The Ethical Journalist. Gene Foreman
there is a shipwreck all of us always put in the cat. 19
Some news photography similarly was suspicious. In his final column for The Wall Street Journal, which he had served as managing editor, Paul E. Steiger reminisced in 2007 about a photographer colleague at a California paper who carried “a well‐preserved but very dead bird” in his car trunk:
The bird, he explained, was for feature shots on holidays like Memorial Day. He’d perch it on a gravestone or tree limb in a veterans’ cemetery to get the right mood. Nowadays such a trick would get him fired, but in the 1950s, this guy said, there was no time to wait for a live bird to flutter into the frame. 20
Journalists at work in the newsroom of The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1938.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Inquirer
Impersonation was an accepted reporting technique in some places. As an 18‐year‐old rookie police reporter in Chicago, Jack Fuller followed the lead of his elders and told a crime victim on the phone that he was a police officer. His ruse was exposed when the victim called back with a few additional details – on the police desk sergeant’s line. A few years later, when Fuller returned to Chicago journalism after school and military service, he stopped misrepresenting himself. He explained in his book News Values in 1996: “Times simply had changed, and so had I.” The reformed impersonator went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and become editor of the Chicago Tribune . 21
Racism permeated the news and editorial columns of newspapers. In 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a black teenager was accused of assaulting a white female elevator operator. The Tulsa Tribune published a news story headlined “Nab Negro for attacking girl in elevator,” and an editorial headlined “To lynch a Negro tonight.” The inflammatory notices set off a chain of events that led to a week of terror and violence in which up to 300 people were killed. More than 10,000 residents were left homeless when a mob of whites burned nearly the entire black residential district of 35 square blocks. 22
Reporters did not always distance themselves from the people and agencies they covered. An extraordinary conflict of interest was described by Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell in their 1995 book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. The authors wrote that William L. Laurence of The New York Times was on the payroll of the Pentagon in 1945, having been hired at a secret meeting at The Times’s offices. Laurence wrote many of the government press releases that followed the August 6, 1945, bombing of Hiroshima. For The Times, Laurence wrote a news story casting doubt on Japanese descriptions of radiation poisoning. However, the authors said, he had witnessed the July 16, 1945, atomic test in New Mexico and was aware of radioactive fallout that poisoned residents and livestock in the desert. 23 Laurence was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 “for his eye‐witness account of the atom‐bombing of Nagasaki and his subsequent ten articles on the development, production, and significance of the atomic bomb.” 24
Sid Hartman began writing sports columns in Minneapolis in 1944 and, when he died in 2020 at age 100, he was still writing three columns a week for the Star Tribune, including one published the day he died. 25 He also was a participant in the sports scene he covered, a role that would be unacceptable in modern journalism. In 1946, Hartman personally arranged the transfer of the Detroit Gems pro basketball team to Minneapolis, where they became known as the Lakers – a name they kept when the franchise moved to Los Angeles in 1960. For the Lakers’ first 11 years, Hartman was the team’s behind-the-scenes manager, “in complete charge of the draft, complete charge in all deals, every part of the basketball operation and everything else.” Of course, he was still writing columns and had begun sports commentary on WCCO radio. In an interview in 2011 reflecting on his long career, Hartman said he was following the sports department’s existing practice: “Every member of our staff had an outside job as a PR man for either the wrestling promoters, boxing promoters, etcetera.” 26 In 2010 a statue of Sid Hartman was unveiled outside the Target Center sports arena in Minneapolis.
The Hutchins Commission
Ironically, social responsibility in journalism was defined most persuasively not by journalists but by a panel of intellectuals. Robert Maynard Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago, was asked in 1942 by Henry Luce, publisher of Time magazine, to “find out about freedom of the press and what my obligations are.” Luce put up $200,000 (about $3.3 million in 2021 currency). Hutchins assembled a panel of 10 professors, a banker who was a former professor, and the poet Archibald MacLeish. They joined him on what was formally titled the Commission on Freedom of the Press but was to become better known as the Hutchins Commission.
In 1947, the commission issued its conclusions. The report was an indictment of journalism as it was practiced in that era. As the commission saw it, the press was neglecting its social responsibility – reporting accurately on news important to society – and choosing instead to focus on sensational stories designed to attract readers rather than inform them. The report warned that if the press did not reform, it could face government intervention. 27
In the passage that was to have the most enduring influence on journalism, the commission declared that the press has the responsibility of providing “the current intelligence needed by a free society.” It then identified five things that American society needed from the press 28 :
1 A truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context that gives them meaning. The commission was saying that being accurate is essential but not enough. The commission then made a statement that journalists and the public recognize today as an important duty of the news media, and that is to distinguish between fact and opinion: “There is not fact without a context and no factual report which is uncolored by the opinions of the reporter.”
2 A forum for the exchange of comment and criticism. “The great agencies of mass communication,” the commission said, “should regard themselves as common carriers of public discussion.” They should publish “significant ideas contrary to their own,” using such devices as letters to the editor (or columnists offering a wide range of commentary, which would become a standard practice). The commission, which lamented that some ideas could be stifled because their authors had no access to newspaper printing presses, presumably would be gratified today by the ease with which ideas are spread on the internet.
3 The projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in society. The commission denounced stereotypes and “hate words.” It observed that, “when the images [the media] portray fail to present the social group truly, they tend to subvert judgment.” The commission thus prodded the era’s news media, composed almost entirely of white males, to cover the entire community. The admonition was not taken seriously until the 1950s and 1960s, when the civil rights movements awakened the media to the need to broaden their news coverage.
4 The presentation and clarification of the goals and values of society. The media “must assume a responsibility like that of educators in stating and clarifying the ideals toward which the community should strive.” Sketching an agenda for the community has become a function that editorial pages and television panel discussions typically perform.
5 Full access to the day’s intelligence. The commission urged “the wide distribution of news and opinion” so that citizens could choose what they wanted to use. In the decades that followed, news outlets broadened the definition of “full access.” As surrogates for the citizens, they campaigned for legislation and court orders to compel governments to open meetings and records. They took the position that citizens should know how their business was being transacted.
The press didn’t like the Hutchins Commission’s report. Critics point to the fact that not a single journalist was on the commission. Columnist George Sokolsky said that having this commission critique the press