor of criticism within newspapers in the late 1940s. Journalists in the new Atomic Age could not help being aware of the press' shortcomings. Even as newspapers were undertaking wide-ranging efforts to improve their editorial product, criticism continued, seemingly from all directions. The critics underscored the need for improvements, propelling efforts already underway. The self-examination would continue throughout the 1950s, as a heightening of Cold War tensions and the rapid growth of television brought new challenges for newspapers and their content.

The criticism and the widespread efforts to improve the journalism profession, many editors believed, were slowly pushing print journalism to become more responsible. The critics were indeed harsh, but together with other forces they were forcing newspapers to mature. "[A] world war--and the thought-provoking, soul-stretching years of this peace which is no peace--have given newspapers greater depth and a broader perspective," Oveta Culp Hobby, an executive of the Houston Post and SNPA president, said in 1950. "Journalism is maturing. The emphasis has shifted from scoop to scope."⁽⁸⁹⁾

1. Erwin D. Canham, quoted in "Canham Visions Trend to Daily News Magazines," Editor & Publisher, 19 January 1946, 63.

2. Erwin D. Canham speech to American Association of Schools and Departments of Journalism convention, quoted in Dwight Bentel, "Fact-Finding Boards On Press Advocated," Editor & Publisher, 10 January 1948, 58.

3. N.R. Howard, "Changes in Standards," Editor & Publisher, 24 May 1947, 38. Of the eclipse of sensationalism by news of reconversion of the economy from war to peace, Howard observed, "A pretty divorce plaintiff gets into print more rapidly now, it appears, if she is suing a war veteran or a victim of the housing congestion."

4. Malcolm W. Bingay, "Bingay Says War's End Alters News Concepts," Editor & Publisher, 27 October 1945, 28.

5. Lester Markel, "The Newspapers," in While You Were Gone: A Report on Wartime Life in the United States ed. Jack Goodman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 373.

6. "The Picture Must Be Painted True," Quill, November-December 1945, 3.

7. Grove Patterson, I Like People: The Autobiography of Grove Patterson (New York: Random House, 1954), 258.

8. John H. Biddle speech to Pennsylvania Press Conference, quoted in Charles W. Duke, "More Readable Papers Called Voters' Need," Editor & Publisher, 22 May 1948, 20.

9. "On Writing It Simpler," Quill, May-June 1946, 3.

10. Joe Levin quoted in Louis M. Lyons, Newspaper Story: One Hundred Years of the Boston Globe (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1971), 309.

11. See the comments of Roy A. Roberts, managing editor of the Kansas City Star, in "Random Thoughts," Editor & Publisher, 22 June 1946, 34.

12. ASNE Proceedings, 1946, 106.

13. ASNE Proceedings, 1946, 160.

14. ASNE Proceedings, 1946, 153; Roscoe Ellard, "Now U.P. Grades Its News Stories," Editor & Publisher, 13 October 1945, 64; "The Unreadable Press," Time, 3 March 1947, 71.

15. Robert Gunning quoted in "The Unreadable Press," Time, 3 March 1947, 71.

16. Robert Gunning, The Technique of Clear Writing (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), 183. For the formula for Gunning's Fog Index, see pp. 36-37.

17. Ibid., 23, 183.

18. "AP Report Simplified by New Flesch Formula," Editor & Publisher, 21 February 1948, 8.

19. Ibid. For Flesch's formula, see Rudolph Flesch, The Art of Readable Writing (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 213-216.

20. Kent Cooper and William P. Steven quoted in "AP Editors Open Chicago Meeting," New York Times, 10 November 1948, 26.

21. Lee Hills quoted in "AP Report Simplified By New Flesch Formula," Editor & Publisher, 21 February 1948, 8; "Flesch Study Improves AP Report, Editors Say," ibid., 15 May 1948, 28.

22. Alan J. Gould, "Foreword," in Flesch, Art of Readable Writing, ix.

23. Roland E. Wolseley, Still in Print: Journey of a Writer, Teacher, Journalist (Elgin, Ill.: David C. Cook Foundation, 1985), 64.

24. Stanley B. Barnett quoted in "AP Editors Open Chicago Meeting," New York Times, 10 November 1948, 26.

25. Ibid.

26. George E. Stansfield quoted in George Turnbull, "Interpretive Reporting Debated Among 50 Editors," Editor & Publisher, 12 April 1947, 11.

27. James Reston quoted in "Papers Must Excel in Explanatory Reporting," Editor & Publisher, 20 November 1948, 9.

28. Vincent S. Jones, speech to American Association of Schools and Departments of Journalism, "Bold Experimentation Needed to Improve Newspaper Content," Journalism Quarterly 25 (1948): 17. In the 1940s and 1950s, Journalism Quarterly commonly reprinted transcripts of public speeches and talks concerning newspapers and other mass media.

29. Ibid., 22.

30. "U.S. Press Advised to Lift its `Sights,'" New York Times, 1 October 1946, 21.

31. Don E. Carter and Malcolm F. Mallette, Seminar: The Story of the American Press Institute (Reston, Va.: American Press Institute, 1992), 8. By contrast, workers in circulation, advertising and printing each had had their own organizations for years and had used them as forums to swap ideas.

32. Sevellon Brown quoted in John M. McClelland, Jr., "Talent, Energy and Truth a Professional Challenge," Quill, November-December 1946, 14.

33. Sevellon Brown quoted in "Keynote: Don't Drive Readers into Mental Fog," Editor & Publisher, 5 October 1946, 9.

34. Carl W. Ackerman quoted in "U.S. Press Advised to Lift Its `Sights,'" New York Times, 1 October 1946, 21.

35. "Editors Open American Press Institute," Editor & Publisher, 5 October 1946, 9, 58; Carter and Mallette, Seminar, 8-11; W.S. Kirkpatrick, "First Seminar of American Press Institute At Columbia Reviewed By a Participant," Journalism Quarterly 23 (1946): 425-426.

36. Grove Patterson, "Social Responsibilities of the American Newspaper," Vital Speeches, 1 May 1948, 437-438; "American Press Institute Seeks $850,000 Endowment," Editor & Publisher, 28 June 1947, 10.

37. Turner Catledge quoted in J. Montgomery Curtis, API: A Personal Remembrance (Reston, Va.: American Press Institute, 1980), 54. Curtis was a longtime executive director of API who retired in 1967.

38. Carl R. Kesler, "Education for Journalism," Quill, July-August 1946, 3.

39. ASNE Proceedings, 1948, 129. The history of the accreditation movement is discussed in detail in the ASNE Proceedings for both 1948, pp. 128-150, and for 1946, pp. 28-29. Some of the background for the movement is taken from a three-part series written by C.E. Brown in Editor & Publisher that summarized the developments up to 1947, by which time the process for accrediting journalism programs was in place. See "Long Courtship Links Educators, Newsmen," Editor & Publisher, 17 May 1947, 38; "Employer Appraisal Part of School Rating," 24 May 1947, 44; and "No Idea of Licensing in School Credit Plan," 31 May 1947, 42. A valuable general history of journalism education is Edwin Emery and Joseph P. McKerns, "AEJMC: 75 Years in the Making," Journalism Monographs 104 (Columbia, S.C.: Association for Education in Journalism, 1987). See also Brad Asher, "The Professional Vision: Conflicts over Journalism Education, 1900-1955," American Journalism 11 (Fall 1994): 304-320.

40. ASNE Proceedings, 1948, 133.

41. ASNE Proceedings, 1946, 28-29.

42. ASNE Proceedings, 1948, 129.

43. "34 Colleges Accredited By ACEJ," Quill, August 1948, 6, 10.

44. ASNE Proceedings, 1948, 148-149.

45. Curtis D. MacDougall, "What Newspaper Publishers Should Know About Professors of Journalism," Journalism Quarterly 24 (March 1947): 1.

46. V.M. Newton, Jr., quoted in Dwight Bentel, "`We'll Take Grads,' Reply Majority of Eds," Editor & Publisher, 28 February 1948, 46.

47. Ibid.

48. Lee Brown writes that American press criticism was muted during World War II but escalated immediately after it. See The Reluctant Reformation: On Criticizing the Press in America (New York: David McKay Co., 1947). Brown's brief book is one of the few secondary works on the history of American press criticism. See also Marion Tuttle Marzolf, Civilizing Voices: American Press Criticism, 1880-1950 (New York: Longman, 1991), especially Chapter 12, pp. 163-176, which deals with the early postwar years.

49. "Heeding Criticism," Editor & Publisher, 19 January 1946, 40.

50. McClelland, "Talent, Energy, and Truth," 14.

51. John R. Herbert speech at Boston University, quoted in John Mason Potter, "Current Press Trends Studied at Institute," Editor & Publisher, 27 March 1948, 22.

52. Edwin Emery, History of the American Newspaper Publishers Association (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950), 244.

53. Ibid.

54. Wilbur Forrest, "Anti-Press Literature," Editor & Publisher, 8 June 1946, 34.

55. Commission on Freedom of the Press, A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communication, Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), v, 1-2. See also the summary of the Commission report as reprinted in a supplement to Fortune, April 1947. A perceptive study of the so-called Hutchins Commission and its aftermath is Margaret A. Blanchard, "The Hutchins Commission, The Press and the Responsibility Concept," Journalism Monographs 49 (May 1977). See also Stephen Bates, Realigning Journalism with Democracy: The Hutchins Commission, Its Times, and Ours (Washington, D.C.: The Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies of Northwestern University, 1995).

56. A Free and Responsible Press, 20.

57. Ibid., 90.

58. Louis M. Lyons, "The Press and Its Critics," Atlantic Monthly, July 1947, 115-116.

59. Ibid. A perusal of newspapers from the day after the report was released demonstrates the brevity and similarity of most newspapers' accounts of the report's release on March 26, 1947. Despite its significance to journalists and historians, the Hutchins Commission report constituted only routine news in its day. See, for example, "Press Freedom in Peril, Educator Group Declares," Atlanta Constitution, 27 March 1947, 3, and "U.S. Free Press Held Periled," New Orleans Times-Picayune, 27 March 1947, 12.

60. Robert U. Brown, "Shop Talk at Thirty," Editor & Publisher, 19 July 1947, 60.

61. Frank E. Gannett quoted in "Free-for-all: Freedom of the Press," Fortune, June 1947, 24. This issue of Fortune contains a wide-ranging synopsis of newspapers' reaction to the Hutchins report. See Also "Press Reaction to Free Press Report," Nieman Reports, April 1947, 14-20.

62. Frank Hughes, "`A Free Press' (Hitler Style) Sought for U.S.," Chicago Tribune, 27 March 1947, 38B. Hughes later wrote a book-length critical examination of the Hutchins report, Prejudice and the Press (New York: Devin-Adair Co., 1950).

63. "A Free and Responsible Press," Herald Tribune, 28 March 1947, 24; Lewis Gannett, "Books and Things," 27 March 1947, ibid., 27. Gannett's comment was a commonly expressed sentiment among reporters, as reported in the era's trade journals.

64. Editor & Publisher Yearbook, 30 January 1948, 17.

65. Morris L. Ernst, "Freedom to Read, See, and Hear," Harper's Magazine, July 1945, 51.

66. Morris L. Ernst, The First Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1946). See especially Chapter 4, "Press," pp. 57-124. Except in the trade press, reviews of Ernst's book were generally favorable. Even reviewers who failed to accept all of his conclusions conceded their alarm at ownership trends in the media. Sample reviews are William S. Lynch, "Free Like an Elephant," Saturday Review of Literature, 23 March 1946, 29; Charles McD. Puckette, "Morris Ernst Considers Some `Monopolies of the Mind,'" New York Times Book Review, 17 March 1946, 4; H.S. Commager, "Monopolies of the Mind," Nation, 15 June 1946, 723-724; and Jonathan Daniels, "Freedom of Public Expression," Yale Review 35 (1946): 726-727.

67. Ernst, First Freedom, xii.

68. Ernst, "Freedom to Read," 52.

69. Raymond B. Nixon, "Implications of the Decreasing Numbers of Competitive Newspapers," in Communications in Modern Society (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1948), 44-47. This chapter was the text of a paper delivered in early 1948 that was intended to answer Ernst's charges. Nixon perceptively predicted that television would prove a strong competitor for advertising and a weak competitor in newsgathering, not only hurting newspapers' revenues but also providing them little incentive to improve news content. See also Nixon's earlier article on newspaper ownership, "Concentration and Absenteeism in Daily Newspaper Ownership," Journalism Quarterly 22 (June 1945): 97-114.

70. U.S. Congress, Senate, Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business, Survival of a Free Competitive Press: The Small Newspaper, Democracy's Grass Roots Senate Committee Print 17, Eightieth Congress, First Session, 1947, pp. 1-4; "Newspaper Survival," Editor & Publisher, 4 January 1947, 34.

71. G.V. Denny, Jr., "Is the American Press Really Free? Debate Presented on America's Town Meeting of the Air," Reference Shelf 20 (1947): 159-76; Akron (Ohio) Beacon-Journal editorial quoted in "Critics of Press Pack Akron Town Meeting," Editor & Publisher, 26 October 1946, 26.

72. Paul Miller quoted in Jerry Walker, "Editors Get Criticism Direct; `No Debate,'" Editor & Publisher, 2 October 1948, 11.

73. A.J. Liebling quoted in Tom Wolfe, "Liebling and His Legend," New York Herald Tribune, 29 December 1963, 24. Liebling's press columns are collected in The Wayward Pressman (1947; reprint ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), Mink and Red Herring (1949; reprint ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), and The Press (New York: Ballantine, 1961). An analysis of Liebling's press criticism is Edmund M. Midura, "A.J. Liebling: The Wayward Pressman as Critic," Journalism Monographs 33 (April 1974).

74. Don Hollenbeck, "Who is Right?" Atlantic Monthly, September 1948, 49-51; John P. Lewis quoted in "CBS Station in New York Starts Criticism of Press," Editor & Publisher, 7 June 1947, 11, 95; `"CBS Views the Press' Wins Peabody Award," Editor & Publisher, 17 April 1948, 34. For reprints of "CBS Views the Press" scripts, see "CBS Rides Herd on New York Papers," Nieman Reports, October 1947, 25-29.

75. George Seldes, Witness to a Century; Encounters With the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs (New York: Ballantine, 1987), 347-348, 381. For an analysis of Seldes' press criticism, see Pamela A. Brown, "George Seldes and the Winter Soldier Brigade: The Press Criticism of In Fact, 1940-1950," American Journalism 6 (1989): 85-102. Liebling appeared before ASNE in 1951 to deliver a talk called "The Rubber-Type Army." See ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 215-228.

76. "Filling a Void," Nieman Reports, April 1947, 19. For the early history of Nieman Reports, see Louis M. Lyons, "Nieman Reports and the Nieman Fellowships," in Louis M. Lyons, ed., Reporting the News: Selections from Nieman Reports (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1965), 14-25. Editor & Publisher, the largest trade journal, was widely read but was regarded within the profession as a forum for publishers. See Keen Rafferty, "Editor (and Publisher)," New Mexico Quarterly Review 15 (Autumn 1945): 344.

77. Leon Svirsky, ed., Your Newspaper: Blueprint for a Better Press (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 8-30; Richard Watts, Jr., "Which Paper D'Ya Read?" New Republic, 15 December 1947, 27.

78. "Reading, Writing and Newspapers," special issue, Nieman Reports, April 1950; "Reading, Writing and Newspapers," Nieman Reports, July 1950, 20; Lyons, Reporting and the News, 17.

79. Elizabeth Lamb, The Inland: A Short History of the Growth and Development of the Services of America's Oldest and Largest Regional Daily Newspaper Association (Chicago: Inland Daily Press Association, 1950), 45; Ralph L. Crosman

-11, 72.

80. Frank Tripp, "Leave Press to People, Tripp Tells Crosman," Editor & Publisher, 2 November 1946, 22.

81. Lamb, The Inland, 46.

82. ASNE Proceedings, 1948, 70.

83. Walter C. Johnson and Arthur T. Robb, The South and Its Newspapers, 1903-1953 (1954; reprint ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974), 290. The National Conference of Editorial Writers had formed in 1947 as an organization to improve editorial pages, always a subject of press criticism. "The editorial page has declined to an astonishing degree," complained Ralph Coghlan, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, at the first NCEW meeting. (Quoted in "Shock Treatment," Time, 27 October 1947, 76. See also Robert H. Estabrook, "Editorial Writers Form New Newspaper Group," Quill, August 1947, 5, 13.)

84. Grove Patterson quoted in "Slanters `Gangsters,' Says Grove Patterson," Editor & Publisher, 4 October 1947, 53.

85. ASNE Proceedings, 1947, 65-74; John S. Knight, "Sulzberger Challenged on Chain Ownership," ASNE Bulletin, 1 June 1947, 1-2.

86. Joseph Agor, "Editor Says Few Small City Papers Are Worth the Ink to Print Them," ASNE Bulletin, 1 March 1947, 3.

87. Hanson W. Baldwin, "The Press and Bikini," New York Times, 3 August 1946, 6; "Dirty Work at the Crossroads," Time, 12 August 1946, 65. For complaints about press coverage of the United Nations, see Vincent Sheean, "Journalese Regnant," United Nations World, May 1947, 42.

88. Richard B. Gehman, "Make Ours Hemlock," Saturday Review of Literature, 7 August 1948, 15.

89. Hobby's speech is reprinted in the Congressional Record, 11 May 1950, A3531-A3533.

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