Twenty-five years after publication of the report, the Commission's "single remedy for all ills" was partially implemented. In 1972, a Twentieth Century Fund task force called for the creation of a council on press responsibility and press freedom, which would adjudicate allegations of unfairness and inaccuracy in the national press and report on issues affecting press freedom. A year later the organization, christened the National News Council, was founded. It tottered for 11 years, then, having never managed to attract the support of a major funder, died in 1984.¹⁴⁵

Part of the council's troubles stemmed from the New York Times, which opposed the idea from the start. "Such a Council will not only fail to achieve its purpose, but could actually harm the cause of press freedom in the United States," publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger wrote in a memo to the staff. The Times refused to cooperate with council inquiries, and its news columns rarely mentioned the group. When Hutchins died in 1977, the Times published a lengthy obituary, which devoted a paragraph to the Commission's proposal for a press-watching organization. "Mr. Hutchins felt then and later that it was a useful one and that it might be accepted some time," the Times reported. The National News Council, then in operation, went unmentioned.¹⁴⁶

Other recommendations in A Free and Responsible Press have fared better over the years, though it is difficult to ascribe credit to the Commission. Sensationalism in newspapers has decreased, though it has found a second life on television. At least at major media outlets, owners no longer dictate news coverage routinely. Journalists are better educated. Since the Kerner Commission report of 1968, and especially since the late 1980s, the press has sought diverse news sources. With journalism reviews, media critics, ombudsmen, and university-based media-watching institutes, "vigorous mutual criticism" has increased vastly. The "public journalism" movement represents one effort to make journalism nurture democracy. Theorizing about the media's role in American self-government has advanced considerably; here the Hutchins Commission does deserve considerable credit.

Still, the news remains colored by many of the elements that the Commission lamented. Fewer than two dozen corporations dominate the newspaper, magazine, book, television, and movie industries. The trend toward concentration, perhaps slightly stanched by the Newspaper Preservation Act, seems likely to accelerate now that telephone companies are providing information and entertainment. Negativity, hype, and the hunger for scoops live on. Some journalists insist that they have no democratic responsibilities. TV reporter Edwin Newman once chided a news anchor for urging people to vote: "We have no right to intervene in that." And though criticism within the journalistic community is increasingly accepted, many journalists continue to resist outside criticism, often equating it with censorship. Jean-François Revel has likened this response to that of "a restaurant owner who, after serving spoiled food, fended off criticism by exclaiming: 'Please, let me fulfill my mission as a nourisher, that sacred duty! Or are you in favor of starvation?'"¹⁴⁷

Several people have called for a new commission, modeled on the Hutchins group, to analyze the press. This second commission has not yet formed, and perhaps it never will. For one thing, no well-heeled, philosophically inquisitive Henry Luce has opened his checkbook.¹⁴⁸

More important, the sense of democratic crisis that sparked the Hutchins Commission has dissipated. Postwar social scientists downgraded the clout ascribed to both the citizenry and the press. "The public is far too sensible to attempt to play the preposterous role assigned to it by the theorists," E.E. Schattschneider wrote in 1960, completing the theoretical shift that Lasswell, Lippmann, and others had inaugurated. In place of Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses, we now have Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites, which warns that the professional and managerial classes are severing themselves from the civitas. On the media side, postwar studies did not find the "somewhat hypnotic effect" that Merriam described. "Mass communication ordinarily does not serve as a necessary and sufficient cause of audience effects," Joseph Klapper wrote in the 1950s, "but rather functions among and through a nexus of mediating factors and influences." Leading intellectuals of the 1940s deemed the press worthy of their close attention; those of the 1990s might not.¹⁴⁹

On the other hand, they still might, for the gulf between journalists and the intellectual elites has diminished. Up through the 1940s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed in 1971, "the preponderance of the 'working press' (as it liked to call itself) was surprisingly close in origins and attitudes to working people generally. They were not Ivy Leaguers." He added, "They now are or soon will be. Journalism has become, if not an elite profession, a profession attractive to elites." Increasingly, reporters and editors from the leading news media move in intellectual and professional circles.¹⁵⁰

Most members of the news audience, however, do not. To the public, the news media seem remote and indifferent, "just another big, bureaucratic force," in David Broder's words, "as unresponsive as all the rest." Many people are driven to seek information outside the traditional press: talk radio, tabloid TV shows, Internet discussion groups, interest group newsletters. While the gap between press and professoriate has narrowed, the gap between press and public seems to have widened.¹⁵¹

The press's claim to represent the citizenry is essential to its role as, in Cater's phrase, "the quasi-official fourth branch of government." "By democratic hypothesis," the Christian Century observed in 1942, "the voice of the people is the voice of God." But what if this God-voice no longer cares to let the press speak on its behalf? What if, as ABC correspondent Cokie Roberts has observed, the public's attitude toward the press amounts to: "I know as much as those guys do. What do I need them for?" The popularity of the 1992 town hall debate in Richmond, in which presidential candidates answered questions posed by voters, suggests that people have grown weary of being represented by journalists. Given the opportunity, they are eager to represent themselves.¹⁵²

The crisis animating today's journalism ("Unless something feels like a crisis," Robert MacNeil once said, "most journalists can't be bothered with it") is the strained bond between press and public. Whereas the Hutchins Commission feared that the press had gotten too close to the public, giving people what they wanted instead of what they needed, a new commission today would have to ask whether the press and the public have grown too far apart.¹⁵³

The current roles of citizens, elites, and the mass media are delineated in The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America. David Protess and his co-authors monitored six investigative reporting stories during the 1980s and conducted public opinion surveys to chart the impact of the coverage. They found that the exposés altered the policymaking environment, shifted the balances of political power, and generated policy outcomes--just as muckraking is supposed to do. The public, however, was barely involved. In only one of the six case studies did the exposé exert a major impact on public opinion.¹⁵⁴

Reporters of 50 years ago saw their job as providing information to the masses. "Give light," they believed, "and the people will find their own way." These journalists (though the word was too pompous for them) wrote articles that mobilized citizens who demanded reforms. The press incited the public and the public incited the officials. Reporters had little use for those who spoke of rewiring this press-people-policy circuit, such as the social scientists who were conniving to make policy without consulting the public.

Today's journalists (the word has lost its snooty airs) exert a different sort of influence, according to Protess and his colleagues. The mass public has apparently grown so inattentive, or at least so indifferent, that muckraking now bypasses it and influences policymakers directly. Indeed, journalists sometimes work behind the scenes with politicians and activists, and to good effect: "Muckraking," Protess and his colleagues conclude, "is most likely to matter, it seems, when journalists form coalitions with policy makers..."¹⁵⁵

Journalists of the 1990s, trying, as journalists always have tried, to make a difference with their reporting, are becoming what journalists of the 1940s reviled: backstage activists, professional experts, undemocratic elitists--or, one might say, democratic realists. The men of the Hutchins Commission would be pleased.