The Recalcitrant U.S. Press

Abstract

Near the end of his valuable monograph about efforts by the U.S. press to stymie largescale public research projects into press performance, Stephen Bates quotes the man perhaps most identified with such studies, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had led the Commission on Freedom of the Press. The press, Hutchins wrote, “does not care for criticism, even self-criticism.” Hutchins was reacting to a study that had been proposed by the journalism organization SDX, which had been shot down by other journalists, but his sentiments, frustrated and even cynical though they might be, resonate beyond their immediate historical context. Bates details four of these studies, including the one proposed by SDX, and investigates how “the press” stopped them from ever taking off. These abortive studies form an obvious pattern, as Bates amply demonstrates. These studies were instigated by a sense of crisis. Some combination of scholars and journalists set them up. Money was available to fund them, often from foundations, or from the press itself. But the press reacted negatively to them when word got out, and they were shuttered before they began. But one common element that Bates identifies stands out as a potentially fatal flaw: These studies were all designed to cause the press to change in some positive way. In fact, in distinguishing attempts at accountability from a mere sense of responsibility, Bates defines them as intended to effect change. That desire is fatal, though, because the U.S. press, steeped in a tradition of independence and convinced that its primary job is to hold other institutions to account, does not like to take criticism from outsiders, and rarely even engages in self-criticism. This is true not just of the large-scale, one-off studies that Bates describes. The press as an institution avoids changing in response to press critics, scholarly studies, good-faith and bad-faith political criticism, public comments on social media, and even to its own in-house ombudsmen. Hutchins was spot-on. The American press does not care for criticism.