Johnson & Johnson recalled every container of the pain reliever. The company did not put the product back on the market until its containers had been made tamper‐proof. A lesser corporate response might have doomed the popular pain reliever, but Tylenol’s sales quickly rebounded. 13
In journalism, Adolph Ochs embraced the idea of social responsibility when he bought The New York Times in 1896 and immediately published a pledge “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved.” 14 Eugene Meyer, who bought The Washington Post in 1933, similarly adopted a business plan based on journalistic independence: “In pursuit of the truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such a course be necessary for public good.” 15
One impetus for social responsibility in the news media was commerce. America’s first newspapers were political organs, but in the 1830s that was changing, “stimulated by industrial growth, the development of larger cities, and technological innovations including steam‐driven printing presses.” Publishers and editors began aiming at a mass market, one in which it made economic sense to report the news neutrally instead of from a party perspective. 16 By the 1880s, the concept of neutral reporting was well established.
By the first half of the twentieth century, journalists’ aspirations for professionalism were growing. Better‐educated people were joining the workforce, and the world’s first journalism school was launched in 1908 at the University of Missouri. 17 Newly formed organizations of journalists quickly adopted codes affirming their responsibility to report the truth and to be fair. The first of these codes was the Canons of Journalism ratified by the new American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1923. 18
The Journalism of an Earlier Era
In spite of these signs of growing awareness of press responsibility, the historical record shows examples of journalism practiced through the mid‐twentieth century that would horrify today’s practitioners and news consumers alike.
Fabrication was not uncommon. In an article in Columbia Journalism Review in 1984, Cassandra Tate described one telling episode. The New York World established a Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play in 1913, and the bureau’s director noticed a peculiar pattern in the newspaper’s reporting on shipwrecks: Each story mentioned a cat that had survived. When the director asked the reporter, he was told:
One of those wrecked ships had a cat, and the crew went back to save it. I made the cat a feature of my story, while the other reporters failed to mention the cat, and were called down by their city editors for being beaten. The next time there was a shipwreck, there was no cat, but the other ship news reporters did not wish to take a chance, and put the cat in. I wrote the report, leaving out the cat, and then I was severely chided for being beaten. Now when there is a shipwreck all of us always put in the cat. 19
Some news photography similarly was suspicious. In his final column for The Wall Street Journal, which he had served as managing editor, Paul E. Steiger reminisced in 2007 about a photographer colleague at a California paper who carried “a well‐preserved but very dead bird” in his car trunk:
The bird, he explained, was for feature shots on holidays like Memorial Day. He’d perch it on a gravestone or tree limb in a veterans’ cemetery to get the right mood. Nowadays such a trick would get him fired, but in the 1950s, this guy said, there was no time to wait for a live bird to flutter into the frame. 20
Journalists at work in the newsroom of The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1938.
Courtesy of The Philadelphia Inquirer
Impersonation was an accepted reporting technique in some places. As an 18‐year‐old rookie police reporter in Chicago, Jack Fuller followed the lead of his elders and told a crime victim on the phone that he was a police officer. His ruse was exposed when the victim called back with a few additional details – on the police desk sergeant’s line. A few years later, when Fuller returned to Chicago journalism after school and military service, he stopped misrepresenting himself. He explained in his book News Values in 1996: “Times simply had changed, and so had I.” The reformed impersonator went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and become editor of the Chicago Tribune . 21
Racism permeated the news and editorial columns of newspapers. In 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a black teenager was accused of assaulting a white female elevator operator. The Tulsa Tribune published a news story headlined “Nab Negro for attacking girl in elevator,” and an editorial headlined “To lynch a Negro tonight.” The inflammatory notices set off a chain of events that led to a week of terror and violence in which up to 300 people were killed. More than 10,000 residents were left homeless when a mob of whites burned nearly the entire black residential district of 35 square blocks. 22
Reporters did not always distance themselves from the people and agencies they covered. An extraordinary conflict of interest was described by Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell in their 1995 book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. The authors wrote that William L. Laurence of The New York Times was on the payroll of the Pentagon in 1945, having been hired at a secret meeting at The Times’s offices. Laurence wrote many of the government press releases that followed the August 6, 1945, bombing of Hiroshima. For The Times, Laurence wrote a news story casting doubt on Japanese descriptions of radiation poisoning. However, the authors said, he had witnessed the July 16, 1945, atomic test in New Mexico and was aware of radioactive fallout that poisoned residents and livestock in the desert. 23 Laurence was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 “for his eye‐witness account of the atom‐bombing of Nagasaki and his subsequent ten articles on the development, production, and significance of the atomic bomb.” 24
Sid Hartman began writing sports columns in Minneapolis in 1944 and, when he died in 2020 at age 100, he was still writing three columns a week for the Star Tribune, including one published the day he died. 25 He also was a participant in the sports scene he covered, a role that would be unacceptable in modern journalism. In 1946, Hartman personally arranged the transfer of the Detroit Gems pro basketball team to Minneapolis, where they became known as the Lakers – a name they kept when the franchise moved to Los Angeles in 1960. For the Lakers’ first 11 years, Hartman was the team’s behind-the-scenes manager, “in complete charge of the draft, complete charge in all deals, every part of the basketball operation and everything else.” Of course, he was still writing columns and had begun sports commentary on WCCO radio. In an interview in 2011 reflecting on his long career, Hartman said he was following the sports department’s existing practice: “Every member of our staff had an outside job as a PR man for either the wrestling promoters, boxing promoters, etcetera.” 26 In 2010 a statue of Sid Hartman was unveiled outside the Target Center sports arena in Minneapolis.
The Hutchins Commission
Ironically, social responsibility in journalism was defined most persuasively not by journalists but by a panel of intellectuals. Robert Maynard Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago, was asked in 1942 by Henry Luce, publisher of Time magazine, to “find out about freedom of the press and what my obligations are.” Luce put up $200,000 (about $3.3 million in 2021 currency). Hutchins assembled a panel of 10 professors, a banker who was a former professor, and the poet Archibald MacLeish. They joined him on what was formally titled the Commission on Freedom of the Press but was to become better known as the Hutchins Commission.
