This was the tenth forum sponsored by the Committee of Concerned Journalists and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. It was held in Boston, Massachusetts and was co-sponsored by Harvard's Nieman Foundation, WGBH and the Boston Globe. WGBH dedicated its sponsorship to the memory of the late Divi Kuhn who spent 23 years with WGHB. Henry Becton, president and General Manager,described him as a member of the family "whose career really exemplified the highest ethical standards in journalism."

Background

In an overview, James Carey, Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism,said he saw the emergence of a new kind of journalistic impulse in America, an independent press not associated with building democracy:

"The separation of business and news is only a problem of the last 100 years. In 1800 the most common name for an American newspaper was The Advertiser. Not advertising in the sense of the purchase of space, but one of its most fundamental purposes was to advertise the wares of industry -- that is to publish prices, quantities, availabilities, the structures of markets to do. Every paper was, in a way, The Wall Street Journal. And the relationship, therefore, between business and journalism was an intimate one...

"Later, when we entered the day of partisan journalism there was not a conflict between the business office and the news operation, for both were joined together. The source of one's subsidy is also the source of one's news.

"It was only at the point when the American press declared its independence of the political system, when it said in the late 19th Century, we are going to be independent of political parties, that the problem of the separation of news and business erupts within it. It did not declare its status as an independent of partisanship for reasons of affecting this separation between news and business. I believe it did it because of the issue of race...

"But once the press declared its independence against political parties and other institutions, it also had to declare independence from its own business office. After all, Upton Sinclair, who led much of this movement with muckraking wrote not only about universities, not only about business, but about the press itself. And as a result ... organs of journalism have generally been owned by journalistic companies.

"There's no reason why the oil industry should not have owned the American press. There's no reason why the automotive industry should not have owned the American press. After all, they've owned it in other countries... That did not happen, and that independence which has persisted in significant ways up to now was reflected in the iron wall of separation...

"One of the peculiar facts about the charter of the Columbia School of Journalism is that Joseph Pulitzer, a businessman if there ever was one, wrote into the charter that we may not teach the business side of journalism for he thought it would corrupt us to do so.

"In 1942 when the Commission on Freedom of the Press was formed by Henry Luce and Robert Hutchins was appointed its chairman, this issue was on the agenda of the commission. I believe it was on the agenda because of the rise of broadcasting, which made it much, much more problematic. For after all, broadcasting organizations were more often in the business of entertainment, and their commitment to news came from regulation built into the Communications Act of 1934 which made it a necessity rather than a luxury of their operation...

Now, "[If] everything has its season, has the independence of news and business had its season, too? Is it something that will be passed by as in fact the partisan press has been passed by in the United States? Perhaps.

"What then is the problem?

"[the problem is] there is a new and ominous element in the mixture of this argument. It is perhaps worth reminding us that republics are fragile. The founding fathers believed by their historical investigation that they generally lasted 200 years. We are in our 211th. They believed they fell because of their corruption, above all, their corruption from wealth.

"Our understanding of journalism including the independent journalism of the 19th Century, has proceeded from the idea taken from the enlightenment culture, that an independent press is a basic institutions of political liberty. But the problem that people increasingly worry about today is that the first amendment ceases in the eyes of many to have the implication of a public trust held in the name of a wider community. Increasingly, it seems more to refer to a property right, establishing ground rules for economic competition.

"And lest you think this hyperbolic -- listen to one of the easiest persons to quote on this, Rupert Murdoch, one of the new barons of the conglomerates. He says, in referring to Asia, Singapore is not liberal, but it's clean and free of drug addicts. Not so long ago it was an impoverished, exploited colony with famines, diseases, and other problems. Now people find themselves in three room apartments with jobs and clean streets. Countries like Singapore are going the right way. Material incentives create business and the free market economy. If politicians try it the other way around, with democracy, the Russian model is the result. Ninety percent of the Chinese are interested more in a better material life than in the right to vote.

"That is a new voice in the inversion of the historic commitments to the relationship of economic and political democracy.

"But political democracy ... does not follow from the presence of an effective market economy, and a politically free press does not follow from an economically free one. Indeed, when economic values come to dominate politics, liberty is often at risk.

"... We are learning that economism can be quite illiberal. As Murdoch attests, modern economic developments seem to favor authoritarian rather than democratic regimes. Ralph Dardendolf reminds us that authoritarian does not mean totalitarian. For such regimes do not require a great leader nor an invasive ideology nor a permanent mobilization. Nor do they require a self perpetuating public class. These are countries which can be quite nice for the visitor, predictable and undemanding for the natives, but for poets and journalists, they are "unbearable places to live".

"What has been added to the mix is a new experiment ... [of] whether or not you can have free markets without political democracy. The concern that runs through the separation or the de-separation of the walls between journalism and business is this question precisely. Whether the historic meetings of political liberty and a free press in that sense, can be preserved adequately once that wall is effectively breached.

"I have no answer to that question and I presume in one way or another that's what we will be exploring today.

"Speaking at Harvard, and this is the closing note, one cannot help but think of a great book written here in the late 1930s by Joseph Shumpeter called "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy". Shimpater was a great lover of capitalism as an economist, but he feared very much for its future because of what he called its process of creative destruction. He meant by that it was such an innovative economic system that it tended to destroy all things including itself. And it did this ... by destroying the social and political bases that guarantees it.

"As the age of modern, independent journalism goes behind us--and I do believe we're entering a new age of journalism--and ... the ways in which we combine political liberty and economic liberty are also ways in which the business and the news side of these organizations will operate. And how this is worked out and what the values of the first amendment come to mean under this new regime will be critical for us."

[top]