The Social Responsibility of the Press

J. EDWARD GERALD. The Social Responsibility of the Press. Pp. vii, 214. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963. $5.00.

There are few problems in the emerging institutions of mass communications more important than the professionalization of their elites. And the present author, professor at a major journalism school in the mid-West and specialist in the interplay between constitutionalism and the press, is well qualified to comment on issues which are essentially about how media, governmental agencies, and publics define freedom and self-restraint as they variously participate in the production and consumption of news.

Professor Gerald divides his book into seven sometimes overlapping chapters: the nature of mass communication-containing an amazingly succinct sketch of press history; journalism as big business-where the role of advertising is graphically portrayed through the rise of Wanamaker's department store; the natural habitat of the press-where the pressure to expand is brilliantly revealed in a career profile of a hypothetical publisher, the best single thing in the book; the proprietorship role-basic economic trends; mass communication content-"passive non-involvement in critical problems is journalism's outstanding quality"; freedom's new community-the ethical stake of the press in meeting the community's new problem; and professional organization of mass communicators-the nurture of the professional intra and extra muros. There is no bibliography to this long, sometimes too rambling essay, but the full footnotes at the back of the book strike a note of heterogeneousness, as Gerald cites from trade papers, scholarly journals, speeches, law cases, and secondary sources. The Index is limited.

My chief complaint is a lack of focus, which I believe comes from inadequate organizing concepts. This seems evident to me on the important question of the role of the journalism school in catalyzing professionalism in the media. In Chapter IV, for example, Gerald cites from an unidentified issue of Journalism Quarterly that 105 journalism schools enrolled 11,766 in 1959, 11 per cent being graduate students. Picking up the same theme in the last chapter, the year cited is 1958, with an enrollment of 11,263 in 100 institutions, but 23.7 per cent are graduate students. One is curious about such a fluctuation.

These figures do not really mean much either, unless some effort is made to distinguish among the several traditions in journalism education. Much of the economic data did not seem to explain a great deal to me either. And I believe that the book is too skewed to print media, especially newspapers, to get at the slippery question of how you prod people constantly sweating over deadlines to become more philosophical about their social roles. The best technique I have seen so far is a book that remains quite superior, Wilbur Schramm's Responsibility in Mass Communication.

In that book Schramm cites a number of case histories which are crises for the professional's conscience. This combines an authenticity dear to the journalist with an inductive kind of moralizing or philosophizing that he can assimilate as part of his experience. Better one vividly articulated conflict for the professional to analyze than pages of high-level abstractions about the need for press improvement. A series of such incidents carefully analyzed leads to a predisposition to respond in a certain way; predispositions over time become traditions; traditions provide institutionalized self-control. And that is what we are after, if we can get there fast enough.

Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 353, City Bosses and Political Machines (May, 1964), pp. 144-145 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science