Document created: 27 August 04
Air University Review, November-December
1970
The military services have a legitimate interest in how the press reports their affairs. The objective of all news reports is to provide the public with a solid base on which to form its opinions. Every government agency must, therefore, do what it can to insure that the reports of its activities are complete and in focus, not fragmentary or distorted. But, contrary to some opinion, we in the military information field do not “control” the press or “manage” the news. Our efforts to convey the facts to the people must be conducted within the framework of our governmental structure. So we have a special obligation to understand that framework, how it functions, and how we operate within it.
Our democracy operates on a revolutionary theory—that the people know best. That is what the American Revolution was all about. We believe that the majority, provided they are well informed, will come up with better solutions to our national problems than any single leader or small group of leaders, even if they are geniuses. We believe that informed discussion and debate on national policies are the basic ingredients of our strength as an open society. Experience over the past two centuries bears out these beliefs.
The whole context of the relationship between the government and the press in the United States was set by the Founding Fathers. Those wise men, who feared that government power might be used for wicked purposes, so framed the Constitution as to enable the press to keep a constant watch on the government. They not only prohibited the government from censoring or regulating the press―that’s what the British government did, and after all they had only recently gained their independence from the British—but they even assumed that the press would censor the government. “No government ought to be without censors,” Jefferson wrote to President Washington, “and where the press is free, no one ever will.” Jefferson believed that the survival of this new nation depended upon information that would, in his phrase, “penetrate the whole mass of the people.” In fact, he thought information more important than the governmental structure itself: “The basis of the government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right: and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” He also said, “When the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.” He was referring to the role of the press in informing the people on what the government is doing. Accordingly, our free press watches and criticizes the government and informs the people.
It is clear from all this that the founders considered informing the people to be a function of democracy. Yet they did not think it wise to set up an official information system. Instead, in effect, the press―privately owned, beyond official control―was incorporated into the machinery of government, but in a way that insured its freedom from any particular administration. This situation has made for a continuing struggle between the press and the government.
The press has not always pleased men in public life, despite their recognition of its vital role. Nearly all American presidents have arrived in office praising the press and departed condemning it. Editors like to quote Thomas Jefferson’s remark that he would not hesitate to choose “newspapers without a government” rather than the reverse, but in the end even he changed his mind. Angry with the treatment he got from the press while he was President, he said: “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” That quotation is not often cited by editors.
Probably every President since Jefferson has had similar complaints. Woodrow Wilson started his first press conference by saying: “I feel that a large part of the success of public affairs depends on the newspapermen. . .” But before long he was saying: “I am so accustomed to having everything reported erroneously that I have almost come to the point of believing nothing that I see in the newspapers.”
President Truman once wrote to a reporter: “I wish you’d do a little soul searching and see if at great intervals, the President may be right.” And according to Theodore Sorensen, President Kennedy never challenged the accuracy of Oscar Wilde’s observation: “In America, the President reigns for four years, but Journalism governs forever.”
Yet, no matter how angry they may get with the press, all who hold public office come to understand the importance of the press in making government work. The press, in fact, is a vital participant in our governmental process. It is the “fourth branch of government,” a term Douglass Cater used for the title of his book on this subject. The “other” three branches would be quite different in their operation and probably not as effective if it were not for the press.
So government and the press, like it or not, live together in a sort of miserable marriage. It reminds one of the story of the disciple who asked Socrates whether it was better to marry or not to marry. “Whichever you do,” replied Socrates, “you will regret it.” Sometimes, as in marriage, the press and the government hate each other; and sometimes they get along reasonably well together. But the conflicts between them can never be wholly resolved unless one or the other abandons its responsibilities—in which event all of us would suffer, for a free society cannot survive without this peculiar partnership.
It is important to understand the origins of this relationship. Not only our government but our very form of democracy is dependent on the continuance of a free press. Not only our people but the very nature of our society is dependent on it. And the press affects our society in some very tangible as well as intangible ways. It affects public opinion, both directly and indirectly, and thus plays a major role in shaping—and changing—our society. In fact, the press has been a dominant force in much of the social legislation which affects our lives.
The press of a hundred years ago, for example, was responsible for crystallizing public opinion about the abolition of slavery and brought about a favorable climate for the amendments to the Constitution which grew out of the philosophical concept that all men are created equal. If the newspapers had not conditioned the public to accept this point of view over a long period of time, Abraham Lincoln might never have pursued it and the Civil War might not have taken place when it did. Another of the great changes in our society has been the rise of the labor unions, which came about because for more than fifty years the press presented the cause of labor favorably and thus created a climate of public opinion that made it possible for legislators to pass the great labor laws.
The press today is infinitely more widespread than it was 100 years ago or 50 or even 20 years ago, for, while newspapers have expanded their circulations, the chief difference lies in the enormous audience which television now reaches. If the press was influential before television, its impact has been multiplied many times over by the advent of television. Today many people, including those who are not well educated and even illiterate, have seen on television more of the world around them than had the most sophisticated travelers of fifty years ago. They have watched the democratic election process in action, from convention to campaign to the counting of votes; they have watched historic international debates and confrontations at the United Nations, visited other nations and other continents with the President, seen the savagery of guerrilla warfare in Africa and in Vietnam, and witnessed the brutality and destructiveness of riots in our own cities and on our campuses.
The audiences of today are measured in millions and tens of millions, for both the written and the broadcast media. Unquestionably this kind of circulation must impact heavily on public opinion, and this influence is felt in many ways, though there is no way to measure it precisely. It is so pervasive that, whether people are interested in public affairs or not, they are affected. This became clear when the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University investigated the political preferences of people in one county in Ohio. So many people admitted that their votes were often swayed by others that those influential names which kept cropping up were labeled “opinion leaders.”
This study constituted a sharp breakthrough in social research. Studies of personal influence began to cluster about the theory of opinion leadership, and the opinion leaders in each field proved to be readers of newspapers and magazines and listeners to broadcast news, or else the writers and broadcasters themselves. In fact, attention to the press is a condition of opinion leadership. The opinion leaders are thus simply extending the power of the press to influence public opinion.
But while the press has helped bring about changes in our society by influencing public opinion, the press itself is affected by the changes it has helped bring about as well as by the normal changes of a growing society. Some very significant changes have taken place in our society in this century, including our increasing interest in public affairs. People are concerned about their total environment today. For example, where once the disposal of waste was a private matter, or at least a local matter, it is now a matter of national concern. Where once the wage contract between the employer and the employee was a local arrangement, now the whole country is concerned. The pay of garbage collectors in New York City or of teachers in Washington, D.C., affects Oklahoma City and Los Angeles as well.
As a result, the press has been swamped with an interest in news. Wherever the citizen and the public interest meet—in crime, in zoning, in consumer regulations, in labor matters, in national defense, wherever the government and the people meet—these events must be reported if the people are to have the kind of information they need in order to govern themselves properly.
The fact is that we Americans, in terms of the amount of information available to us, are the best informed about public affairs of any people in the world. Through the various media of the press, each man’s realization that he is involved in all other men’s lives, one of history’s great change-making ideas, has been vastly expanded. As never before and nowhere else, the press has done the job first enunciated by James Madison, the father of our Constitution: “A people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”
The trouble is that we are becoming less able to understand the meaning of current events because the information itself is outpacing our capacity to comprehend. It has very little to do with the performance of the news media or with any efforts by the government or the press to suppress or manage the news. It is simply that everything is becoming more complicated, more scientific, more technological; and most of us do not have the necessary education or training to comprehend fully the things that are happening.
Information, of course, is simply another word for knowledge, and the increase in the sheer bulk of knowledge is another revolutionary change of our time. The increase in knowledge during the past thirty years equals the amount gained in all the years of human history up to then. Some specialized areas have far outstripped others; in the field of physics, for example, the quantity of knowledge is doubling every ten years. But though the total amount of knowledge has multiplied many times, that part of it which is common knowledge—which ordinary individuals know—has increased much more slowly.
As areas of new knowledge have grown, they have become more and more specialized, and the specialists in the fields have come to use language that is less and less comprehensible to the layman. Today every public question—national defense, environmental pollution, educational policy—involves highly specialized knowledge. The role of the press is to translate such knowledge into language the rest of us can understand, but there is considerable doubt on the part of many knowledgeable critics that the press is doing this job as well as it could, and certainly not as well as it should. As a result, there is a growing credibility gap separating the press and people. There is a disturbing skepticism among readers as to whether what they read in their newspapers is either true or relevant.
An old story illustrates this skepticism most aptly. A fellow asked a friend what he should do about a very critical article in the newspaper. Should he demand a public apology or file a suit for damages? His friend listened to the complaint and then said: “What should you do? Do nothing. Remember, half the people who read that paper never saw that article. Half of those who did read the article did not understand it. Half of those who did understand it did not believe it. And half of those who believed it are not worth bothering about.”
The question is, Whose fault is it? The press is limited not so much by its own capacity to present news as it is by the reader’s capacity to absorb news. That’s the critical factor. Surveys have shown that people rarely spend more than 30 minutes a day—and usually less than that—reading their newspapers, and they spend another 15 to 30 minutes listening to radio or television news. This modest investment in time drastically limits the amount of news one can absorb and gives the press an excuse for limiting the amount of news it will publish.
As a result, of the thousands of things that happen on any given day, reporters and editors make only a very small selection to transmit to the public. By being extremely selective in choosing what to publish, the press has both simplified and complicated American life. It has simplified life by making it easy to concentrate on a few issues; it has complicated life by making it difficult for all pertinent views to be heard. Consequently, if individuals or groups have problems to bring before the public, they either have to hire publicity agents and advertise or else create some kind of disturbance so that the press will give them free publicity. Sometimes they do both: hire publicity agents to organize demonstrations.
Politicians particularly are sensitive to what the reporters select for publication, for this is what gets a reaction back home where the votes are. What makes news in our society thus influences public opinion and, in turn, impacts on governmental policy decisions.
The critics contend not that the press is getting worse but that it is not getting better fast enough. McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, suggested in a talk to the American Society of Newspaper Editors that many specialists, particularly in the universities and in government, could tell more of the important relevant truths of our times than the reporters. He added:
The professions of scholarship and of journalism are threatened with a requirement of merger. A cynic might say that the scholars should learn to write and the journalists should learn to think.
Magazine publishers learned years ago that sophisticated readers want and will take time to read sophisticated, interpretive writing in which a skilled reporter examines a complex situation—student demonstrations, the population explosion, the antiballistic missile—studies the background, interviews the experts, and comes up with the essential truth of the situation. Then he writes his story in a way that gets the reader involved and conveys the facts. This is a tough, highly skilled, creative kind of writing. It takes time and it costs money, but magazines have built multimillion circulations on it, and some of the best newspapers are following suit. But the problem of how to relate the news meaningfully—how to provide perspective without ignoring the line between fact and opinion—has still not been resolved satisfactorily by most newspapers, and particularly not by television.
The critics further contend that the press is not covering ideas and causes very well, either. It emphasizes the conflict in the streets, but it does not relate that conflict to the underlying reasons. James Reston, one of the best-known journalists of our times, wrote this not long ago:
I believe we in the news business are going to have to twist ourselves around and see these wider perspectives of the news, the causes as well as the effects, what is going to happen in addition to what governments do. It is not governments that are transforming the world today, but the fertility of people, the creativity of scientists, the techniques of engineers and economists and the discoveries of physicians. Almost all governments in the world today are merely rushing around trying to keep up with the consequences of what is happening outside their own official offices.
Reston points up the failure of the press to give us enough interpretation of the news or perspective on it―and in these days of complex affairs, a simple presentation of facts without explaining the meaning of those facts often has little significance. When newsmen fail to add up the meaning of change, people lack confidence that they know what is going on. And the tragedy is that many of those who are so sure that they know really do not. The loudest shouters, both on the left and the right, tend to ignore the actual changes taking place and base their views on a simple, more static society that simply does not exist any more. The noisiest debates are almost meaningless because their informational backgrounds are fragmentary and out of date.
Even a powerful nation like ours can become pervaded by a sense of its own ignorance and helplessness if it feels that it does not have an adequate view of where it is going. In fact, lack of confidence in the quality of news could be fatal in our kind of society. If society does not know about poverty, for example, it cannot deal with it; if the consumer does not know enough about what he is buying, he cannot protect himself; if the public is unaware of the threats to our country, it cannot provide for an adequate defense system. The way to insure our future is to be sure that information, the essential ingredient of democracy, is adequate.
Our elected officials risk a disastrous confrontation with the voters if they embark on an important policy without first making certain that a large body of Americans is informed about it and has had an opportunity to discuss it. Whatever the government seeks to do—whether it seeks to negotiate an arms control or disarmament treaty, or a treaty to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, or an agreement to limit the production of ballistic missiles—there must be broad-ranging public discussion about the objective and the means of attaining it. The discussion takes place primarily in two places, the Congress and the press. The people participate only vicariously, in a sense, but their concurrence is absolutely imperative to the success of any long-range policy.
This is the beauty of the American system, that the people, through their majority view, are the final arbiters of our destiny, the final decision-makers in our governmental process. The important thing to remember is that the discussions, both in the Congress and in the press, take place over a period of time and that it is impossible for all the facts and all the arguments to emerge in one day—or from one source. Walter Lippmann once said, “The theory of a free press is that the truth will emerge from free reporting and free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account.”
The ultimate burden, therefore, falls upon the individual citizen. If he wishes to be well informed, he must read widely in the press and listen widely to the broadcasts. No one example of either can serve him adequately. Moreover, he must add up what he reads and hears over a period of time and apply his own thinking processes to what he absorbs.
By way of illustration, consider the professor whose hobby was woodworking. He had his basement converted to a carpentry shop and bought a combination power tool that could be rigged as a lathe or a band saw or a drill press or anything else he could conceivably want to use. When he got it home, he took it out of the crate and sat down to read the instructions on how to assemble it. After spending a whole day trying to put it together properly, he finally gave up and called in the neighborhood handyman. This handyman was just an unschooled old fellow who did odd jobs. He came in, looked at all the parts strewn around the basement floor, and, without even glancing at the instructions, went right to work. In a half hour he had the thing completely assembled, without a single nut or bolt left over.
The professor marveled at him. “How on earth did you do that so fast,” he asked, “and without even looking at the instructions?”
“Well, you see,” said the handyman, “I never learned how to read, and when you don’t know how to read, you have to learn how to think.”
The moral, the real point, is that when you do know how to read, you have to think twice as hard—that’s something we should all practice.
Office of the Secretary of the Air
Force
Harry M. Zubkoff is Chief, Executive Agency Services, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, and has been with that office since 1950; until recently he was editor of The Friday Review of Defense Literature. During World War II he served with the U. S. Counter Intelligence Corps in France and Germany. He has had varied free-lance editorial experience and has written articles for encyclopedias, including Americana, Collier’s, and World Book.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor