A Letter to the Press - Partisan Media, Propaganda, and Post-Truth Politics in the American CenturyThe story behind the 1940s Commission on Freedom of the Press--groundbreaking then, timelier than ever now "Bates skillfully blends biography and intellectual history to provide a sense of how the clash of ideas and the clash of personalities intersected."--Scott Stossel, American Scholar "A well-constructed, timely study, clearly relevant to current debates."--Kirkus, starred review In 1943, Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry R. Luce sponsored the greatest collaboration of intellectuals in the twentieth century. He and University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins summoned the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the Pulitzer-winning poet Archibald MacLeish, and ten other preeminent thinkers to join the Commission on Freedom of the Press. They spent three years wrestling with subjects that are as pertinent as ever: partisan media and distorted news, activists who silence rather than rebut their opponents, conspiracy theories spread by shadowy groups, and the survivability of American democracy in a post-truth age. The report that emerged, A Free and Responsible Press, is a classic, but many of the commission's sharpest insights never made it into print. Journalist and First Amendment scholar Stephen Bates reveals how these towering intellects debated some of the most vital questions of their time--and reached conclusions urgently relevant today. |
Contents
INTRODUCTION | 1 |
1 Skunk at the Garden Party | 9 |
2 Unlucky Crusader | 22 |
3 Disillusionment in Democracy | 29 |
4 Synthetic Dead Cats | 39 |
5 Highest Intellect Ever | 48 |
6 Restless Searchlights | 57 |
7 The Glorious Mischievous First Amendment | 68 |
12 Beguiling the Dragon | 126 |
13 Consider Yourself Pedestaled | 140 |
14 All Great Problems Are Insoluble | 153 |
15 Jeffersons Epitaph | 164 |
16 Gentlemans C | 177 |
17 The Luce That Laid the Golden Egg | 184 |
18 From Target to Canon | 196 |
19 Democracy on the Skids | 212 |