Four Theories of the Press

60 Years and Counting

Maira T. Vaca-Baqueiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351662789
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The links between distinctive political regimes and media systems are undeniable. As Siebert, Peterson and Schramm wrote (1956: 1) 60 years ago: 'the press always takes on the form and coloration of the social and political structures within which it operates'. Nevertheless, today's world and politics are completely different from the bipolar era that inspired the ground breaking Four Theories of the Press. What are the main changes and continuities that have driven the study of politics and the media in the last decades? How to approach this interaction in the light of the challenges that democracy is facing or the continuing technological revolution that at times hampers the media?

This provocative book explores the main premises that have guided the study of politics and the media in the last decades. In so doing, it gives the reader key analytical tools to question the sustainability of past categorizations that no longer match up with current developments of both, political regimes and the media. In searching for clarification about current discrepancies between democracies and media's distinctive structures or purposes, Four Theories of the Press: 60 Years and Counting puts forward an alternative premise: the political-media complex.

1
Four Theories of the Press and Its Legacy

It seems that this formidable little book will never die. It shows no signs of even fading away. Why is this? It is certainly no due to lack of criticism for its ethnocentric perspectives, its inconsistent structure, its questionable typology and its problematic assumptions [… But] maybe that’s the way to do a book. Keep it short. Keep it simple. Keep it descriptive. Keep it neatly organized.

John C. Merrill, The Four Theories of the Press four and a half decades later: a retrospective (2002)

‘The press [and by press, in this book, we mean all the media of mass communication] always takes on the form and coloration of the social and political structures within which it operates’ argue Siebert, Peterson and Schramm in the opening page to their groundbreaking Four Theories of the Press (1956: 1). As obvious and simple this statement may seem nowadays, it remains a guiding hypothesis of comparative research on the relationships between political regimes and media systems. But why is this? How did this ‘little book’ become so influential in the study of the media and journalism around the world?

The following pages critically assess the main premises introduced by Siebert and his colleagues. Researchers might agree or not with the authors, but the fact is that almost every effort to study the interaction between politics and the media on comparative grounds starts by referring how crucial differences among political regimes (their ideology, regulatory framework or the kind of citizens’ participation) shape (mainly constrain) media’s goals and functioning. In other words, past and current research on media systems assumes that the particularities of political regimes impose a great influence in media functioning and, more critically, restrain their contributions to civic participation and public debate, just as Four Theories of the Press established more than a half century ago.

The Need to Study the Relationship Between Politics and the Media

‘When you’d ask Ted Peterson how the book had come to be written’, Nerone brings to mind (2002: 134), ‘his answer was simple and direct: “by accident”’. Nevertheless, when reading the book, it becomes clearer that it was certainly not ‘by accident’ that its three authors were interested on the ‘the press’ as mechanisms of influence and power for political or business interests. Here, an approach to the historical context in which Wilburn Schramm, Fredrick S. Siebert and Theodore Peterson put together their ideas about the media in different political settings is useful to explain the (arguable) success of their book. In fact, a short presentation paragraph to Four Theories of the Press reads:

These essays were prepared in connection with a study of the social responsibilities of mass communication which Dr. Schramm conducted for the Department of Church and Economic Life of the National Council for Churches (NCC). The authors are grateful to the Council for releasing these materials for publication apart from the study.

Indeed, these lines acknowledge the real core of the book: the ‘Social Responsibility theory of the press’. Wilburn Schramm had actually been working on a research project on the media’s ethics and responsibility funded by the NCC when he ran into Ted Peterson (Nerone 2002: 134). They started talking about their respective research projects, and it was when (apparently) ‘by accident’ the idea of putting together their corresponding findings gave birth to Four Theories of the Press.

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, the NCC sponsored different research projects founded by the Rockefeller Foundation on ethics and responsibility. It was in this context that Peterson’s assertion that the rise of mass media made traditional libertarianism obsolete made much sense and was practically unrefuted in the book. From its part, Schramm’s study on responsibility in mass communication aimed at introducing an alternative view to some influential liberal and secular standpoints about the potential (but unrestricted) power of the media as big corporations and powerful business groups. Schramm’s research was, moreover, deeply influenced by his work during the WWII at different U.S. government departments (Navy, War, Defense and State Departments, for instance), as well as a consultant at some governmental agencies (the U.S. Information Agency, the U.S. Air Force, the Army Operations Research Office, USAID) and diverse international organisations during the postwar period. This standpoint allowed him a sharp criticism of the Soviet system, especially regarding the role of the media in terms of propaganda and controlling social effects.

Fredrick S. Siebert was a prominent member of the journalism faculty at the University of Illinois. He and Schramm had worked together on developing a doctoral program and an Institute of Communication Research, both envisioned as links between the professional needs of journalism as part of a buoyant communications industry and the academic research’s demands put forth by the Hutchins Commission—officially known as the U.S. Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947) through which a group of prominent scholars wrote a report dealing ‘with the responsibilities of the owners and managers of the press to their consciences and the common good for the formation of public opinion’ (U.S. Commission on Freedom of the Press 1947: vi).

Siebert’s contribution to Four Theories of the Press was crucial (Nerone 2004: 22). He gave the book structure and wrote its two pillars: the chapters on the Authoritarian and the Libertarian theories of the press. Actually, ‘since the beginning of mass communication, in the Renaissance’, reads the second page of the book (Siebert et al. 1956: 2):

there have been only two or four basic theories of the press—two or four, that is, according to how one counts them. We have written four essays about them, but have tried to make clear that the latter two ‘theories’ are merely developments and modifications of the first two. The Soviet Communist theory is only a development of the much older Authoritarian theory, and what we have called the Social Responsibility theory is only a modification of the Libertarian theory.

(original emphasis)

This particular approach to different models of press-government relationships was grounded on Siebert’s previous academic research, especially on his Freedom of the Press in England (1952). In this work, he presents an analysis of British history to explain changes on the relationship between mass communication outlets (mainly the press) and the governing elites under different political and social conditions. His historical analysis identifies three different periods (although the author called them ‘theories’): the Tudor-Stuart, the Blackstone-Mansfield and the Camden-Ersike-Jefferson theory. One year later (1953), he related these periods with three additional ‘theories’ to describe the modern functioning and purpose of the media, this time looking mainly at the U.S.: the Supreme Court freedom theory, the Hutchins Commission (or the Social Responsibility) theory and the Soviet Communist theory. The main argument behind this reasoning was that different regulations and social settings shape in very different ways the media’s contribution and influence into society. Building on this reasoning, Siebert changed his six-theory schema to the four theories that became the outline for the 1956 collective volume. However, in Four Theories of the Press, Siebert’s original historical and descriptive purpose seems to lose weight by turning into a prescribing list of normative tasks that rule media’s contributions to society.

Ted Peterson joined the University of Illinois from Kansas State in the early 1950s. As doctoral student first, and then as faculty and dean of the College of Communications, he worked closely with Siebert and Schramm in developing a better understanding of the relation between the communication system and the society in which it operates (Siebert et al. 1956: 1). Peterson’s work actually sought to explain these relationships through the analysis of the links between communication, education, readership, participation and media’s responsibility [see for instance: Magazines in the Twentieth Century (1956), or; his contribution to The Mass Media and Modern Society (Rivers et al. 1971)]. He wrote the Social Responsibility theory chapter, as said, the real core of Four Theories of the Press. Based on the work of and on the responses to the Hutchins Commission about the nature and problems of a free press, Peterson stressed the need to expand on notions such as ‘the public’s right to know’ or ‘the public responsibility of the press’ since ‘nothing in Libertarian theory established the public’s right to information or required the publisher to assume moral responsibilities’ (Peterson 1956: 73). Quoting the Wall Street Journal’s publisher, William Peter Hamilton, Peterson brings to mind that: ‘a newspaper is a private enterprise owing nothing whatever to the public, which grants it no franchise. It is therefore affected with no public interest. It is emphatically the property of the owner, who is selling a manufactured product at his own risk’ (ibid).

As a response to this (quite influential) line of reasoning of the time (1940s and early 1950s), broadly speaking, the Hutchins Commission found three principal factors that alter and thus force a reconsideration of the notion of freedom of the press: (1) a decrease in the proportion of the people who can express their opinion and ideas through the press; (2) an inadequate service by big media conglomerates to the needs of the society, and; (3) damaging practices from the few (business people or politicians) who are able to use the machinery of the press to satisfy their own interests in detriment of the public good (U.S. Commission on Freedom of the Press 1947: 1).

As a consequence, stressed the Commission, there were five things that (apparently any) society requires from its media: (1) to be accurate: ‘identify [the truth about] fact as fact, opinion as opinion’ (Peterson 1956: 87); (2) to serve as a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism; (3) to present a representative picture of its constituent groups; (4) to be responsible for the presentation and clarification of the goals and values of its society, and last but certainly not least; (5) to provide full access to the day’s intelligence (ibid: 87–92). With the passing decades, the specific Hutchins Commission’s recommendations blurred together and were raised as ‘the happy ideal of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a twentieth-century milieu’ (ibid: 103). That is, ‘a belief system that defines the appropriate practices and values of news professionals, news media and news systems […] an hegemonic model of journalism’ tailored to a late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Western vision of mass media (Nerone 2012: 447). Exporting this normative model of journalism along with many others beliefs and practices that the West exported to the rest of the world, developed on what Mancini (2008 quoted by Nerone 2012: 452) refers to as ‘stupid normativity’: a constrained notion of normative approaches to mass communication steered by an inappropriate application of Western standards to practically any social and media systems.

All in all, the last paragraph of Peterson’s (Peterson 1956: 103) contribution to Four Theories of the Press summarises his views about the imperative need to ‘shift away from pure libertarianism’ (Peterson 1956: 73) and develop a news sense of responsibility for the media:

Whether or not one agrees with the Commission, however, one conclusion is abundantly evident—pure Libertarian theory is obsolescent, as the press as a whole has in fact recognized. Taking its place is an emerging theory which puts increasing emphasis on the responsibilities of the press, although it is still too early to discern what the full-blown form of theory will be. Individuals who still speak of freedom of the press as purely personal right are diminishing breed, lonely and anachronistic.

There is, quite surprisingly, a fourth mastermind behind Four Theories of the Press: Jay Jensen (Nerone 1995: 16–17). By the time the book was published (1956), Jensen was finishing his doctoral dissertation Liberalism, Democracy and the Mass Media at the University of Illinois. Jensen became part of the Illinois faculty, and eventually head of its journalism department. Great part of his work on the late 1950s and early 1960s focused on the analysis of the ideas behind the material causes imprinted on diverse communication outlets. That is, Jensen was interested on a detailed understanding of the ideology, discourse, comprehensive believes and ideas about the purpose and functioning of mass communication around the world. His argument was that different understandings (worldviews) about the legal, cultural, political function of the press, as well as its history, generate different media systems. In Four Theories of the Press’ terms: ‘the differences in the press of different countries reflect simply what people in different places and what their experience leads them to read about’ (Siebert et al. 1956: 1). Nevertheless, Jensen’s concept of ‘worldviews’, in sharp contrast to Sier-bert, Peterson and Schramm’s uses of the term ‘theory’, aims at describing a specific, concrete and clearly identified historic period. ‘One of the tensions that makes Four Theories interesting (and bedevilling)’, condemns Nerone (1995: 17), ‘is the unacknowledged discord between history and theory’ (see below).

To sum up, Four Theories of the Press is a product of its time and of its authors’ beliefs (Nerone 1995: 8). It started as a joint enterprise between scholars (the writers) and conservative businessmen (the sponsors) who aimed at counterbalancing general thinking about the media’s goals and growing influence (especially the rise of television as a social force supplanting other agencies of socialisation, as well as the concentration of media ownership, threatening diversity and independence of viewpoints) in a bipolar world. As such, the book’s premises and flaws are in great part a reflection of the historical period in which it was written, as well as each author’s specific standpoints to understand and explain the interaction between political regimes and the mass media.

The ‘Fantastic’ Four

What with the years turned into the highly famous Four Theories of the Press, indeed emerged from two basic and contrasting ‘philosophical and political rationales or theories which lies behind different kinds of press’ (Siebert et al. 1956: 2, emphasis added): authoritarianism and libertarianism. This might not come as a surprise if one keeps in mind, as described above, that the book is a product of the postwar years and as such, describes a world divided into two poles: the oppressed (ruled by authoritarian or communist regimes) and the free (enhanced by liberal democracies).

Four Theories of the Press offers thus a clear and brief explanation as to why these two...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables, Boxes and Figure
• Introduction
• 1 Four Theories of the Press and Its Legacy
• 2 Beyond the Dichotomy: Authoritarianism vs. Democracy
• 3 Thinking Institutionally About Politics and the Media: Why and How
• 4 The Political-Media Complex at Work: A New Perspective on the Study of Transitional Democracies
• Conclusions
• References
• Index