Twilight of Press Freedom

The Rise of People's Journalism

John C. Merrill, Peter J. Gade, Frederick R. Blevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135655563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume offers a historical, philosophical, and practical critique of public and civic journalism--a movement that gained momentum in the final decade of the 20th century. During that period, proponents of the movement have published nearly a dozen books expanding upon and expounding the virtues of journalism, seeking to repair what is thought to be the torn social, political, and moral fabric in America. Although previous works have established a strong practical underpinning for public and civic journalism, none has examined its philosophical roots or challenged its methodology and grounding in neoliberal constructs. This volume does just that, tracing its origins in early philosophy to the current newsroom policies and practices that conflict with traditional constructs in libertarian press theory. Twilight of Press Freedom postulates that institutionalized journalism is fading away and world journalism--prompted by the people--is veering toward more order and social harmony, and away from the traditional idea of the great value of press freedom. The volume provides a critical examination of the trend toward public journalism and considers how press freedom will be impacted by this trend in coming years. Scholars and students in journalism, public opinion, and media studies will find this book insightful and invaluable.

1
The Sunrise of Freedom

I deduce that reason cannot desire for man any other condition than that in which each individual not only enjoys the most absolute freedom of developing himself by his own energies, in his perfect individuality, but in which external nature itself is left unfashioned by any human agency, but only receives the impress given to it by each individual by himself and of his own free will, according to the measure of his wants and instincts, and restricted only by the limits of his powers and his rights.

—Wilhelm von Humboldt

It had been a long night and it looked as if the sun would never rise. But rise it did, the first rays of freedom flickering across Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, in what we usually call the Renaissance. Essentially this sun was freedom, with a variety of new concepts and accomplishments spinning off of it. At first the light was dim, but it grew brighter during the 17th century—the Age of Reason—and reached its zenith at high noon with the 18th-century Enlightenment. Its rays would stimulate artistic and then scientific endeavors as never before and would create a revolutionary philosophical system of optimism and progress that would spread across the Atlantic and create the United States of America.

Of nearly 2,500 years of Western politics and philosophy, only those four centuries (mid-15th through the mid-19th) stand out as a period of progress, optimism, science, rationalism, and freedom. The genesis of this amazing fourcentury era of geographical and intellectual discoveries, with its emphasis on individual achievement and value, was the reintroduction of the ideas of Aristotle into European thought by Thomas Aquinas at the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages. Then, during the Renaissance that presaged the Enlightenment, the power of religion faded, the feudal caste system broke up, church authority was challenged, inventions and explorations flourished, and individualism made its debut. In short, sunlight was filtering through the pale and misty world of medieval Europe.

THE PRE-ENLIGHTENMENT SPIRIT

The Renaissance, appearing in the 15th century, became an important part of Western intellectual consciousness and merged into the spirit of the Enlightenment. Referred to at the time by the Italian humanist Ficino of Florence as “this golden century,” the Renaissance brought back to light “the liberal arts, which were all but extinguished: grammar, poetry, oratory, painting, sculpture, architecture, music…and all this in Florence” (Nisbet, 1980, p. 102). Here we see, emerging from the Middle Ages, the rebirth of Greco-Roman ideas, although some critics see many such ideas also existing in medieval times. And as Nisbet pointed out, all was not light and progress during the Renaissance. For instance, there was the great interest in the occult, magic, and fate or fortune (see page). Even in enlightened Florence of the day, according to Nisbet (see page), such thinkers as Machiavelli and his younger contemporary Francesco Guiccardini believed that fortuna (chance, fate) has control over a person’s life.

During the 17th and early 18th centuries, this early-Enlightenment sunlight was bearing down on Britain and shining into the Italian city-states and Germany. Even more strongly it shone down on France, whose thinkers we observe shortly. Italy felt the intellectual warmth, but to a much less degree. It was actually in England that the Enlightenment was most prevalent. The fundamental and characteristic ideas originated there. As Frederick Beiser (1996) said, “It was no accident that the Aufklaerer, philosophes, and illuministi [of Germany, France, and Italy] saw England as the source of their inspiration” (see page). In Italy, as far back as the 16th century, such Renaissance figures as Copernicus, Galileo, and Machiavelli in their own ways challenged the Catholic Church and veered toward rationalism, setting the stage for the Age of Reason.

Probably the foremost essayist of the Renaissance was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), whose idol was Socrates, and it was from him that he appropriated his basic rationalist philosophy. For Montaigne, the greatest evil of the age was fanaticism and, in his original and imaginative style, he assailed it vigorously. Montaigne’s essays were extremely varied, thoughtful, and stylishly written, and they evidenced an intellectualism that presaged the later Renaissance and Enlightenment. For a good anthology of his essays, illustrated by the artist, see Essays of Michel de Montaigne (Dali, 1942). The scope of his essays is indicated by such titles as these: “Of the Education of Children,” “Of Cannibals,” “Of Democritus and Heraclitus,” “Of Repentance,” “Of Vanity,” and “Of Experience.”

Another Frenchman, René Descartes (1596–1650), is known as the father of rationalism and one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the pre- Enlightenment 17th century. After his education in his hometown University of Poitiers and much traveling in Europe as a soldier, he settled in Holland, where he could have the greatest freedom of expression. He was early obsessed with the question of whether we could know anything for certain. Between 1620 and 1649, he produced his major works, Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1641). He died in 1650 in Stockholm, where he was tutoring Queen Christina of Sweden in philosophy.

Descartes was, like Montaigne, a superb stylist in his writing. He was the forerunner of the French philosophes, and like them was preoccupied with human freedom—from prejudice and from social and political oppression. Although Descartes was vitally interested in other aspects of philosophy, his fundamental concern was with freedom. For him, other traits (e.g., mastery over the passions and progress) presuppose freedom. He thought about, and wrote about, freedom of opportunity, freedom of the will, freedom from prejudice, and freedom from indifference. A firm believer in social progress, Descartes thought that if a person were willing, he or she had the capability of self-determination (Schouls, 1989, pp. 40–48). Such strong Cartesian beliefs as the primacy of human freedom and the possibility of autonomy filtered strongly into the 18thcentury Enlightenment and became the core beliefs of press libertarianism.

Also in the 17th century, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, the great Jewish thinker Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) was championing freedom of expression and was serving as the central figure in a band of freethinkers who were drawn to Holland, where he lived. Long before it was popular to do so, liberal-minded Spinoza suggested that freedom of speech was necessary for public order, an idea that might get a cool reception by the communitarians and public journalists of today. However, freedom was the song being sung by philosophers throughout Europe, and Spinoza and his contemporary, Descartes, added their influential voices to the choir.

THE GERMAN AUFKLAERUNG

The 18th century saw the appearance in Germany of the great Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who honored freedom and reason but, as a Platonic idealist, served as a bridge from rationalism to romanticism. The first to apply the term Enlightenment had been the Germans. They referred to the period as the Aufklaerung (Enlightenment) and it probably was used first by Kant (Gay, 1973, p. 13). Kant and his follower, Hegel, helped usher in the sentiment-endowed period of romanticism that followed in the 19th century; they are discussed later in this chapter.

Two other German thinkers of the 18th century should be mentioned: Gottbold Lessing (1729–1781) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Lessing was probably the foremost thinker in Germany to be influenced by the French philosophe movement. Censorship being very tight in Germany, the freedom movement never gained much headway. Lessing argued against religious intolerance, and his most important book is Nathan the Wise, written in 1779. In it he urged religious tolerance of the Jews, and also maintained that human excellence was in no way related to religion. Lessing was known for his lively writing style. Friedrich Nietzsche, probably the premier German stylist, characterized his fellow writers as long-winded, ponderous, with solemnly clumsy styles. The exception, said Nietzsche, was Lessing. This was because of “his histrionic nature which understood much and understood how to do many things” (Nietzsche, 1966, pp. 40–41). According to Nietzsche, Lessing was influenced by Diderot and Voltaire, two French Enlightenment stylists, but could not compare to Machiavelli, who, writing about two centuries earlier, presented the most serious matters in “a boisterous allegrissimo (brisk and lively manner).”

Humboldt’s most famous book was On the Limits of State Action, written when he 24 years old, 5 years before Mill’s On Liberty. Humboldt was an educator and most of his writings focused on the problems of German education. He founded the University of Berlin and changed the Prussian Gymnasium to adhere to his own philosophy. A champion of personal rights and morality, his goal was a free, self-conscious, self-determining individual (Humboldt, 1993, p. xxix). He believed with Mill and Tocqueville that the only justification for governmental interference is to prevent harm to others. Although Humboldt’s life lapped over into the early 19th century, he largely characterized the Enlightenment in his dedication to individualism, freedom, and reason.

The most influential Enlightenment philosopher in Italy was Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), who was particularly interested in the European outlook on justice and the penal system. He argued that the judicial system should not be designed for punishment, but for the protection of society. He even thought that training jailed criminals would teach them social values that would keep them from repeating their lawless ways. Beccaria would have outlawed capital punishment at a time when public executions were common, but he did call for vigorous enforcement of criminal laws, and he thought that the threat of punishment would cause people to obey the law. He really had little to say about freedom or individualism, but his book On Crimes and Punishments (1764), surely the most influential criminal law book ever written, made a lasting impact throughout Europe (G.W.Carey, 1984, p. 31).

ADVENT OF LIBERALISM

In the 17th century as the sun of freedom rose higher, English scientists (e.g., Newton), writers (e.g., Milton, Bunyan, and Swift), and philosophers (e.g., Hobbes and Locke) stressed rationalism in human affairs. An age of confidence, empiricism, and reason had begun. It should be said, however, that this generally optimistic century did include such an influential writer as Thomas Hobbes, who definitely was not an optimist and who believed that people were inherently evil and must be strictly ruled. The medieval shackles of mysticism, emotionalism, sentiment, and faith that were loosened during the Renaissance were broken, and for the first time a serious respect for reason became the mark of the European culture. No longer was a person’s intellect suspect, but something to be respected—a virtue. The spirit of this hopeful, rational, and optimistic period, that reached its zenith in the 18th century, was not to last long (only into the mid-19th century) but it was to make a profound impact.

The Enlightenment brought about many changes, most of all in political philosophy. Perhaps the most notable result of the new philosophy was the establishing of a truly revolutionary political system and country—the United States. It was from the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers in England (largely Locke, Hobbes, and Hume) and in France (mainly Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and later Constant) that the Founding Fathers got the political insights with which they created the new nation. It was a philosophy—with some exceptions, of course—that reified individualism and freedom. Peter Gay (1973, p. 16) described the Enlightenment as “a congenial and informal movement of literary men—of philosophers, critics, playwrights, essayists, storytellers, editors, all of them articulate and prolific men of words.”

The American concept of press freedom stemmed from the Enlightenment and bore these main characteristics: the press is free from government control, the press operates in a laissez-faire system, the press is privately owned, the press is a quasipublic service, and the press will seek to find the truth. Additional characteristics were grafted onto these basic ones in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the press is a check on government, the press presents a pluralism of information and ideas (Levy, 1985), and the press must use its freedom responsibly. The Enlightenment spawned the philosophy of liberalism, a concept that began to lose its power in the late 19th century. Listen to James Carey (1977) of Columbia University talking about liberalism and making the point of its outmoded status:

Liberalism, in its 18th century form, has suffered from sustained and withering attacks, particularly from the Left, and from the corrosive effects of industrialization, urbanization and mass democracy: movements that have destroyed the form of society from which liberalism emerged and to which it was adapted and most pertinent. The effect of this dual attack has been to render liberalism weak and defensive: admired in theory almost to the precise degree it is abandoned in practice, (p. 627)

Carey called 18th-century liberalism “a species of individualism…grounded in the proposition that the individual existed before society and…was of greater value” (p. 622). Carey, a sympathizer with today’s communitarians and public journalists, like many other intellectuals today believes that classical liberalism has outlived its usefulness, and the individualism and freedom that it enthroned should be replaced by a new spirit of community and social responsibility.

We should probably mention Aristotle at this point. His philosophy was basically that of the Enlightenment: the importance of the individual, the dominance of man’s secular reason, the affirmation of certainty and objectivity, the reality of absolutes, the value of self-fulfillment and personal happiness, the high value given to intellectual development, and the firm belief in human progress. Aristotelianism greatly impacted the Enlightenment and for a while banished the mysticism and the idealistic philosophy of the Platonic tradition (to be revived by Kant at the end of the 18th century and the Romantics that followed him).

Even earlier than Aristotle, in 6th-century China, a voice for freedom spoke out. It was Laotzu, perhaps the first known libertarian. “Without law or compulsion,” he said, “men would dwell in harmony.” He is best known as the author of the Tao Te Ching, presenting the classic Tao (spiritual serenity or Way), the verbal underpinning of Taoism. Here is yin and yang, the unity of opposites, showing that harmony can come about through competition. It offers advice to rulers not to interfere with the lives of the people. By and large, however, Laotzu’s philosophy was an aberration, and China ever since has followed the communitarian tenets of Confucius. It was in the West, in Europe, that freedom or libertarianism came onto the world stage.

However, it was a long time coming. Languishing for centuries in Europe, it suddenly appeared in the 17th century when the English poet John Milton wrote Areopagitica (1644), a powerful tract against official licensing of the press and for freedom of religion. Under the banner of the Anglican Church, the Star Chamber and other authoritarian forces became increasingly repressive, leading to the Puritan Revolution, led by Oliver Cromwell. In 1642 a civil war ensued that swept the Stuart king, Charles I, from power. However, Cromwell’s harsh leadership lasted only until 1660 when Charles’ son, Charles II, was put on the throne. Milton, according to Altschull (1990, p. 40), played a part in all this, lashing out at all signs of authoritarianism. How ridiculous, Milton wrote in 1644, for the church to license publications to keep people away from evil. How can they know good from evil, how can they apprehend vice without hearing about it? And he said, and this is important to journalistic libertarianism: People must read all sides of questions and issues and not be exposed to a single side. Only then can they understand goodness and decency, or as he put it, human virtue.

The Miltonic concept most appreciated by modern journalists is his selfrighting principle—the idea that truth will win out over falsehood in the marketplace of ideas. Libertarians everywhere delight in Milton’s ringing words describing the value of free expression:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? (Milton, Areopagitica, in Altschull, 1990, pp. 40–41)

When it came to religion, however, Milton was not so liberal. While he worked for the Council of State in the Cromwell Protectorate, he muzzled Catholic writings, condemned Catholics generally, and even supported (there is a need to eliminate tyrants) the beheading of Charles I. In spite of Milton’s inconsistency, he raised the torch of liberty and believed that it was a means to finding the truth. One should note that, for Milton and for those thinkers who followed him in the 18th century, freedom was not absolute. They generally held that reason would dictate moderation in its use. This was not just a period of freedom but of reason as well. Therefore freedom—and that included freedom of expression— should be used rationally.

Another 17th-century thinker, not nearly as optimistic as Milton about the nature of man, was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). He saw men as badly in need of authority due to their intrinsic savage natures and unpredictable actions. People, he thought, are naturally wicked, not good, and need protection from one another. Although Hobbes was an early spokesman of the Enlightenment and had a theoretical love of freedom, he was in many ways akin to the 20thcentury communitarians in his belief that people should live orderly lives in community. For Hobbes, there must be a firm government (or “commonwealth”) that would rein in the natural excesses of human action. The most important social force, for Hobbes, was order, and “order means regularity, predictability, and system as opposed to randomness, chance, and chaos,” according to Wrong (1994, p. 37). For Hobbes, the provider of such order should be an all-powerful leader or monarch. He explained his governmental ideas in his influential Leviathan, published in 1651.

Going against popular belief, historian Walter Berns called Hobbes “the first libertarian” and “the founder of the modern liberal state” (G.W.Carey, 1984, p. 28). Berns pointed out that modern Americans are indebted to Hobbes for their appreciation of privacy. “Before him, and for a time after him,” Berns wrote that “it was understood that every human activity was subject to public scrutiny and public control, if not by the state, then by the church, and usually by the state as church” (G.W.Carey, p. 28). Hobbes was the first political philosopher to argue that all was private and that the public realm was artificial, being, as it is, made by man.

So for Hobbes, man is a private, not a public, animal, thinking first of himself and only of others as means to a selfish end. This is why he said that life in the state of nature is a “war of everyman against everyman,” a war that “ceaseth only in death” (G.W.Carey, 1984, p. 29). This warfare will cease, said Hobbes, only by the individual turning over his natural rights to the ruler created by a social contract. This Leviathan or ruler, however, would confine himself to keeping the peace and would otherwise leave the people alone to pursue their private lives and activities. This kind of state is called a “liberal” state because its objective is to grant the people the greatest range of liberty consistent with peace. Hobbes believed the principal duty of the sovereign was to see that neighbor does not bother neighbor and to guard against foreign enemies—and nothing else. This concept of limited government is, indeed, a libertarian tenet.

So the verdict on Hobbes is really unclear. Was he an authoritarian or a libertarian? Certainly he exhibited signs of being both. He would have people living in a strictly ordered society, but at the same time he would permit a great degree of personal freedom. Those living in such a society, because they fear anarchy and war, are willing to accept this harsh authority. The commonwealth was created by the citizens for their own self-preservation and so that, protected from the anarchic tendencies of their fellows, they could enjoy considerable freedom. For Hobbes, security comes before freedom. As Berlin (1969, p. 19) wrote, Hobbes turns out to have been right and not his contemporary Locke: People really desire above all else not happiness nor liberty nor justice, but security.

It is somewhat ironic that modern communitarians often criticize Hobbes as an Enlightenment thinker when, in one important way, he agreed with one of their basic desires: social order. He believed so much in order that he advocated force if necessary to get it. This, of course, would not resonate well with communitarians who would...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: A New Spirit of Community
• 1 The Sunrise of Freedom
• 2 Freedom From Freedom
• 3 Order Out of Chaos
• 4 The Communitarian Alternative
• 5 Anticipating Community
• 6 Rise of Public Journalism
• 7 Talking Public Journalism
• 8 Practicing Public Journalism
• 9 The Waning of Press Autonomy
• Epilogue: A Brief View Into the Future
• References
• About the Authors