Old News, Part One
The Hutchins Commission and the Journalism Crisis We Keep Discovering
I.
File under “not-quite-breaking news”: on June 22, 2026, Tribune Publishing completed its purchase of the Daily Herald, a 150-year-old suburban Chicago newspaper that had spent the last eight years as an employee-owned institution. The Herald’s workers — organized as an ESOP, or employee stock ownership plan, since 2018 — voted by what the paper’s chairman described as “a substantial margin” to accept Tribune Publishing’s offer, which included a 30% premium over competing bids. Tribune Publishing had wanted this deal badly enough to take out several full-page advertisements in its own flagship paper making the case. The Herald, founded in 1872 as the Cook County Herald, is the third-largest newspaper in Illinois. It is now part of a chain of more than thirty daily and weekly papers anchored by the Chicago Tribune. Tribune Publishing was acquired by Alden Global Capital in 2021 for $633 million.
Alden is a New York-based private equity-style investment firm and one of the largest newspaper owners in the United States, only second to USA Today Co. (formerly Gannett). Its aggressive approach to the properties it acquires is by now familiar: cut costs, reduce staff, and treat legacy print assets as a source of value to be extracted rather than a journalism infrastructure to be maintained or enhanced. The Daily Herald’s employees were not ignorant of this. They voted anyway.
Nearly 3,500 newspapers have ceased publication in the United States since 2000. True, the Daily Herald did not cease publication: it joined a chain. Whether that distinction will prove meaningful over time is not yet clear.
In other words, the Daily Herald’s story is not all that remarkable. A local newspaper facing merger or closure has been old news for over a century. What is remarkable is that we have had, for nearly eighty years, a precise diagnosis of why stories like it keep happening, as well as a working institutional model for what to do about it. Both have been hiding in plain sight.
II.
To better understand why any of this matters beyond the immediate fortunes of suburban Chicago journalism, we must go back to the 1940s, and to a political scientist named Robert Devore Leigh. I’ve written about him in this Substack before.
Despite my best efforts, Leigh is not a household name, even among people who study the history of American media. My guy had a PhD in political science from Columbia, and the trajectory of his career before anyone thought of him in connection with journalism or libraries reads like a particular kind of mid-century American intellectual biography: federal health researcher, founding president of Bennington College in Vermont, fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. During World War Two he directed the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, which monitored and analyzed enemy propaganda transmissions. In short, he was a man who had spent decades thinking about information: how it moves, who controls it, what it does to the people who receive it, and what happens to democratic life when the institutions responsible for it fail.
In 1944, Leigh was hired by University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins to direct the staff of the Commission on Freedom of the Press, a body convened in 1943 and funded by Henry Luce of Time Inc. (there is an amusing irony there: a media titan underwriting an inquiry into whether the commercial media model he embodied was good for democracy). The members were drawn largely from academia and public intellectual life rather than from working journalism, among them theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, First Amendment scholar Zechariah Chafee Jr., philosopher William Ernest Hocking, and communications theorist Harold D. Lasswell. When Judge Learned Hand (quite possibly the coolest name in the history of American jurisprudence) declined to chair the project, Hutchins took on the role himself as the thirteenth member. A commission composed entirely of elites — philosophers, theologians, legal scholars, and poets, with no actual journalists among its members — was evaluating an industry that had not been invited to evaluate itself. That the commission’s members had never covered a police beat or negotiated with a city editor made their recommendations ripe for dismissal as ivory tower idealism. The press found this easy to resent and, ultimately, reject.
Leigh’s role was central, if not without friction. He struggled to manage the commission’s small research staff, and Stephen Bates, whose recent study of the Commission is the most comprehensive available, characterizes his draft prose as “tend[ing] toward the leaden” — a judgment the archival record appears to support. It was MacLeish who was asked to draft the final report, and Hutchins who ultimately rewrote it before publication. When factual errors were discovered after the report’s release, Hutchins blamed Leigh, who had been responsible for the research. Leigh, for his part, was not the self-effacing figure one might imagine (or maybe that I would like to imagine). He actively sought credit for his contributions, which were real even when imperfect. Nevertheless, his impact is undeniable: he had shaped the Commission’s intellectual agenda, synthesized testimony from dozens of witnesses, and done the sustained staff work without which the report would not have existed. The ideas eventually presented in A Free and Responsible Press were the product of years of testimony, argument, and revision rather than a fortnight of deliberation. They were built, painstakingly, by someone who had developed a clear sense of the problem.
III.
The Commission’s main publication, A Free and Responsible Press, subtitled A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books, appeared in March 1947. Its argument was blunt, organized around four broad conclusions: the current performance of the press is poor; a democratic government can, as a philosophical matter, legitimately regulate the press; regulations are not warranted under current circumstances; and therefore solutions must come from outside the government. The report’s overarching claim was that the press had become so concentrated and so commercially driven that it could no longer be trusted, strictly on its own, to serve the public interest. This was not an argument against a free press. It was an argument that freedom alone was insufficient: that the libertarian model, in which the market would naturally produce the journalism a democracy needed, had failed to deliver in this regard.
The Commission’s indictment was pointed: the economic logic of private enterprise forces most units of the mass communication industry to seek an ever-larger audience. The result is what it called an “omnibus product which includes something for everybody” — a press that pushes aside stories of genuine consequence in favor of what sells. Many activities of the utmost importance to democratic life lie below the surface of what are conventionally regarded as reportable facts. These topics, it concluded, are crowded out by sensationalist stories about violent crime, social unrest, and the spectacle of public misconduct. As the Commission put it in 1947, in language that still resonates: “The effort to attract the maximum audience means that each news account must be written to catch headlines. The result is not a continued story of the life of a people, but a series of vignettes, made to seem more significant than they really are.”
The Commission was not, it should be said, the first to make this case. Twentieth-century press criticism had roots in the Progressive Era — in the muckrakers’ exposure of concentrated economic power, and in the sustained critique of sensationalism and commercial distortion that ran from the late nineteenth century through the 1940s. Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book Public Opinion had already articulated many of the Commission’s core concerns about the press’s capacity to serve democratic life. What the Commission provided was therefore not a new critique but a distinguished, systematic, and well-resourced articulation of a critique that had been building for decades — and, as media historian Margaret Blanchard noted in 1977, an idea whose time had come.
The Commission’s assessment of press performance is best remembered for its enumeration of what a responsible press must provide. The report laid out five requirements:
First was what the report called “a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning.” Not merely accurate in the narrow sense of getting facts right, but contextually honest: presenting information in ways that allowed readers to actually understand what was happening, rather than merely consuming a sequence of isolated items.
Second was “a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism.” The press, the Commission argued, had become a vehicle for the views of those who owned it. A responsible press had an obligation to be a genuine public forum: to carry voices and perspectives that challenged, rather than merely reinforced, the positions of its proprietors.
The third requirement was “a means of projecting the opinions and attitudes of the groups in the society to one another.” The Commission’s concern here was structural rather than merely demographic. A press that failed to reflect the actual composition of the society it served was not just incomplete; it was producing a distorted version of reality that shaped how communities understood themselves and one another.
Fourth was “a method of presenting and clarifying the goals and values of the society.” The press, on this account, bore some responsibility for the civic culture it helped create. Sensationalism was not merely a failure of taste but a civic harm: it crowded out the kind of reporting that helped citizens make sense of their collective life.
Finally, the fifth requirement — and the most striking when one considers what has happened to local news in the eight decades since — was full access to the day’s intelligence; what the report called “a way of reaching every member of the society by the currents of information, thought, and feeling which the press supplies.” The Commission was worried, in 1947, about the consolidation of news sources and the resulting gaps in coverage. Some communities, they noted, were already underserved. The mechanisms by which that underservice would accelerate — chain ownership, the collapse of the advertising model, the private equity-style acquisition of distressed print assets — were not yet visible. The structural concern was.
Henry Luce had funded the Commission with genuine curiosity about the philosophical questions it might answer, and with some expectation that it would validate the American commercial press as the world's finest. He got the curiosity satisfied, but did not get the validation. Luce’s objection to A Free and Responsible Press ran deeper than disappointment. His primary criticism was philosophical: he had wanted the Commission to answer the question of to whom a publisher is ultimately accountable, and found their answer — to the public interest, to the common good — insufficient. For Luce, the only adequate answer was theological. “My ultimate accountability,” he had said, “had to be to my Creator,” and he found it hard to accept that thirteen distinguished thinkers had simply left the question open. He gave the report what he called “a gentleman’s C,” sent a note to his executives apologizing for the $200,000 spent on it, and was absent from the press conference at which it was released.1
The established press was no more receptive. Editor & Publisher and the American Newspaper Publishers Association denounced it. The American Society of Newspaper Editors debated whether to denounce or ignore it. The Chicago Tribune’s headline invoked Hitler. Working journalists resented being lectured about their responsibilities by academics who had never filed a deadline story. The hostility was loudest where vested interests were strongest, such as the daily newspaper establishment and its trade organizations. Elsewhere the reception was more mixed: Quill, The Guild Reporter, and several advertising trade publications found the Commission’s critique neither new nor unreasonable, which was itself a pointed observation. The charges, noted one trade editor, had “been charged before.”
After the initial wave of coverage and reviews, the Commission and its report virtually disappeared. They were not seriously resurrected until 1956, when the publication of Four Theories of the Press by Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm brought A Free and Responsible Press back into the curriculum of journalism schools. Peterson’s chapter on social responsibility concluded that the libertarian theory of the press was outmoded: that social responsibility was the theory of the future. It has remained an open question whether that conclusion was prescriptive or descriptive.
A Free and Responsible Press did not confine itself to diagnosis: the Commission had actionable proposals, ones that still warrant serious consideration. The core argument was that the press could not be expected to reform itself, because the forces driving its failures were also the forces sustaining its business model. The Commission generally rejected antitrust enforcement as a tool for reducing concentrations of ownership, and it rejected most forms of direct government regulation on pragmatic grounds — though it laid a philosophical foundation for such regulation and issued a warning: if the press fails to improve, new regulations are inevitable, and they may be draconian. “The amendment,” it wrote, meaning the First Amendment, “will be amended.” Yikes.
The Commission’s principal recommendation was neither government regulation nor market competition. It was a press council: a nonprofit civic organization that would periodically assess the performance of the press and report its findings publicly. Beyond that, the report advocated the creation of nonprofit media organizations at universities and elsewhere; it urged journalism schools to adopt a more critical stance toward the industry; and it called on media organizations to raise the competence of their journalists through better education, higher pay, and longer-term contracts. The common thread was accountability from outside the commercial structure, without the coercive authority of the state.
These proposals were not received as the measured institutional suggestions they were. Industry actors saw a specter of repressive government licensing and censorship dressed in the language of civic responsibility. This was partly bad faith, though not entirely without substance. The Commission’s framework did raise questions that its members did not fully answer. If a press that fails its responsibilities is a problem for democracy, who determines when it has failed? What body, with what authority and what accountability, would assess whether the day’s journalism met the standard of truthful, comprehensive, and contextually honest reporting? The Commission gestured toward a press council, but the proposal was vague, and the vagueness was not reassuring — a point that Judge Learned Hand, who had declined to chair the project, might have pressed had he been at the table.
Whether Hand engaged directly with the finished report remains a question worth investigating, but his position on the underlying problem was already on record, and it reinforced the Commission’s own warning: in his 1943 ruling in the Associated Press antitrust case, four years before the Commission published, Hand had argued for a “multitude of tongues” in the press, and warned that if newspapers did not open themselves to diverse voices on their own initiative, judicial intervention to compel it might be warranted. His First Amendment jurisprudence also suggests he would have recognized the danger in any standard of “responsibility” flexible enough to be applied by whoever held power. The concern that “responsibility” is a concept that can be made to do a great deal of unpleasant work depending on who holds it was not a paranoid one in 1947, and is no less so now.
At the risk of stating the obvious: the Hutchins Commission’s proposals were not modest. Neither, as it turns out, was the effort to realize them. Part II examines what that effort has produced, what remains undone, and the solution that has been in front of us all along. The next installment also makes clear why the persistently lamented state of American journalism is a worthy topic for this Substack. Stay tuned!
Part Two publishing published on July 16, with citations:
https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/old-news-part-two.
To promote viewpoint diversity, Heterodoxy in the Stacks invites constructive dissent and disagreement in the form of guest posts. While articles published on Heterodoxy in the Stacks are not peer- or editorially-reviewed, all posts must model the HxA Way. Content is attributed to the individual contributor(s).
To submit an article for Heterodoxy in the Stacks, send an email with the article title, author name, and article document to hxlibsstack@gmail.com. Unless otherwise requested, the commenting feature will be on. Thank you for joining the conversation!
$200,000 in January 1944 is a little over $3.8M in June 2026, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator.
Thank you, Caroline--excellent article on the background of the Hutchins Commission, its report, and some of the well-known figures involved in it, which more of us should know more about. Good to see Robert Leigh and his role described again--your previous article on the Public Library Inquiry fills in a gap for many of us as well. I look forward to reading Part Two!
Nice piece. Do you know if the Commission discussed the effect of advertisers on how or what gets covered?