>> DAVID FERRIERO: Good afternoon, I'm David
Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States
and it's a pleasure to welcome you here to
the William G. McGowan Theater at the National
Archives Center. A special welcome to those
of you who are joining us on the National
Archive YouTube Channel. Today we present
a discussion of a new book "Free Speech and
Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom
in America" by Sam Lebovic of George Mason
University. Professor Lebovic's book comes
at an interesting time, an election year,
the likes of which we haven't seen in decades.
And it's an election year with the spotlight
on those who are reporting on it for the public,
the news gatherers for print, broadcasting
and internet. Today's program is presented
in conjunction with our exhibit "Amending
America" on display upstairs in the Lawrence
F. O'Brien Gallery.
This exhibit features more than 50 originals
documents from the National Archives that
highlight a remarkably American story, how
we amend our constitution. I hope you will
take time after the program to view the exhibit
in the O'Brien Gallery before you leave and
don't forget to stop in the rotunda and examine
the original charters of freedom: The Declaration,
the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Before we get to today's program, I would
like to tell you about some upcoming programs
here in the McGowan Theater. This Thursday,
April 7, at noon, author James Traub will
speak on his most recent book: "John Quincy
Adams: Militant Spirit." Traub draws on Adams's
diary, letters, and writings to evoke a diplomat
and president whose ideas remain with us today. A book signing will follow the program.
On Wednesday, April 13th at 7:00 p.m. we will present a panel discussion African-American
Life in Washington, D.C. before Emancipation that will explore a life before the 1862 Congressional
Emancipation Act and discuss the slavery and freedom exhibit at the Smithsonian's new National
Museum of African-American History and Culture. This program is presented in partnership with
that museum, the D.C. Commission on African-American Affairs and the D.C. Commission on Emancipation.
If you want to learn more about these and
all our programs and exhibits, consult our
monthly calendar of events. There are copies in the lobby as well as sign-up where you
can receive it by regular mail or e-mail.
You will also find brochures of our other
National Archives programs and activities.
And becoming a member of the National Archives
Foundation is another way to get more involved in the National Archives. The foundation supports
all of our education and activities and there
are applications for membership. And a little
known secret that I keep telling everyone,
no one has never gotten turned down for membership
in the Foundation. Professor Lebovic is Assistant Professor of
History at George Mason University. He received his bachelor degree from the University of
Sydney in his native Australia and his doctorate at the University of Chicago. Before coming
to George Mason, he held post doctoral fellowships at Rutgers University and New York University.
He has published articles on the roll of the
media in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
on the history of the Fulbright Program, on
the politics of pop culture of the 1940s and
on the Beatles and cultural globalization
and currently serves as associate editor of
the Journal of Social History. Please welcome Sam Lebovic to the stage.
>> SAM LEBOVIC: Thanks, David, and thank you all for coming out on what has turned out
to be quite a nice Monday in the end despite
predictions. It's a real pleasure and a real
honor to be giving a talk here, it's the first
talk I've given since the book was published
last month. And it's really fittings for two
reasons. First, I spent a lot of time within
the halls of the National Archives in the
business end doing the research for the book
so it's nice to come back to the public side
of the institution. And, secondly, the book
is an effort to make sense of what the right
of free press meant during the 20th Century
and could have meant in the 20th Century so
it's a real privilege to be giving a talk
associated with an exhibition celebrating
the 225th anniversary of the passage of the
Bill of Rights in 1791.
So, what I want to do today is sketch the
broad argument of the book and give you a
few examples of what I talk about and hopefully
use it as an example of how we might think
about the history of the amendments in the
20th century and how the amendments evolve
or don't evolve and how we should talk about
that history. So, when I began the book I
was really again struck by what seemed to
me a central paradox of press freedom in the
early 21st Century. And it was on the one
hand, the right to free speech or the right
to publish without government interference
has never been more highly protected than
it is today. The Supreme Court has upheld
the right to publish all sorts of information
absent government censorship. And that right
is even extended to things that some people
are slightly puzzled about, and that's the
right to make corporate contributions to campaigns
is seen as a form of free speech.
So that should mean the free press is doing
great, right? On the other hand, at the same
time as the right to a free press has never
been more highly protected, the actual press
seems to be beset by a sequence of crises,
and two in particular struck me. The first
was a crisis of access to government information
and a practice of accessing and publishing
state secrets which has manifested itself
both in the war on whistleblowers over the
last decade, more leak prosecutions in the
last 10 years than in any previous point in
American history and ongoing rise of classification,
something like 80 million documents a year
are currently being classified in the United
States which is sort of one problem posed
to operating a free press. The second is the
economic crisis of the newspaper industry
in the wake of the incident, closing of daily
newspapers and laying off of reporters is
a real crisis that you sort of see talked
about a great deal in trade journals and more
broadly.
And I realized in order to understand this
crisis, this paradox, so the rise of free
speech on one hand and the crisis of the actual
press on the other, I need to make two moves
in the books. The first would be to return
to the middle decades of the 20th Century,
from roughly the 1920s through the 1970s because
in these decades all of these trends have
the origins.
The first is the right to free speech has
its origins in these years. Now, as we know
the First Amendment to the Constitution is
from the late 18th Century, Congress shall
make no law abridging the freedom of the press,
but in the practice the Supreme Court doesn't
really uphold the meaningful right to free
speech or the publication until the 1930s
and after. Now during the 19th Century -- to
begin with we make a lot out of the fact that
this is the first amendment, it must mean
something. It was actually originally intended
to be the third amendment. The first two amendments
in late 18th Century was supposed to deal
with the election and compensation of congress
people and they slipped out of the drafting
process, so what was the third amendment became
the first and thereafter has been embraced
as sort of a quintessentially American value.
But during the 19th Century everyone understands
that there are going to be limits to what
you have a right to say or publish and the
government does have the right to regulate
speech so that speech that is not in the interest
of the common good can be punished or censored.
Now, during the 19th Century the expectation
largely that will be done not by the federal
government, the amendment says Congress shall
make no law, but done by the state government.
So throughout the 19th century the state government
has all kinds of censorship legislature. In
the first half of the 19th Century, blasphemy,
obscenities, critiques of government officials
are illegal, abolitionist material is illegal
in the South because of the Civil War. In
the late 19th Century anarchist literature
is illegal. By the late 19th Century you don't
have a right to circulate what is considered
obscene material in the mail. What obscene
material means in the late 19th Century is
basic birth control information. And then
by World War I this kind of repressive impulse
reaches a crescendo with the passage of the
Espionage Act and Sedition Act which make
it illegal to criticize the war effort, or
the Army, the draft and a host of other things
including the Army, the uniforms of the Army.
They are very worried that people will make
fun of the uniforms.
It's only after World War I that the Supreme
Court begins to consider whether or not you
might have a First Amendment right to say
these kinds of things. And slowly, at first
in dissent, and then building up to majority
opinions through the 20's, 30s, and into the
50s the Supreme Court will construct a far
more robust First Amendment to protect the
rights of these kinds of speech from government
censorship at the federal and state level.
And for the press, the important case is Near
V Minnesota, in a 1931, basically a small,
scurrilous, antisemitic newspaper in Minnesota
was censured and it brought a free speech
claim against the Minnesota government which
was upheld by -- the challenge was upheld
by the Supreme Court. For the first time the
Supreme Court says states can't censor newspapers
and that moving would expand throughout the
20th Century.
By the time in the end of war period that
the Supreme Court begins to recognize a meaningful
First Amendment right to free speech or to
publish without interference the other two
problems that I outlined are already beginning
to emerge. The first of these is state secrecy
which really balloons in the late 1930s through
to the 1950s with construction of the moder
classification system and the second is the
crisis of newspaper economics. So in some
sense, if we think that both the right to
free speech and the politics of secrecy emerge
a little later than we might imagine, the
economic crisis of the newspaper industry
actually emerge earlier than we might imagine.
We think about them today as something that
happens in the wake of the internet.
The largest number of newspapers in the nation's
history was actually reached in 1909 and it's
been declining ever since. Sometimes more
quickly than other times, but you actually
get a steady process of decline in the number
of newspapers in the nation from that period
and beginning in about the 1920s you are going
to get the first sort of editorials and journalism
pieces worrying about what is going to happen
when the newspaper disappears, sort of very
similar to the kind of things we see today.
So that's the reason for going to the 1930s,
1940s and 1950s. And in looking at these decades
I realized we need to make a second move as
well to understand the paradox of press freedom
and that was to move the history from outside
of the court, to look at not just at the Supreme
Court jurisprudence about what the First Amendment
means in law but also to think about the broader
social, political and economic conditions,
what the rights of a free press means in practice
and also what a wide variety of intellectuals,
lawyers, politicians, publishers and journalists
thought a right to a free press should be
or could be.
I think we tend to follow the history of the
First Amendment by looking at the Supreme
Court and look at the ever rising tide of
First Amendment speech rights. The tradition
story is quite an uplifting one, that over
time more and more speech gets protected,
so by the end of the 20th Century the founders'
vision of the right to a free speech was for
the first time fully realized and we have
had great free marketplace of ideas in the
America.
Looking at broader debates in the mid-century reveals a more complicated story because I
found there are actually two different visions of press freedom circulating in public discussion
in these years and the first is the one familiar to us. A free press means absence of government
censorship, the right to publish what you
want without any government interference and
this was definitely circulating at this time.
Raymond Caffa, the famous journalist, said
in 1941, and I quote, "It's difficult for
me to be dogmatic about this problem of the
press, but I'm dogmatic on one point, there
must be no government tampering with the news."
I think the sort of defensive backwards way
that he expressed that, like it's hard for
me to say anything about this, but the one
thing I can say is I don't want government
to censor, suggests that there were other
visions of press freedom circulating, and
those were varied and diffuse and complicated
but I think they all boil down to one thing,
they were an effort to guarantee or protect
the forms of information that was circulating
in the press, a concern not just with the
rights of free speech and free publication
but to make sure that the press had a diversity
of accurate, quality information that it was
providing to the public. But rather than a
negative right to free expression, this was
like a positive right to the news.
And the book traces this distinction back
to the moment in 1919 when the Supreme Court
begins to articulate the modern idea of the
right of free press. Oliver Wendell Holmes
in 1919 in dissent in Abrams, obviously says
that we should have a free trading of ideas
and that's the meaning of free speech. Just
months after he publishes that opinion the
journalist Walter Lippmann writes a series
of articles in the Atlantic in which he critiques
that vision of free press and a free press
and says actually if we focus on protecting
opinions, we will be missing the point. He
says that's the deal with, quote, the subsidiary
phase of the whole metal. He thinks the more
important point in protecting the rights to
express an opinion is to protect what he calls
the stream of news upon which expression is
based. So rather than focus on people's rights
to say what they want, he is more concerned
with how do people work out what they think
about an issue and that leads him to focus
much more on the problems of the press and
the economics of the press industry and the
problems of government classification of information
rather than censorship of speech.
And the book opens with this distinction and
then shows how a wide variety of Americans
over the 20th Century work with the same distinction
trying to expand the meaning of press freedom
to purify or improve or protect the stream
of news upon which people they base their
opinions and the book covers a wide variety
of arenas in which this vision is debated,
it looks at New Deal ethics to regulate the
corporate news industry, it looks at ethics
to improve the journalism, the labor of journalism
either by professionalization or the unionization
of journalists, it looks at government publicity
handouts and views about government propaganda.
It looks at ethics at the United National
to write global press freedom laws that will
get rid of censorship and state propaganda
internationally, it looks at the rise of state
secrecy, freedom of information laws, and
access regulations, it looks at philosophical
and political debate about what the free press
could actually mean in America.
And, of course, all of these settings I show
that there will always be two visions competing,
right, the vision that a free press should
mean only the right to negative liberty, the
to publish without government interference
or the right to positive news, the idea that
Americans should have some regulated access
to good, quality information. And in all of
these settings I show that the second loses
out, that Americans continue to prioritize
the right to free speech over any rights to
access to information, I think this produces
the paradox that we live with today.
So, what I want to do then today is just very
quickly sketch two of the problems that confront
press freedom in the 20th Century. I want
to look at the problem of corporate consolidation
and I want to look at the problem of state
secrecy, and in each of these area I want
to make three points, I just want to show
you that there is a new problem in the 20th
century that was unanticipated to the Founders
and unanticipated in the language of the First
Amendment, I want to look at some efforts
in the mid-20th Century to instruct a positive
right to the news, to counter these problems.
And then I want to look at how those efforts
failed and what is left is the right to free
expression but no effort to guarantee access
to the news. Okay. So Problem Number 1, corporate consolidation
of the newspaper industry. By the 1920s and
increasingly by the 1930s there's a widespread
sense that this is a real problem and imposes a foundation challenge to press freedom in
American democracy. Now, there are real structural reasons for thinking that the corporate consolidation
of the press is a problem. As I said, the
number of newspapers in the nation is declining
in the first half of the 20th Century and
that is being commented upon. There is something
like 2100 newspapers, daily newspapers in
the nation in 1919. That goes down to a little
less than 1800 by 1942. That's a 14% decline in the number of newspapers in the nation
despite a 30% increase in the nation's population and a boom in circulation of those newspapers
that exist. And those newspapers are increasingly monopolistic in their towns, each town will
increasing only have one newspaper. In an
earlier period, New York had 15 newspapers
in the late 19th Century, Chicago has 12 in
the early 20th Century, increasingly these
numbers were whittled down over the 20th Century. Those newspapers that exist in each town are
increasingly parts of chains, chain circulation makes up about a third of all circulations
in the 1930s, about half of all circulations
on Sundays. And these newspapers, monopolistic,
and possibly chains, are increasingly owned
by newspaper barons, larger than life figures
that sort of control what goes into the press
and are in the 1930s increasingly reactionary
political players. The key figure here is
Randolph Hearst, imagine him as the archetypical
newspaper baron. In the political culture
there is a widespread sense that this is a
problem, this is a threat, not least to the
New Deal, because these publishers are opposed
to FDR and the New Deal. But also more broadly
because there's a debate about whether or
not you can have a vibrant public sphere,
vibrant public debate if all of the organs
of public opinion are owned by the same small
set of individuals.
And, so, you get expressions of this anxiety
and fear throughout the political culture
of the depression and I just want to give
you two examples to illustrate what is going
on. The first is a debate between Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, and Frank E. Gannett,
the head of the Gannett chain. They have a
debate in the New York town hall in 1939 that
is broadcast nationally over NBC and the subject of the debate is "Do We Have a Free Press?"
This is the summarization. And Gannett, high up in the New Deal administration is arguing
that America does not have a free press because the corporate ownership of the newspapers
hold a financial whip that it uses to discipline and police the press. It's sort of hard to
imagine in any other point in American history a high level administrative official arguing
that there is no free press in America because the corporations are in control but that's
what Ickes is arguing in 1939. Gannett, unsurprisingly, doesn't agree and he thinks the greatest threat
to press freedom comes from the New Deal which is going to try to regulate the newspapers.
The other moment I would will draw your attention to is I think it's no accident that the masterpiece
of the cultural politics in these years is
"Citizen Kane," in an effort to think about
the undemocratic type of publisher that emerges out of these debates and in this moment and
at a moment when there are wide public boycotts of Hearst's news reels and newspapers as an
effort to protest what seemed to be Hearst's, quote, "insipient fascism." What you get in
response to these fears then is an argument
that something should be done about corporate
consolidation and as is typical of the New
Dealers they turn to the states to imagine
efforts to use the states to regulate the
newspaper industry. Now, there are also concerns
to the libertarians so they don't want to
do anything too bold so they propose three
slightly technical measures that are supposed
to reform the newspaper industry just like
any other industry in the Depression.
The first is the National Recovery Administration
proposes that there should be a newspaper
code that will regulate fair trade practices
in the newspaper industry in an effort to
try to make sure that large newspapers can't
exploit their advantage in the marketplace
to get rid of smaller newspapers.
The second is a truth in advertising bill
proposed by the Food and Drug Administration
that is an attempt to get rid of dangerous
consumer advertising on the one hand but is
also understood by proponents to be a way
to limit the control of advertising interest
over the newspaper economics and provide the
readers with more of the same.
And the third is an antitrust case against
the Associated Press wire service. So in the
1930s the Associated Press is basically a
subscription only service, that every city
will have one newspaper that will subscribe
to the Associated Press, it will then provide
local news reporting for the members of the
cooperative. If any new newspaper want to
buy into the AP wire service, existing members
can veto their membership. So in 1941 Marshall
Fields, III, wants to start a new newspaper
in Chicago, he wants to support FDR, the AP
subscription in Chicago is held by McCormick,
all right? Very opposed to FDR and opposed
to internationalism and foreign policy, and
he vetoes Fields' application. So Marshall
Fields can't buy a subscription to the AP
wire service, which means it's very hard for
him to compete with McCormick because McCormick
is getting all this news from all over the
country at a cheaper rate, Fields would have
to hire journalists in every state in the
country to compete fairly. So he goes to the
Justice Department and says this is an antitrust
violation, and this is affecting my ability
to compete.
So none of these three measures are particularly
bold or necessarily focusing on the state,
there is fair trade practice regulation, anti-advertising
regulation and antitrust action. But all are
met with a firestorm of political controversy
by the newspaper industry who really make
three arguments. First they lobby behind doors
putting pressure on Congress people and in
the Archives upstairs too I found letters
from newspapers to their local representatives
suggesting that if you pass these kinds of
acts I might need to support somebody else
in the midterm next election and then those
congress people will write to FDR and say
how about we wait on this one until later,
because politicians are dependent on their
newspapers for coverage and news.
Secondly they make two broader arguments related
to the history of press freedom and the First
Amendment and they are made by a guy called
Elisha Hanson, who is the general counsel
for the American Newspaper Publishers Association.
And he's the sort of individual who gets forgotten
in history for the First Amendment more generally
but plays an important role in driving its
development over the 20th Century. And he
argues that, first, if the government can
regulate the economics of the newspaper industry,
this will open the door to government interference
of the editorial content of the newspaper
industry and then that will, therefore, create
a risk of dictatorial or totalitarian government
in the United States.
And, second, he argues that state measures
to regular newspaper economics, are violations
of the First Amendment right to a free press.
So, the First Amendment says Congress shall
make no law abridging the freedom of the press.
And it's these kinds of economic regulations
are a form of abridging. The new Dealers are
kind of surprised by this, they say no one
has suggested that the First Amendment provides
the newspapers with an exemption from child
labor laws, for instance, although the newspapers
respond and say yes, it does, actually, we
would like to be employ to employ news boys,
newspaper delivery boys, and they get an exemption
from the child labor law on this front, but
the publishers are insistent that if the government
can regulate the economics of the newspaper
industry, that will open the door to dictatorship.
Here is Hanson speaking about the Associated
Press antitrust suit. If the suit succeeds,
quote, the people of the United States will
be confronted just as the people of Germany
today are confronted with a government-controlled
press. The public good requires that the press
shall not be subject to such control and our
forefathers determined that question when
they ratified the First Amendment. It was
actually quite a novel use of the First Amendment,
it hadn't been used to protect these type
of industries' prerogatives earlier in history.
But Hanson successfully makes the case that
the First Amendment requires a lack of government
intervention in the newspaper industry. All
three of these reform efforts fail. The NRA
Code is written behind closed doors in consultation
with the NRA administrators and basically
is a rubber stamp that exempts the newspaper
industry from any formal regulation. NRA administrators
at the time say it's highly unusual and by
far the weakest code of any industry in this
nation.
The anti-advertising bill is watered down
in Congress and essentially amounts to not
much when it passes out. The AP antitrust
case is slightly more complicated, because
the justice department actually wins the case
and AP is forced to open its membership to
anyone who wants to buy one. But it does so
on an incredibly narrow ground because it
is afraid that any broad vision that the press
can be regulated by the government will, in
fact, violate the First Amendment. So what
it says is that in this case the newspapers
have a right to buy from a wire service but
we probably think there's no broader right
to bring antitrust actions against monopolistic
newspapers in any given market. In other words,
the newspaper publisher can bring an antitrust
suit against one of its suppliers but the
public can't bring any antitrust action against
monopolistic newspapers on their behalf. And
what you will get then after World War II
is really neglect of antitrust action even
as press monopolization and consolidation
continues.
And you can see this very clearly in a commission
into press freedom that was launched in the
1940s. Henry Luce, the publisher of Time Life,
looks at these debates about press freedom
in the states and thinks that everything is
very confusing and he wants to know what press
freedom should actually mean in the 20th Century.
So he gives a chunk of change to the University
of Chicago who bring in about 2,000 leading
intellectuals, liberal intellectuals and lets
them meet for five years to discuss what should
a free press look like in the 20th Century,
and when you read the drafts of those meetings,
at first they are very in favor of the AP
antitrust decision and they want to expand
it. And they think if we could really use
antitrust action to break apart chains, to
break apart monopolies, we will have a much
more diverse newspaper market in America and
that would lead to good. But over time as
they redraft and debate they become very concerned
that actually doing that would allow the state
to regulate the newspaper industry and would
create conditions of totalitarianism. So in
the end they say actually we can't do anything
to deal with corporate consolidation, we just
need to leave it as is. That's one of the
costs of a free press. And then they say,
well, what should we do to deal with the fact
that there are declining voices in the marketplace
of ideas and their response is to say that
any existing newspaper has a, quote, social
responsibility to its readers.
What does that mean in practice? It means
that if you are the only newspaper in town,
you have to publish the other side on any
issue that you want. This is the birth of
the modern idea about a fair and balanced
media, okay? And it's a response to the decline
of actual diversity in the newspaper market.
It's a weak response to consolidation. Not
by chance this is what leads to the rise of,
say, the op-ed page in newspapers. "The New
York Times" launches an oped page in the 1960s
when its rival "The New York Herald Tribune"
goes out of business. And in "New York Times"
meetings they say: Well, there used to be
a voice for liberal Republicans in New York,
now that's gone, we will have to do it on
the op-ed page.
All right, so you get less newspapers and
more voices within the newspapers as an attempt
to deal with this problem because earlier
more radical options were off the table. There's
a small post script to this story which is
that even though no one was using the antitrust
actions in the 1940s, it's still on the books
and the newspaper industry wasn't very happy
about that. In the 1960s newspapers began
creating what they called joint operating
agreements where you have two newspapers in
one town, they joined the business and printing
and advertising sections and then keep printing
two separate newspapers but with the same
business side of the operation and the justice
department begins to says that this is a violation
of antitrust law and brings an antitrust suit
in the mid-1960s.
And the newspaper industry goes to Congress
and asks for what it calls at first the Failing
Newspaper Act which then gets called the Newspaper
Preservation Act. This is a formal exemption
from antitrust laws to allow this kind of
consolidation in order to preserve newspapers
and diversity. And they get it under the Nixon
administration and this is kind of the opening
wedge of a broader wave of media deregulation
in the 1980s and 1990s. Interesting side note
on this front, giving testimony to Congress
in favor of Newspaper Preservation Act is
a guy called Arthur Hanson who is Elisha Hanson's
son who had inherited the family business,
representing the newspaper industry to Congress
from the 1930s. So it's a kind of trajectory
here from the 1930s through to the 1970s an
on, so a contemporary way of deregulation.
The outcome of all this then is that there
is no interference with newspaper economics
out of fear that that will interfere with
free speech. Newspapers are free to act, to
publish what they want, to operate their businesses
like they would like and that's all understood
as totally compatible with the First Amendment
right to individual free speech. What comes
alongside that though is a resignation to
corporate consolidation of the newspaper industry
and a newspaper industry that is by the 1980s
and 1990s will be increasingly monopolistic
and increasingly joined in chains and geared
to high profits. As these newspapers take
on debt to buy their competitors and expand,
they will have to serve the debt and owe money
to stockholders. What they are basically doing
is building on a house of sand when the economics
of the industry shift in the early 21st Century,
we will get to the day where there will be
cuts to newsroom budgets in order to meet
the profit margin.
It's also interesting, I think, as a broader
story about who the right to a free press
is supposed to protect. The traditional theory
of press freedom that was developed in the
late 18th Century assumes that the press and
the public have the same interests against
the absolutest state. We want to protect the
right to free press against the state. By
the 1930s and 1940s it's less clear that,
in fact, the press and the public have the
same interest. People are worried that the
economic rights of the press might run against
the right of the public to diversity of newspapers,
but an effort to build a meaningful First
Amendment public right to the news failed,
and what, instead, what continues to be protected
is the right of the publishers.
So by the 1960s, A.J. Liebling, the press
critic, sort of hits the nail on the head
when he says that freedom of the press belongs
only to those who own one and that's a direct
legacy of the debates about what a free press
should mean in the 1930s and 1940s. Okay.
So that's Problem Number 1 -- growing corporate
consolidation, an effort to imagine state
regulation and a failure of that effort out
of fear it will interfere with a free newspaper
market.
Problem Number 2 is the rise of state secrecy.
Now, we don't actually know how much information
is kept secret in the United States after
World War II, that's part of what it means
for something to be secret. But by any estimation
it's a staggering amount. Peter Galison has
estimated there is something like 7.5 billion
pages currently classified in the American
government which is the same amount of pages
that are currently held on the Library of
Congress, and, so there is sort of a second
Library of Congress that is classified. Every
year something like 80 million documents are
classified, 4.5 million Americans require
a security clearance to do their work. It
is a massive edifice to state secrecy.
As I said at the beginning, I think we tend
to think of this as a timeless attribute of
the time, sort of a holdover of the pre-democratic
mode of governance. Max Weber, on the other
hand, saw it as a modern form, something that
all bureaucracies do, that every bureaucracy
will try to keep its information secret. Maybe
that's true. But there is also a very particular
history about how you go about keeping things
secret. It's one thing to say you want to
keep something secret, it's another thing
to develop the laws and the practices and
the mechanisms that will enforce that secrecy.
And here the story is actually different.
It's much newer. The origin of the modern
secrecy regime come in the 1940s and 1960s.
And you can see this if you go to World War
II and a very obscure and forgotten government
agency called the Security Advisory Board,
which was established as part of the Office
of War Information and whose job it was to
go to all government departments for the first
time and train them how to keep information
secret. And as they go out throughout the
federal government in the 1940s they are amazed
to find that federal employees have no idea
how to keep things secret. That people are
reading classified documents on streetcars,
they are taking it down the road to get it
photocopied at non-cleared copying companies,
they are bringing it home. And there is sort
of no real understanding about how you keep
information secret. People are leaving it
on their desks, they are not locking it up
overnight.
The reason for this is two fold. First, it's
only during World War II in the late 1930s
and then World War II that FDR first issues
orders that all documents across the federal
government should be classified. And, secondly,
even during World War II it turns out there
were no laws on the books that make it illegal
to leak or spill a government secret. It's
just a kind of recommendation that this is
something that should be kept secret, it's
not backed up by law for reasons that could
answer any question, this was just sort of
a technical question about the bad way that
the espionage act was written in 1917.
Now, just because there's no way to keep secrets
in the government administration in the 1940s
doesn't mean there's never been secrecy before.
States have always tried to keep war tactics
secret or diplomatic correspondence secret.
The key difference is how do you go about
keeping something secret. Until the 1930s
and 1940s the way that the state would try
to keep it secret would be to try to keep
the press from publishing them. So in 1790s
Benjamin Franklin Bache gets secret diplomatic
correspondence with the French and he publishes
it in a newspaper and he finds himself charged
and jailed for illegal speech. On the one
hand he's too critical of the government but
on the other hand he has also published this
information that he shouldn't have. He actually
will die in jail before it goes to trial from
one of the various diseases that runs through
Pennsylvania in the middle 18th Century.
During the Civil War Abraham Lincoln, to try
to protect Union military information, will
censor newspapers, shut down newspapers or
close the telegraph, so the way that you deal
with secrets is to regulate the press. By
the middle of the 20th Century that's no longer
politically feasible. First it's seen as a
violation of the First Amendment rights of
the press. Second, it is seen as totalitarian,
there is a worry that this would make America
just like the Nazis that they are fighting.
America is fighting World War II, after all,
to preserve freedom of speech and freedom
of the press. So, during World War II there
is a real problem, how do you keep information
secret? And the solution they hit on is quite
ingenious. FDR establishes an Office of Censorship
but the Office of Censorship has no legal
ability to censor the press. Rather, what
it does is it issues a code that tells the
press these are the sorts of things we would
like you not to publish. If you want to publish
them, that's up to you, you might kill a few
soldiers but we're not going to do anything
to repress them. They call is voluntary self-censorship
and they basically run schools to encourage
journalists to sit on information they don't
want out in the public good.
And the system works fairly well during World
War II. I just want to give you one example.
In 1943 the Selective Service Director in
Tennessee said we are building a weapon just
down the road that is going to win the war.
He's referring to the atomic bomb. Okay, now,
during the Cold War the Atomic Energy Act
will keep all information about the bomb classified,
this is information that is born classified
the defense director sought. During World
War II this information is leaked by this
director to the press, the press writes up
the story, it goes to the Associated Press,
it goes out to all the newspapers that subscribe
to the Associated Press and they begin printing
their afternoon edition.
Then at 12:23 one of these newspapers calls
up the Office of Censorship and says we have
this story, is this the kind of thing you
were talking about you don't want us to publish?
And the Office of Censorship says actually,
yes, that is exactly the sort of thing we
don't want you to publish and sends out a
message by the Associate Press to all the
newspapers can they please kill the story?
And despite the fact that they are printing
they do, they remove the story, there's no
law, there's no compulsion and it works fairly
well to keep information secret because the
patriotic cooperation of journalists. As the
war begins to end, this system is framed in
various ways and securityminded officials
want a stronger and private classification
system, they are not willing to rely on journalist
collaboration any more. And this leads to
the development of a new way to regulate secrets.
The Security Advisory Board, those same guys
that were trying to train people how to keep
secrets begin writing general classification
orders in the late 1940s. And in 1951, in
an executive order, Harry Truman will establish
for the first time a government-wide classification
system and most importantly he will tie it
to existing statutes that make it illegal
to leak information classified to those not
authorized to receive them. So for the first
time you've established a new form of censorship,
a mode of classification that is based not
on regulating the circulation of information
once it is in the press, but it is based on
censoring the ability of government officials
to release information from the state to the
press, it's a different form of classification
and securing secrets. And most importantly,
it's understood to be entirely compatible
with the individual right to free speech because
it doesn't interfere with publication, all
right? It doesn't do anything to newspapers
or the expression of opinion. Byron Price,
who was the director of the office of censoring
during World War II had developed this distinction,
actually it was in a speech given in this
building, I believe.
He said "free speech does not mean and never has meant the right to play fast and loose
with information as distinguished from opinion.
We do not curtail -- I'm sorry. Voluntary
censorship does not curtail free speech in
that it places no restrict whatever upon expressions
of opinion, it seeks only to keep information
from the enemy."  In this distinction, what
you get then is the development of a classification
system that censors information, it doesn't
censor speech and is, therefore, deemed to
be totally compatible with the First Amendment
right to press freedom. Joseph Short, Truman's
press secretary introducing a new classification
order in 1951 will say that, quote, classification
has no realistic relationship to censorship.
Of course, classification is just a different
form of censorship. And in some ways it is
a more insidious form. All right. Censorship
happens in the public sphere, if someone says
something and they have been punished for
it, you know what they've said and you know
why they -- when they are being punished.
Classification keeps information from ever
reaching the public sphere, it happens before
the press gets the information, before the
public can know about it. And the classification
system actually is incentivized to overclassify
information. If you are working in the government,
there is no penalty for putting too high a
classification stamp on something. There is
a penalty for under-classifying a document,
all right.
So, there is a kind of bracketry for ratcheting
up, of more and more information being classified
over time. Since the 1950s there have been
defense department and intelligence community
investigations into the classification system,
and uniformly they say that 75% to 90% of
information that is classified should never
have been classified in the first place. But
despite this fact, the courts continue to
defer to the act of classification as it's
done in the administration and don't want
to force open access to information.
So what you get then out of a desire to protect
the right of free speech and to free expression
is a new form of regulation of information
a new mode of state secrecy. That's the problem.
The solution is the development of the freedom
of information movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
And sort of seen in the abstract, when we
get the Freedom of Information Act in the
-- 1966 and 1974, this can seem like an unprecedented
breakthrough for transparency. I think if
you see how quickly and how recently the state
secrecy regime had been constructed in the
1940s, FOIA doesn't seem like such a new breakthrough
so much as it seems like a weak response to
a new problem.
The whole idea of a right to know, a right
to access information, is first articulated
in the 1940s. It was actually first articulated
in what are called the World Freedom Information
committees that are run by the newspaper industry
in the 1940s. And those committees are focused
on tearing down phobia censorships, they are
actually an international organization looking
at secrecy overseas. And then in 1950 they
all realized actually there is a problem developing
here and they dropped the word "world" from
their titles and reform as freedom of information
committees at home and advocate for a right
to know.
Now most importantly at first none of these
institutions want a freedom of information
act, what they want is a constitutional right
to access information. They argue that the
First Amendment has to imply the right to
access government secrecy, the government
secrets is just another form of classification
or censorship which should violate the First
Amendment. And they kind of cast about for
anything that they can do to justify this
move. My favorite moment in this is James
Polk who is the journalist who heads up this
organization, he said, you know, John Milton
said that we have a right to know, to utter
and to argue freely. He said it can't be by
accident that he said first the right to know,
right, right to know has to be the most important.
These are not arguments that he is winning
in the court.
So when there is no ability, no success in
constructing a constitutional right to challenge
the utter classification scheme, the freedom
of information movement turns to legislative
solutions and the first of these is Freedom
of Information Act of '66 which is not that
successful and was then reformed in the wake
of Watergate in 1974. Now the Freedom of Information
Act is important and has opened up a lot of
information to public oversight. But it is
plagued by problems which recently the Associated
Press reported that the Obama administration,
despite its commitment to being the most transparent
administration in history has actually refused
the highest numbers of FOIA requests in history,
possibly because there are more FOIA requests
being made. But the point remains this is
a narrow and limited channel of access and,
more importantly, it doesn't challenge the
classification system.
The second exemption from FOIA says if the
information has been classified you can't
FOIA it. So this is why when you classify
all national security documents a lot of them
come redacted if at all. Had the freedom of
information movement played out differently
and had it been able to make a constitutional
challenge, you could have imagined redrafting
the classification orders, actually making
those accountable to a public right to know.
As it is, those are entirely autonomous, and
continue to grow unchecked and the freedom
of information legislation is wait and subsidiary
and sort of chips away at it the fact. It's
a sign that what got preserved was not a right
of access to information but a right to free
speech. You can see that, I think most clearly
in the Pentagon papers case which we all know
stands for the principle that if -- newspapers
can publish state secrets, this is the secret
documents about the Vietnam War that the "New
York Times" and the "Washington Post" published.
Now, the Supreme Court said that actually
you do have a right to publish classified
documents but it only says you can publish
them if you can get them, it doesn't provide
any right to get access to them. How did the
papers get the documents? Well, they got them
from government leakers -- Ellsberg and Anthony
Russo in particular and neither Ellsberg nor
Russo went to jail for leaking but the reason
for that wasn't because the Court found they
had a right to leak information that was in
the public good, the reason for that was that
the Nixon administration had broken into Ellsberg's
psychiatrist's office, which is why the Nixon
scandal is called the Plumbers Scandal, the
reason they are called the plumbers is because
they were fixing leaks. And they broke into
Ellsberg's office, and the court --Ellsberg's
psychiatrist's office, and when the Court
got wind of this they threw the entire case
out for government misconduct.
As the law currently stands it is a balancing
act in place. The press can publish secrets
if it can get them but whoever leaks the information
to the press violates the law and can go to
jail. And you see that playing out with the,
you know, while the "New York Times" wins
awards for its WikiLeaks coverage, Chelsea
Manning sits in jail. Similarly for "The Guardian"
and the Snowden disclosures, Ed Snowden has
to go into exile because the leak itself is
illegal. So we have this kind balancing act
built into the First Amendment that is understood
to protect the rights of free speech, the
press can publish what it wants without interference,
but the government's right to censor its own
employees remains and we think of that as
a fair balancing act, we both want secrets
and the right to free speech and this is a
way to weight them off. But actually the right
to publish is totally dependent on the leaker.
It's not an even balancing act, it prioritizes
the government's right to leak information
and this creates a sequence of problems.
In the first case it makes the press dependent
upon officials to access to information, which
makes them more inclined to be deferential
and also creates possibly some nebulous information,
the textbook example here is the leaks of
the information of WMDs in the lead-up to
the Iraq war. It also makes it very hard for
the public to make sense of newspaper stories
based on anonymous tips. When you read a newspaper
story in the paper today it often says "three
different anonymous sources tell us" and it's
very hard to work out what the agenda is.
And it also relies that there will always
be leakers to come forth with information.
And that's just not a historically justifiable
assumption. Some things don't leak out. The
most famous of these, I think, is the COINTELPRO
investigation. The FBI's illegal monitoring
and interference of civil rights and new left
activists in the 1960s. And the only reason
we know about the COINTELPRO program is that
individual activists in Pennsylvania, in a
town called Media, appropriately named, actually
broke into the FBI headquarters and stole
government documents and from that the word
COINTELPRO appeared for the first time and
once the word COINTELPRO exists you can then
start FOIA-ing for many years on the basis
of that word and find out the program. But
that's a weak protection for the public's
right to know and a pretty weak response to
unprecedented levels of government's secrecy.
So that's the second problem. So in both the
problems of corporate consolidation and the
problems of state secrecy you see a similar
pattern, the growth of a new problem in the
20th century, unanticipated in the language
of the First Amendment and unanticipated to
the drafters of the First Amendment, an effort
to construct a more expansive vision of what
a free press could mean, access to government
information or diversity of newspapers in
the newspaper market and a failure to implement
that vision largely because of a desire to
protect free speech focusing just on limiting
censorship of speech rather than guaranteeing
the more ambitious goal, but also because
of a fear of totalitarianism. In the case
of the newspaper industry, a fear that regulating
newspaper economics would open the door to
government censorship. In the case of classification,
fear that allowing national security secrets
to circulate would harm national security
in the era of the Cold War.
The result is that Americans have a very well-respected
right, well-protected right to express their
opinions but our rights to access information,
our rights to improve the stream of news upon
which we base our opinion are less protected,
subject to unprecedented crises in the early
21st Century.
And I think this story is important for two
primary reasons, I think the first, as I said
at the beginning, it recasts our history of
the First Amendment, it focuses less on a
kind of rising part of free speech Supreme
Court, and more on forgotten versions of unanticipated
consequences and shifting political and economic
contexts in which the right to free speech
developed. What it means to have a right to
publish without government interference is
very different now than it was in the early
20th Century, but the idea of a free press
as embodied in the First Amendment has never
changed.
In 1970, Thomas Emerson, the leading theorist
of the First Amendment said that the basic
theory underlying the First Amendment has
remained substantially unchanged since its
development in the 17th and 18th Century and
I think it's surprising that in the early
21st Century we continue to think about free
speech and the free press in exactly the same
way as we thought about them in the late 18th
Century despite massive changes in governance,
in economics, in society in the 21st Century.
And, secondly, focusing on this paradox, I
think, helps explain the newspaper industry
that I began with, a consolidated newspaper
industry geared to monopoly profits was poorly
situated to shift with the crisis generated
by the internet. The response was to try to
maintain profit rates which meant cutting
newspapers and reporting. I think what you
get then today in the ecology of journalism
is still a protection of the right to express
your opinion, the bloggist theory is better
at this than any form of media in American
history. You can express your opinion in a
variety of channels at a low cost without
any censorship. Getting access to information
upon which to base those opinions is much
more difficult. There is a sequence of studies
that show that there is much less reporting
going on now, there is much more opinion blogging
than there is new journalism or investigative
journalism. And we get, secondly, the blossoming
of state secrecy even under the, quote, most
transparent administration in history, in
large part because earlier mechanisms to regulate
the sphere of circulation have completely
fallen away and the only tools left to the
Obama administration are to regulate the disclosure
of information from within the administration
which continues, therefore, to expand in the
early 21st Century.
So, in the conclusion to my book I discuss
some of the policy discussions that are currently
going on about how to confront some of these
problems and how we might imagine a more vibrant
press freedom in the coming years. I would
be happy to answer questions of that in question
time. But for now I just want to suggest the
conceptual importance of expressing freedom
of the news from freedom of speech. Problems
of secrecy and corporate consolidation have
been with us for a long time, they are not
going to go away without a deliberate program
of reform. But current orthodoxy focus just
on the negative right to free expression is
no guide to dealing with these problems and
the hope is and the challenge now is that
if we focus on public rights for the news
we might be able to reconstruct what an American
free press looks like in the coming decades.
Thanks for your time.
[Applause]
So my understanding is we have time for questions,
but I've been asked to ask you to head to
the microphones on either side so we can hear.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you for your presentation,
I found it very interesting. Is the Snowden
situation an anomaly or something we will
see a lot more of?
>> SAM LEBOVIC: Hard to know. I guess there
are two ways to think about that, where the
likelihood of a disclosure is anomalous or
likely to exist more often. I'm not sure.
As the state requires more and more people
to have a security clearance to do their work,
4.5 million people now need a security clearance,
the oversight process gets weaker in some
ways. And there's been stories in the "Post"
recently that the private firms contracted
to do the security clearance are behind on
their quotas and need to speed things up which
means actually there are more chances of individuals
getting through, getting secrecy clearances
and choosing to leak. They still face the
risk of losing their jobs, losing their security
clearance and losing their jobs. So there
is a potential there, there is still the same
risks, so it's hard to gauge how any individual
with will make that decision to risk their
livelihood for public good.
Conditions are all there to suggest it will
happen more frequently and I think the way
it has been handled is typical and is likely
to happen again. That if you to get leaks,
the press will get awards for the publications
based on the leaks but the leaker will face
severe prosecution.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Several years ago I heard
a somewhat similar talk in which a former
newspaper editor said that newspapers do three
functions that nobody else does and you dwelled
on one of them, almost nobody else does, investigative
journalism, with deep pockets sometimes. Second,
they are a major institution with legal backing
which individual bloggers like myself are
not. And, third, they have master readership,
some people take the "Washington Post" for
the bridge column or for the horoscope or
whatever but they end up purchasing the rest
of the paper so they have a master readership.
And the third point, of course, with the splintering
of the internet everybody has their own readership
and people are reading stuff that they agree
with, and they are not, the master readership
is not amassed quite the same way. And, so
I'm kind of interested in the end what your
answer was to the those three things and maybe
you could repeat it or what is your answer
to the fact that nobody is doing those three
functions as well now.
>> SAM LEBOVIC: Yeah. So I think the answer
to all of them is slightly different, right,
I think this is the benefit of distinguishing
between a right to free speech and a right
to information.
So the problems of the decline of a mass media
market and the splintering is a problem of
collective governance and of sort of having
a common culture in which people are reading
similar things, having similar talking points
and are not in their echo chambers. That's
a problem from one angle. On the other hand,
the mass press of the middle decade of the
20th Century wasn't always the most democratic
common culture, certainly around Cold War
prerogatives, things were oppressed in the
public good and having only a few small people
responsible for deciding what everybody gets
access to isn't necessarily the best thing.
So I think that there are challenges to a
more diversified media market but there are
also real opportunities so I'm less concerned
about the decline of people just kind of picking
up the news for the bridge columns or comics,
and getting the front page or listening to
echo chambers than the first problem.
And the first problem is how do support investigative
journalism and reporting and that's a different
problem to how do you make sure there are
channels for discussion and debate. There
aren't good solutions at the moment but I
think if we focus on propping up investigative
journalism and the reporting function rather
than everything else that a newspaper might
do, you can actually see it's not that expensive
to hire newsrooms in the grand scheme of things
to do reporting particularly when you don't
have to pay for the delivery trucks and newsprint
and, like, the labor costs of a larger newspaper.
So what can be done? There are a few different
options on the table at the moment, there
are investigations into using nonprofit laws
to allow newspapers to incorporate as sort
of nonprofit ventures, there is philanthropic
investment in newspapers to kind of establish
a sort of endowment in the equivalents of
the university. And less debated in the U.S.
but I think also appropriate you can imagine
publically endowing investigative newsrooms,
something like on the BBC model but targeted
not at opinion columns and not at sort of
soft coverage but just at the kind of pro-public
model of individual organizations devoted
to gathering news. Now you don't want all
of those to be government funded, that creates
a certain problems over time but some of those
are philanthropic-endowed papers. And, you
know, given how much cheaper it is today,
it is also possible to imagine consumer-based,
subscription-based reporting organizations,
so that would be my answer to folks on that
problem, not the broader problem of desegregation.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. I want to thank you.
Again, I'm not from the United States of America,
I'm from the Caribbean. I grew up in the Netherlands.
So this leads to a few questions based on
what you have to say. Obviously, if you grew
up in the Netherlands, at least when I was
there, you touched on it but you didn't go
too far. The fact that anybody who is in the
papers in the United States, it becomes very
apparent if you come from anywhere else, how
very, very, very limited what is reported
here. I mean it's extreme and extraordinarily
limited, right? Very little about foreign
news, very little about, you know about what
is going on from different angles. So that's
the first problem. And how do you see what
you talked about playing into that, manifesting
that. The second issue is that you talk about
the fact that the newspapers are facing, growing
problems because of growing government secrecy
with getting information from government,
right? But one of your talks was the fact
that the media is part of privatized media
system, right? What about the problem of the
media getting the information from the big
massive businesses that dominate or in the
liberal model that dominates society, right,
where because it's a kind of a free market
kind of thing, it makes it much more difficult
even to go after that, right? So that's another
big problem. And the third issue, obviously
you come from -- I believe you come from Australia,
right?
>> SAM LEBOVIC: Uh-huh.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: To somewhat compare and
contrast, right, do you see these same things
starting to develop in Australia? Do you see
the government in Australia moving also in
the direction of you can write whatever you
want, have can have whatever opinions you
want, the problem is you are not going to
get it. Is this development that you see taking
place internationally or do you see, for example,
in Europe with the European court system and
stuff like that, these different, these things
playing out differently in different places
giving the ideological and, you know, and
your political background. Thank you.
>> SAM LEBOVIC: So The final question about
the sort of comparative question about how
distinct the U.S. is, I won't speak to Australia
in particular because I haven't been there
for a long time I'm based from here now, so
despite my access I'm not an expert on the
Australia media. I will say what is distinctive
about the United States is actually the right
to free speech is so highly protected. In
these other places there is a right, there
are evolving secrecy regimes but those tend
to look more like the earlier moments in the
U.S. where the press gets access to the information,
so in France, for instance, when us are doing
research on classified information you normally
can get access to it, but you then have to
sign an agreement that you won't publish it.
That's a different model, that's closer to
the World War II model rather than it is to
the American model which doesn't want to do
anything to interfere with free speech rights
and has to construct secrecy in a different
way. The broader economic crises are the same
elsewhere, but in other countries it is more
imaginable to use public dollars for public
journalism because there's not the same fear
that any state involvement will interfere
with the First Amendment.
As for the first two questions, the problem
for both of them is a problem of dollars,
right? How do you get the money to do investigative
reporting on sort of corporate stories in
the corporate sector and how do you get the
money to do international reporting. And the
crises in newspaper economics in the U.S.
undercutting both those conditions. The final
problem I think on the corporate side is that
it was designed -- I mean it would be better
if the papers did investigative journalism
into corporate malpractice but one would probably
settle for like a halfway house and say at
least do no harm in the first instance. And
the real problem is that with slashing newsroom
budgets, more and more reporting is basically
rewrites of handouts and a lot of that is
corporate propaganda, right, handouts coming
from corporations into newsrooms advertising
a new product, then it's an easy way to write
up a story that people will hit on. The classic
is the iPhone story, every time that gets
released that's a leading news story. That's
really advertising running in the news columns
and that's even leading to one side, the problem
of negative advertising where newspapers are
actually selling their white space to corporations
for profit.
So I think in both cases the problem is trying
to do more with less produces a kind of weaker,
less of a watch dog news function and in that
sense I think actually that's a kind of global
trend, it's a real problem. What makes it
distinctive in the U.S. is the absolute right
to free speech. Hi, Eric.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, actually I am a history
guy so can we go back to the 30s if you don't
mind. Actually a quick question, you said
at the National Archives you found letters
discussing the New Deal proposals about constituents
and Americans advocating Congress not to pass
these three proposals, the New Deal reforms.
I'm wondering what are the motivations behind
Americans at the time or like New Deal era
newspapers openly advocating against, like,
anti-trust legislation and why would a normal
American feel inspired enough to align themselves
with newspaper barons.
>> SAM LEBOVIC: Okay. So the letters tend
not to come from the general public. The letters
tend to come from small -- I mean they come
in various forms. They come from publishers
or from spokespersons for publishers. There
are letters from individual members of the
public and they sort of spray across the issue
depending on their politics. So some of them
who love the New Deal are, like, I can't believe
you are getting such a raw deal in the corporate
press and others who hate the New Deal think
that FDR is a dictator and they are proud
of the press for standing up to them. So there's
a kind of broad spray on those issues.
You know, I guess the more important point
for us is this is a real debate in the 1930s,
people are very upset with the newspaper coverage
of the New Deal. When FDR is reelected in
'36, you know, all the newspapers had come
out really opposed to his reelection. The
night that he wins, protestors on the streets
of Chicago actually egged the Chicago Tribune
building and set fire to delivery trucks.
There is an idea here that this is a fight
against the Chicago Tribune and people were
writing in to cancel their subscriptions to
the Tribune because of the coverage. There's
a sense here the newspapers were very much
a conservative force in American politics.
We think a lot today about sort of the mainstream
media, or the lame-street media, as a liberal
media. That's a really new development in
the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1920s, 30s and
40s the expectation is that there is a mainstream
media and it's a force in society, it's the
conservative force, big business is on the
wrong side of the track again the people.
And something very interesting happens in
the 60s that fixes that, historians are still
trying to work that out. The best guess is
that it has something to do with newspaper
coverage of the Civil Rights Movement and
particularly when the "New York Times" belatedly
starts sending correspondents to the South,
that this is seen as a kind of new moment
of a national news media that is opposed to
kind of state rights and conservative values.
But it's a complicated story what the average
person thinks about all this.
Okay, I think we are out of time, so thank
you very much for coming. It's been a real
pleasure.
[Applause]
