The rise of totalitarianism in Europe was not the only cause for alarm. "All sectors of living problems have grown in complexity far beyond their former proportions," sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd wrote in 1937. At the same time, the electorate had swelled as a result of immigration and women's suffrage, and its duties had increased with the direct election of senators. More Americans, it seemed, were saddled with more responsibility for resolving more numerous and more nettlesome problems than ever before.9
These overburdened voters, furthermore, were being subjected to new "scientific" techniques of public relations. World War I had shown propaganda to be "one of the most powerful instrumentalities in the modern world," wrote political scientist Harold Lasswell (later a member of the Hutchins Commission). To Edward Bernays, a public relations pioneer (and nephew of Sigmund Freud), the "astounding success" of wartime propaganda suggested "the possibilities of regimenting the public mind" in peacetime as well. Political propaganda, Bernays rhapsodized, would enable "the sincere and gifted politician ... to mold and form the will of the people." Substantive policy held little interest for Bernays and other "public relations counsels"; their expertise lay in selling policy, any policy, to the public. Rephrasing Justice Louis Brandeis's pronouncement that the cure for dangerous speech is more speech, Bernays said, "The cure for propaganda is more propaganda."10
Faced with the complexity of issues, the swollen electorate, and the blandishments of public relations experts, the citizen needed help. "Hence," the Lynds observed in 1929, "the press becomes more and more an essential community necessity in the conduct of group affairs." "Democracy," Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Editor Fred Fuller Shedd said at a 1931 conference, "functions largely through the efficient service of the newspaper." Nelson Antrim Crawford made the same point in his 1924 study The Ethics of Journalism, writing that "successful popular government, being dependent on facts, is ... dependent on the press." To Crawford, "no human institution is more potent, for the good or the evil of society."11
The press's potency grew out of its influence over public attitudes and beliefs--influence that at the time seemed almost limitless. "Men who would give little credence to a tale told them by a neighbour, or even written to them by a friend, believe what the newspaper tells them merely because they see it in print," James Bryce remarked in 1921. Political scientist (and future Hutchins Commission member) Charles Merriam wrote in 1931 of the press's "somewhat hypnotic effect on masses of readers." Looking for the lever with which to move public opinion, public relations specialists settled on the press; reporters in turn groused about the "mass of mimeographed junk" to which those specialists subjected them.12
This recognition of press power and importance led to a series of critical analyses in the decades before the Commission convened. Whereas in 1911, Will Irwin could find in the Library of Congress only "a few treatises on the making of newspapers, a few volumes of pleasant reminiscences, one interesting but incomplete and shallow history," a shelf of books was published in the 1920s and 1930s by Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, Harold Ickes, Silas Bent, Crawford, and Irwin himself, as well as a host of lesser-known figures. "Every time a disabled journalist is retired to a professorship in a school of journalism, and so gets time to give sober thought to the state of his craft," H.L. Mencken wrote in 1925, "he seems to be impelled to write a book upon its ethics, full of sour and uraemic stuff."13
The press of the time was exerting its power in new ways, providing interpretation and explanation alongside raw facts. The two newsmagazines (News-Week, as it was first known, began publishing in 1933) not only provided a brief rundown of the week's events; they also offered insights, predictions, descriptive details, and, in the case of Time, public figures' middle names.
A second form of value-added news was the syndicated political column, which historian Michael Schudson has called "the newspaper sensation of the thirties." Walter Lippmann started "Today and Tomorrow" in 1931, the first syndicated column to concentrate on opinion rather than reporting. Drew Pearson and Robert Allen started "Washington Merry-Go-Round" in 1932, dishing out inside dope in a know-it-all tone. It soon became the most widely syndicated political column. The political columnists were eclipsed by Walter Winchell, whose "On Broadway" was by far the most popular column of the era. The Lynds reported that Muncie readers pored over such resolutely New York gossip as "What two famous socially listed married duos on the Long Island North Shore have swapped mates for the summer?" Winchell, though, did devote increasing attention to politics starting in the late 1930s.14
Newsmagazines and syndicated columns represented changes of scope as well as style for the news media. They created journalistic voices with nationwide audiences and impacts; these voices prodded communities to orient themselves outward (so did nationwide movies, chain stores, and consumer products as well as the New Deal's centralization of government power in Washington). The press was on its way to becoming, as Douglass Cater would later write, "the quasi-official fourth branch of government," or, as Merriam put it in 1931, "an informal and irresponsible House of Lords."15