-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
News and the Culture of Lying
How Journalism Really Works
by Paul H. Weaver�1994
THE FREE PRESS
Macmillan, Inc., New York
Maxwell Communication Group of Companies
-----
Paul H. Weaver has been a writer and editor for Fortune Magazine, taught
political science at Harvard University, and worked in corporate
communications at the Ford Motor Company. He has been a fellow at the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University and at the American Enterprise Institute in
Washington, D. C. Weaver lives in Palo Alto, California.
This is quite an interesting book that I would recommend to any researcher.You
will also run into some members of Skull & Bones, imagine that.
Om
K
--[2]--
Meanwhile, across the Hudson River in Princeton, New Jersey,
the uses and potentials of Pulitzer's front page were making an
impression on a political scientist, university president, and wily
liberal politician named Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson had built his career as a critic of the Constitution, par-
ticularly of Congress. His 1884 classic, Congressional Government,
an excellent analysis that still deserves to be read, is a brilliant
polemic against an institution he persuasively depicted as parochial
fragmented, meddlesome, leaderless, unanswerable, good at repre-
senting but bad at governing. The British Parliament, by contrast,
Wilson believed, was good at both governing and representing
because it unifies both power and responsibility in a government
that can act but is answerable to backbenchers and, through them
to the people. The American system, Wilson argued, disperses
governmental powers and renders government both ineffectual and
out of touch. Wilson believed that the Constitution should be
amended to give the United States a modified parliamentary sys-
tem, which he hoped would be better able and more inclined to
give the country the liberal social policies and state-assisted insti-
tution building that the ambitious reformer and social democrat
favored.
As Wilson contemplated what Pulitzer's new journalism was
making possible for the likes of the Equitable's cartel-minded
managers, however, he began to reconsider his pessimism about
the American system and his conviction that only fundamental
formal changes would do. Stimulated by the example of Theodore
Roosevelt, whose career and strong presidency were in orbit at
the time, Wilson began to conceive a way in which the country's
traditional institutions might be given the powers and inclination
to build the untraditional welfare state Wilson envisioned.
In 1908, twenty-four years after his first book, Wilson pub-
lished a new volume on American democracy, Constitutional
Government. A more radical change in attitude is hard to imagine.
By now Pulitzer's new journalism had become the nation's stan-
dard, and the bright young political scientist had become the
ambitious reform governor of New Jersey and the odds-on
favorite to win the nation's top job in Washington, D.C. The new
book celebrated a system in which the presidency had become a
potent source of leadership and government had acquired new
ability to meet society's needs.
The disabilities created by the Constitution's dispersal of pow-
ers had been overcome, Wilson argued, by the recent evolution of
the political parties and news media. With the support of the one
and outreach of the other, Wilson argued, a president could create
within the Founders' framework, the equivalent of a prime-minis-
terial and parliamentary system. From his bully pulpit a president
could mobilize the parties and public opinion, and through them
the Congress, to take the actions a complex, fast-changing society
required.
To a reader of Wilson's second book, the system it describes is
easily recognizable as essentially the one that prevails today -
just as a reader of the earlier book, while easily recognizing the
Congress toward which we today have the same love-hate feel-
ings as Wilson, doesn't recognize the ineffectual presidency
Wilson describes.
At the heart of Wilson's new vision of constitutional politics
was a radically altered presidency. As political scientist Jeffrey
Tulis has explained in a fascinating recent study, the Wilsonian
presidency-both the one Wilson wrote about in his second book
and the one he conducted in the White House starting just four
years after he published it-differed sharply from the office of
Washington, Lincoln, McKinley, and Taft. It was, says Tulis, a
rhetorical presidency in which Wilson routinely initiated and advo-
cated new public policies, speaking over the heads of Congress to
address the people as a whole.
Previously, as Tulis shows, presidents had avoided initiating
and advocating policy proposals; their public speeches and state-
ments dealt mostly with uncontroversial constitutional principles.
By the same token they had avoided addressing the people direct-
1y or in person, or in a manner meant to stir them up, or on any
matter involving a current issue of public policy. Traditionally
presidents had communicated mainly with Congress and mainly
through written messages. This practice had been inaugurated by
George Washington in the conviction that the Constitution out-
lined a republican rather than democratic system of government
and that under it an official's main allegiance was to the Constitu-
tion itself rather than to the people who elected him. Under the
Constitution an official's job was to handle public business while
respecting the coequality and independence of other officials and
other branches of government. An official's job did not include
mobilizing popular constituencies to manipulate other branches of
the government.
The early republic's norm that officials were to speak deco-
rously to one another, not demotically to the public, was so
emphatic that when Congress drew up articles of impeachment
against Andrew Johnson in 1868, one of the charges was that, by
making a speaking tour of the country to advocate his program of
reconstruction and attack its opponents, he had brought the presi-
dency into "contempt, ridicule, and disgrace."
In this view of the Constitution, the press had the same stand-
ing as any member of the general public. It was entitled to
observe the government's proceedings and report what public
officials might say or do as part of the regular body of already pub-
lic information it gathered together and made available to all and
sundry. Just as officials refrained from speaking over their col-
leagues' heads to the general public, so did the press avoid giving
public officials a special platform from which to make such pitch-
es. In the era before Pulitzer invented the front page, the press
presented information about recent events in a format that made
no judgments about what the public thought.
Wilson's presidency was made possible by Pulitzer's journal-
ism. With a press that emphasized political affairs and created a
bully pulpit from which officials might address the masses over
the heads of their constitutional colleagues, the rhetorical presi-
dency became possible. The Wilsonian presidency and Pulitzerian
journalism were mirror images of each other.
Thus, Wilson became reconciled to the Constitution once he
understood that the press-assisted presidency would shift the
American system to the emergency-power model. Superficially it
would look like the constitutional system of yore, but under a
patina of popular concerns, it would function in an autocratic man-
ner by drawing attention to dangers warranting unilateral inter-
vention by the president and a presidentially led Congress.
During his eight years as president, Wilson institutionalized
his theory and explored what it meant in practical political terms.
He built up the presidency by means of frequent policy-oriented
speeches, a constant stream of special messages to Congress, an
insistent quest for attention, an aggressive, self-serving idealism
a Manichean rhetoric dividing the world into a presidential party
of light and an anti-presidential force of darkness, and, of course
the war and presidential war leadership. During and just after the
Wilson presidency, there were the formal institutional innovations
that solidified presidential leadership of the legislative process,
presidential control of the budget, and presidential management
of the economy.
In policy terms Wilsonianism, true to the spirit of the progres-
sive era as a whole, was ambivalence personified. There was a
strong strain of social democracy and egalitarian reform. It was
matched by a strong strain of self-promotion, militarism, authori-
tarianism, privilege, oligarchy, and oligopoly. Both elements of
this politics have continued in a direct and unbroken line to our
own time. Together they define the politics of news.
The new system of mobilizing journalism, manipulative adver-
tising, monopoly-seeking public relations, and emergency-based
presidential government worked because, behind the forms of an
old-fashioned limited state based on rights and limits, it had creat-
ed a mechanism for mobilizing the emergency powers of the state
in support of a politics that used methods and served ends
antithetical to those of the original constitutionalism. In effect
Pulitzer & Company had engineered a hidden revolution that
transformed the real politics of the nation while preserving an
illusion of continuity. Into old constitutionalist forms had been
poured a new, unconstitutionalist substance.
They were well aware of what they had wrought, excited
by the notion of striking out on a course different from that set
by the Founding Fathers, proud to be building a new kind of poli-
tics and economics for a new world of science, technology, and
progress they were sure lay ahead. To Henry Adams, historian-
intellectual and descendant of presidents, whose ironic autobiog-
raphy, The Education of Henry Adams, is one of the monuments of
American letters, the coming of a new age was a mock-glorious
event that meant the passing of the world for which he felt fitted
by his self-described nineteenth-century background. But for his
best friend and neighbor on Lafayette Square, across from the
White House, John Hay, a literary politician who had been an aide
to Lincoln, married into a fortune, written Lincoln's biography
and built the American empire as a fin de siecle secretary of state,
the coming of the new era evoked not a trace of irony or regret.
"Every young and growing people has to meet, at moments,
the problem of its destiny," Hay declared in his eulogy for assassi-
nated President William McKinley, which historian Martin J. Sklar
describes as the Periclean oration of a new American society. The
Americans, Hay asserted, had at last met up with their special
destiny. "The 'debtor nation' has become the chief creditor nation.
The financial center of the world, which required thousands of
years to journey from the Euphrates to the Thames and the
Seine, seems passing to the Hudson," he boasted. The first new
nation was being born again. For Americans "the past is past, and
experience vain."
The fathers are dead; the prophets are silent; the questions are
new, and have no answer but in time.... The past gives no clue
to the future. The fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do
they live forever? We are ourselves the fathers! We are ourselves
the prophets!
As Pulitzer and his fellow titans prepared to make their exit, they
carefully finished off the new construction they had undertaken,
painted, and papered, brought the furniture back from storage,
policed the area, and painstakingly restored everything to its orig-
inal appearance. For the new emergency state to work, for the
culture of lying to be believable, the nation had to be under the
impression that everything was working as it was meant to
and that the American system was in essence unchanged, albeit
updated in keeping with the needs of changing times. In the years
following Wilson's terms in the White House, Americans' aware-
ness of the political meanings of the new journalism faded and a
sense of the radical departure made by Pulitzer's generation was
stifled by a swelling drumbeat for the comforting myth that the
republic was returning to the ways of yore.
The theme of continuity was sounded aggressively by Presi-
dent Warren G. Harding when he coined the phrase "the Found-
ing Fathers" and revived the malapropism "normalcy" itself
(Harding, who rose to national office largely on the strength of the
"presidential" image he projected in the press, is considered by
many historians to be America's first pure media politician.) It
was echoed by the construction of the Lincoln and Jefferson
Memorials in Washington, D.C., in the 1920s and 1930s. It was
furthered when business leaders began evangelizing for free
enterprise even as their old and uninterrupted quest for antimar-
ket subsidies and protections struck paydirt in Washington and in
many state capitals. To listen to both academic and popular inter-
preters of politics-from philosopher John Dewey or political sci-
entist Arthur Bentley to journalist Walter Lippmann - the rela-
tionship prevailing among government, media, and the public was
just the same good old interest-group constitutionalism that the
Founding Fathers had put in place over a century earlier, updated
to reflect the faster pace and more advanced state of knowledge of
the twentieth century.
Within the journalistic sector this sense of normalcy was pro-
moted by the notion that journalism is a profession, a notion
spread both in the self-descriptions of journalists and media firms
and, more importantly, in the rise of journalism schools and for-
mal journalism education. In fact, it was and is and can be no such
thing, at least not in the important sense that there is a body of
proven expert scientific knowledge involved, as in medicine or
law. Journalism is inherently non expert, subjective, expressive,
personal, and contingent, like politics itself or like the novel. The
spread of the image of journalism as a profession was meant to
invest a newly powerful institution with the misleading but recon-
ciling and comforting aura that it is natural and that its practition-
ers are subject to a collective intellectual and ethical discipline.
The idea that journalism is a profession, in other words, was a
public relations flourish meant to conceal the true nature of the
enterprise, deflect criticism and attack, legitimate the industry,
and increase the new journalism managers' control over their
employees and subordinates.
Here, too, Joseph Pulitzer was the prime mover. But whereas
in creating news itself, he had been utterly sincere and engaged
to the limit of his awesome powers, in promoting the idea of a
professional journalism he tended to be cynical and hypocritical.
To Pulitzer the news was the product, journalism schools and the
accoutrements of professionalism just an exercise in public rela-
tions and media hype.
Pulitzer toyed with the idea of journalism education on and
off for two decades. Most of the time his interest was off. Ideologic-
cally Pulitzer was a liberal individualist. In his view, exemplified
by his own career, the journalist was essentially an amateur. He
observed and wrote about public affairs from the viewpoint and
with the powers and rights of a private citizen, no more and no
less. For such a person, Pulitzer and many others at the time
held, a broad liberal education was the correct training. The idea
that journalism should be viewed as a profession struck him as
grotesque. In 1879 in St. Louis, a Pulitzer editorial mocked the
idea of a professorship of journalism, which he considered "as
absurd ... as ... a professorship of matrimony, it being one of
those things of which nothing can be learned by those who have
never tried it."
Pulitzer's scorn for journalism education softened, however,
when his thoughts turned to celebrations to mark the anniver-
saries of his advent as a media mogul. He first took an interest in
the subject in 1892, when he was planning for the tenth anniver-
sary of his purchase of the World. That year Pulitzer approached
Seth Low, then the president of Columbia University, about the
possibility of Pulitzer's endowing a college of journalism, which
would have been the world's first. Low and his trustees weren't
interested, and Pulitzer let the idea pass, though he did soon
endow a modest annual lectureship to inform graduating seniors
at Columbia about career opportunities in the news business.
A decade later, as Pulitzer made plans for his twentieth anniver-
sary at the World, he approached Low's successor, Nicholas Murray
Butler, with the same general notion of a Pulitzer-endowed school
of journalism at Columbia. This time a deal was eventually
consummated. But the nine years of often farcical contention
between the two parties that preceded the completion of the two-
million-dollar gift establishing the Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism and a program of Pulitzer Prizes made it clear that
Pulitzer was doing it for the personal fame and institutional legiti-
mation and that he had little respect for the content or merits of
the programs his money was bringing into being.
Soon after Pulitzer's benefaction was settled, the publisher in
1905 wrote an article attempting to define the purpose to be
served by a special school of journalism. It wasn't to transmit
technical journalism skills, Pulitzer argued; these, in his view
were best learned on the job. No, he said, the reason to have a
journalism school is to instill in the fledgling journalist qualities of
moral courage and devotion to the noncommercial duties of the
news media. Journalism schools, Pulitzer argued, would do for
prospective reporters and editors what military academies did
for the physical courage of those destined for careers as military
officers.
Pulitzer's advocacy of the Columbia journalism program as a
school for moral courage was profoundly hypocritical. After all, if
he felt the news media had become too commercial, he was in a
perfect position to develop a strategy for making them less so,
beginning with his own huge and highly commercial publication.
By handing the task over to an academic institution that would
have little of the power and knowledge needed to make changes,
he was evading the problem under a pretense of addressing it.
And as for strengthening journalists' moral courage and sense of
social responsibility, Pulitzer's appreciation of these qualities was
abstract at best. In real life he was a jealous, domineering boss,
slow to delegate responsibility and quick to fire or otherwise pun-
ish employees who didn't do precisely what he told them to do. It
is recorded that Pulitzer on a number of occasions came to blows
with reporters in his employ.
When Pulitzer finally gave his money to Columbia for the
journalism school, it was as a posthumous bequest, an act of res-
ignation and despair on the part of a man who was profoundly
alienated from the school he was endowing. After an initial and, as
it turned out, premature announcement of Pulitzer's commitment
to endow the school in 1903, the donor and his beneficiary fell
into a bitter impasse that prevented the completion of the gift and
the school's launch for eight years. Pulitzer believed passionately
that journalism education needed a strong, continuing input from
practitioners and that the school should be open to people of tal-
ent, whether they had gone to college or not. Columbia's acade-
mics, anxious, as a professor had said, to "escape the reproach of
degrading the University," insisted that formal authority had to be
in the hands of academics only. They conceded that there might
be an advisory board of outside experts, but it would have to be
limited to giving advice, its members would serve limited terms,
and though Pulitzer would name half the initial members, their
successors would be appointed by the university president.
One of the issues between donor and beneficiary concerned
admissions. Pulitzer, keenly aware that he and most of his
employees hadn't been college men, wanted the program to be
open to able people without regard to previous educational cre-
dentials. Columbia resisted. In a compromise the Columbia side
agreed that promising applicants without two years of college
education might be admitted at the university's discretion. But,
the academic side insisted, there'd be no guarantee that any such
candidates would be admitted in a given year, and however well
they might perform, they wouldn't be entitled to receive a
Columbia degree. Degrees would be given only to journalism
graduates with proper academic credentials. In other words, while
it was theoretically possible that a Joseph Pulitzer would be
admitted, there was no way he would be able to receive formal
acknowledgment of his having completed a course of study.
With deep misgivings Pulitzer had swallowed all this, signed
the agreement with the Columbia trustees, handed over his check
for the first two hundred thousand dollars, and sent President
Nicholas Murray Butler a list of the seven people that under the
agreement he was authorized to name to the advisory board. Five
were top names in the news industry, and two were distinguished
academic leaders and friends of Pulitzer's who had taken an inter-
est in journalism education-President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard
Harvard and President Andrew Dickson White of Cornell. Butler
and his trustees refused to appoint Eliot and White. "Understand
jealousy," Pulitzer cabled back to his man on the Columbia proj-
ect. "Telegraph Butler my insistence. Unalterable. Final."
Butler, thinking to pressure Pulitzer to go ahead with the proj-
ect, issued a press release announcing Pulitzer's gift and omitting
any mention of the members of the advisory board. If he thought
this would overcome Pulitzer's resistance, he had misjudged his
man. The prospective benefactor immediately trumped Butler's
move, declaring that he wouldn't complete the remaining $1.8
million of the $2 million gift until the advisory board was complet-
ed. When Butler later tried to communicate with Pulitzer about
the impasse, Pulitzer replied, "All further disagreeable cables for-
bidden."
There the matter rested for eight years.
Time, of course, was on Butler's side. Columbia had the name
and authority to create a journalism school, and Pulitzer, his
health fading, was resolved to create a suitably Pulitzerian, issue-
oriented, public-spirited monument to himself. Unwilling to back
down on the matter of his right to name half the members of the
advisory board but insistent that eventually there would be a jour-
nalism school, Pulitzer relented. He declared that while he
refused to subject himself to the anguish of further negotiations
or the spectacle of the school going ahead with a system of gover-
nance he didn't control, he would nonetheless include the rest of
the bequest in his will.
Butler was happy to wait. Pulitzer was in poor health, and
when he died, quite possibly soon, Columbia would have the best
of both worlds: all of Pulitzer's money and none of Pulitzer's val-
ues or advice.
When Columbia finally launched its journalism school in 1913,
two years after Pulitzer's death, it was with an almost total lack of
input from the man who had almost single-handedly remade
American journalism. The project quickly came under the influ-
ence of people and ideas inimical to Pulitzer. The first dean,
Philadelphia editor Talcott Williams, was a leader of the National
Civic Federation, the elite, tripartite, progressive-era business-
government-labor association that stood for a managed, cooperative
approach to politics somewhat at odds with Pulitzer's reform-
oriented Democratic politics, though of course entirely in harmony
with the reality of the emergency-power politics Pulitzer's journal-
ism enabled. The school soon fell into the orbit of the New York
Times and its philosophy, espoused by Pulitzer's old rival, Adolph
Ochs, of an objective, impersonal, centrist journalism quite differ-
ent from the World's. The Pulitzer Prizes, with their emphasis on
long stories about subjects of social and political import, were
more in keeping with the founder's values.
Aside from recruiting able young people to the news business
and developing their technical skills, the important functions of
the journalism schools and the professional idea they represented
were to dignify journalism and, by suggesting that the field is
properly a subject for academic study, undermine the idea of
journalism criticism by nonacademics, generalists, and ordinary
citizens.
This new, protective, sheltered view of journalism was articu-
lated most importantly in the postwar writings of Walter Lipp-
mann, which, behind their veneer of genteel criticism, have been
the principal legitimation of Pulitzerian journalism throughout the
twentieth century.
In 1921 Lippmann, a founding editor of the New Republic and at
thirty-two already a prominent social critic, coauthored with
Charles Merz an analysis of the way the New York Times had cov-
ered the Bolshevik revolution from 1917 to 1920. Abysmally,
Lippmann concluded. The Times's news coverage was a pastiche
anti-Bolshevik Propaganda. Things that hadn't happened but served
anti-Bolshevik purposes were covered, things that had happened
but clashed with the anti-Bolshevik line were ignored. The Times
was guilty of "seeing not what was, but what men wished to see,"
and this failure grew out of "hope and fear in the minds of reporters
and editors." The gentlemen of the Times had been overcome by a
"boundless credulity, an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on
many occasions a downright lack of common sense."
If ever there was an occasion tailor-made for intelligent critical
reflection on the nature of the press and politics in the era after
Pulitzer, this was it. But in this work, and in Liberty and the News,
the two that followed, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public,
Lippmann turned his formidable intellect in a very different direc-
tion. For Walter Lippmann, the discovery that one of the nation's
top newspapers had systematically misled the public about an
important story by uncritically repeating the manipulative lies of
interested parties was an occasion for meditating on the igno-
rance and unthoughtfulness of the public and the irremediable
intellectual shortcomings of popular government. What the
Times's mishandling of the Russian Revolution showed, Lippmann
argued, was not that journalism should be conducted differently
but that democratic institutions weren't capable of governing. The
public, Lippmann held, lives in a world of crude mental images or
stereotypes, all of them partly fictitious, and some of them entire-
ly so. A nation's elites, no matter how well informed, cannot rem-
edy or escape these mass limitations; the continuing growth of
knowledge was bound to be negated, at least in part, by the inten-
sifying political aggressiveness of the ignorant. Government in a
modern society, then, was bound to be a disappointing and often
dangerous affair.
Lippmann's oeuvre amounted to a fancy form of blaming the
victim and denying the crime. Rather than lay bare the realities of
a confusing new world, it sought to conceal and justify them.
However valid in the abstract (and in the abstract Lippmann's
point was perfectly valid: we are victims of stereotypes), the theo-
ry was a smokescreen. What had gone wrong with respect to the
Russian Revolution was not that one hundred million Americans
had simplified pictures of reality in their heads, it was that official
sources had lied to journalists and that the journalists had accept-
ed the lies and repeated and validated them. The news had been a
manipulative fabrication.
To Walter Lippmann, however, then the foreign affairs editorial
writer for the New York World and about to become its editor, that
wasn't the issue. "News and truth are not the same thing," he
wrote complacently "The function of news is to signalize an
event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden circum-
stances." Despite the exaggerated respect now accorded Lipp-
mann as a public philosopher, his theory of news and democracy
can only be described as professional propaganda. Its purpose was
not to explain and criticize a complex new reality in which jour-
nalism, working in conjunction with oligopoly- and oligarchy-
seeking institutions, had become a potent source of a routinized
emergency power that was rapidly transforming the political
economy of a less and less constitutionalist society. Lippmann's
theory sought mainly to justify the new Pulitzerian journalism
and to reconcile a still-constitutionalist public to the anticonstitu-
tionalist politics it represented and engendered.
In the seventy-five years since Lippmann's apologia, the jour-
nalism and politics he was defending have flourished beyond any-
one's wildest imagining. The novelty that Pulitzer, Wilson, et al,
put on the map slowly but emphatically entrenched itself as a sys-
temic reality in several ways.
First, the news industry became more concentrated, less
diverse, and more mutually imitative, particularly following the
advent of the nightly network news programs in 1963. For all the
ways it differed from print journalism, television was a profoundly
Pulitzerian medium. It used sound, moving pictures, live cover-
age, a national focus, and omniscient narrative to outdo even the
front page in projecting the illusion that the whole world is watch-
ing. It relied on advertising sales, not for 80 percent of its rev-
enues, as in the case of newspapers, but for the entire 100
percent. And amid enormous growth, television maintained itself
as a tight-knit, government-protected oligopoly for many decades.
In the 1960s television gave a nineteenth-century journalistic
invention a greatly extended lease on life.
The second major change in the twentieth century has been
the growth of big, interventionist government along the pragmat-
ic, crisis-managing lines of the emergency-response news story
As the public sector became larger, especially after World War II,
the relationship among the state, big private-sector institutions,
and the press became more supportive and more consequential.
The bigger government and private-sector institutions got, the
more willing they were to enact the crisis-and-emergency-
response pseudoevents that the press needed to do its job. The
more the press responded to these efforts with dramatic front
page news stories, the bigger the government became and the
more special benefit the private institutions derived, and so on in
a mutually reinforcing spiral.
A similar dynamic of increasing mutual empowerment was set
in motion by reforms of the national political process in the late
1960s and early 1970s. In Congress new rules extricated the leg-
islative process from its long-standing domination by seniority-
based committees and returned the lawmaking function to the
control of the entire House or Senate. As a result, Congress
became more reactive to and supportive of the news media, and
vice versa. Much the same happened in the wake of the switch to
presidential primary elections in the 1960s and the consequent
displacement of the political party organization as the main source
of presidential nominations.
The third line of evolution that took the news business from
the age of the gaslight to that of the microchip was the growth of
popular involvement in the emergency-power politics that
Pulitzerian journalism routinizes. On one hand, news-based poli-
tics won substantial broad-based support as more and more
groups learned to turn the new system to their benefit in the
form of public subsidies, protections, recognitions, and other posi-
tive advantages. On the other, this widespread direct experience
of the aggressiveness. manipulativeness, and dishonesty of media
politics-and the spectacle of other groups using the same meth-
ods to gain advantage at the beholders' expense-have nurtured
explosive public distaste. In a very real sense the popularity of
Pulitzerian journalism is reflected in the vast majorities who,
through public opinion polls and in other ways, express low
regard for the moral character of the press and the political sys-
tem it so profoundly shapes.
Toward the end of the Reagan presidency, the historical impact
of that politics over the hundred or so years that have passed
since it appeared on the American scene was weighed, in an indi-
rect but dramatic way, by an economic historian named Robert
Higgs in a study he entitled Crisis and Leviathan. The book was a
fascinating quantitative and analytical retrospective on the growth
of American government. Using a variety of measures, Higgs
identified three basic dynamics.
One of these was a slow, steady, secular expansion of govern-
ment associated with normal political processes and events - in
effect, a gentle upward drift of the magnitude of the public sector.
A second dynamic, both more dramatic in itself and the source
of the lion's share of the growth of the public sector during the
twentieth century, was a crisis dynamic. During four short crisis
episodes-World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and
the Vietnam War/Great Society period-government grew explo-
sively. What expanded, Higgs found, wasn't merely the dollar vol-
ume of government activity, which would have been accounted for
by the special effort to fight the war or remedy the depression.
Equally important was a dramatic expansion of the range and type
of government activities during the crisis period. It was as if,
Higgs observed, organizations and groups with political agendas
were standing in line awaiting a crisis that would provide an occa-
sion for implementing their agendas.
A third dynamic identified by Higgs's research was what he
called the ratchet effect. After a crisis the size and scope of the
government would shrink, but not back to their precrisis level nor
even back to the level implied by the slow, steady growth trend
driven by normal politics. The government would shrink to a new
significantly higher base level from which future growth dynamics
would proceed.
Higgs's study was interesting not only for what it found but
also for what it didn't find. It demonstrated that a number of the
explanations conventionally put forward to account for the growth
of big government-modernization, changing ideology, growing
economic inequality-don't fit the facts nearly as well as the theo-
ry that stresses the interaction of the crisis, ratchet effect, and
normal drift dynamics.
At the end of his study, Higgs, ever the prudent scholar, notes
that at least one unanswered question hangs like a potential mill-
stone around the neck of his crisis theory of government growth:
Why did crises vastly inflate the size of government in the twenti-
eth century but not in the nineteenth century? Crises did happen
during the 1800s in America - one need only mention the Civil
War and the disastrous War of 1812. Yet they didn't unleash the
growth dynamics that similar crises touched off in the twentieth
century. Why not? Or, to put the same question the other way
around, why did crises engender the ballooning of government in
the environment of the twentieth century?
A substantial part of the answer, I would suggest, is that the
emergence of modern journalism and the institutional adaptations
to it by the corporation and the state created a coherent, self-
sustaining, efficacious mechanism through which organizations
seeking benefits from an expanded government could generate or
co-opt crises, unleash the crisis power, and create both the reality
and the appearance of popular support for institutional innova-
tions jury-rigged during the crisis episodes. In other words, what
Pulitzer & Company created around the turn of the century
wasn't merely a new journalism, but a new and powerful perma-
nent emergency mode of operation that constitutional govern-
ment was routinely urged to resort to and routinely reward for
doing so.
* News in our time isn't merely a genre or mode of knowledge.
It is also, in effect, a special type of political power. That is why,
despite protestations of independence, the journalist and the offi-
cial or "newsmaker" end up in such a tight embrace, one in which
each depends on and enables the actions of the other, and both
must maintain the fiction that they are merely telling it like it is,
when in fact they're putting on a dog and pony show to activate
the extraordinary powers and immunities of the emergency state.*
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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