Name: Stephen Bates
University Affiliation and Position: Associate Professor, Greenspun School of Journalism, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Book Title: An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press
1. Describe the focus of your book.
It’s a book about the Commission on Freedom of the Press, known as the Hutchins Commission, and its 1947 report, A Free and Responsible Press.I trace the origins of the project, the biographies of the people involved, the development of their ideas, and the public response to the report, as well as why it mattered then and why it matters now.
2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
When I read A Free and Responsible Press in the 1990s, I was struck by its prescient and eloquent analysis of the role of the news media in a liberal democracy. The book is part of the canon in schools of journalism. I think it should be known more widely, as the product of the greatest collaboration of American intellectuals in the 20th century.
3. What archives or research materials did you use?
The Hutchins Commission generated thousands of pages of memos, drafts of books, and transcripts of deliberations; several universities have more or less full sets. In the transcripts, one can see preeminent thinkers grappling with fundamental issues of philosophy and policy. A second crucial collection was the Time Inc. internal files, which I was able to consult at the Time offices; the files are now at the New-York Historical Society. Henry R. Luce principally funded the Hutchins Commission, and I think I was the first to see his handwritten annotations, mostly unfavorable, on a draft of A Free and Responsible Press. In all, I visited nearly twenty archives, thanks in part to a Senior Scholar Grant from AEJMC.
4. How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
A Free and Responsible Press is a classic, but it’s the work of a group of people who didn’t fully agree, so it embodies a lot of compromises as well as a handful of contradictions. The dialogues in the Hutchins Commission’s transcripts and memos are more incisive, with the members explaining and defending their positions. Along the way, they discuss many now-timely topics, most of which don’t appear in the report: political polarization exacerbated by a partisan press, foreign and domestic groups trying to manipulate public opinion, the perils of demagoguery and authoritarianism, and the value of media-literacy training.
5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?
This may be obvious, but I found it helpful: Like many researchers, I ended up with enough material for a thousand-page book that nobody would want to read. I was able to keep it fairly short (224 pages plus notes) without much heartache by publishing the outtakes as freestanding articles.
Bates’ book won the Goldsmith Award from the Shorenstein Center: