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Freedom to be Responsible, 2000-10-17
The Commission on Freedom of the Press issued its report, titled A Free and Responsible Press, in 1947. Often nicknamed after its chairman University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, it had a number of other luminaries among its members, including Zechariah Chafee Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, Harold Lasswell, Archibald MacLeish, and Arthur Schlesinger Sr.The report concluded that freedom of the press was in danger unless steps were taken to ensure accountability. The Commission's report was highly critical of the way in which the press exercised its freedom and urged, among other things, that government create media to act as models for the private press and that public rights prevail over private rights in construing freedom of the press.
In a noteworthy passage in the first chapter, the Commission set the tone for its report when it observed:
"To protect the press is no longer automatically to protect the citizen or the community. The freedom of the press can remain a right of those who publish only if it incorporates into itself the right of the citizen and the public interest.
....
"[The press] must be accountable to society for meeting the public need and for maintaining the rights of citizens and the almost forgotten rights of speakers who have no press. It must know that its faults and errors have ceased to be private vagaries and have become public dangers. ... Freedom of the press for the coming period can only continue as an accountable freedom. Its moral right will be conditioned on its acceptance of this accountability. Its legal right will stand unaltered as its moral duty is performed."
The report was not well-received by the press at the time, which criticized it as the product of a bunch of ivory tower academics. But it has continued to be popular even 50 years after its release in journalism schools, and it continues to be the jumping-off point for analyses of the press's social responsibility. Though somewhat dated, a similar book, which devotes a chapter to social responsibility, is Four Theories of the Press.
One might think that freedom included the freedom to be irresponsible; this book takes the opposing view.