Reluctant to Criticize: Media, Academia, and the Press Council Without a Home

Abstract

The earliest recommendation for an American press council appears in A Free and Responsible Press (1947), the report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press. Few people know that Commission chair Robert Maynard Hutchins and two allies between 1959 and 1962 tried to create the press council. They wanted an organization that would evaluate television as well as print, and entertainment as well as news, with Adlai Stevenson as chair, Edward R. Murrow as staff director, Henry R. Luce as a major funder, and an elite university as a base. In substantial part because of resistance from the universities, they failed.