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An Aristocracy of Critics


My recent reading includes AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS (2020), by Stephen Bates. I won't say much about it today: but I will give you some bibliographic particulars. Let's do this is question-and-answer form.

Who is Stephen Bates?

An associate professor at the University of Nevada, in Las Vegas, teaching journalism and media studies.

Is this his first book?

No, it's his fifth. Perhaps his best known before this was THE POISONER (2014) about a notorious Victorian-era serial killer, William Palmer. 

Okay. What is the new book about?

Chiefly it is about the Hutchins Commission and its report. This was a Commission created by Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, at the behest of his friend Henry Luce, then a press baron with roughly the power and wealth of a Hearst or a Murdoch. Hutchins collected some renowned philosophers, theologians, and Big Thinkers to think about the issue of a free press -- what it means and how it should be nurtured. It produced its report in 1947, entitled "A Free and Responsible Press." 

Did the report have a lot of impact?

Not really. It made a bit of a splash, and provided some ammunition (as its title indicates it should) to the then-evolving "social responsibility" theory of journalistic ethics. But its policy recommendations were quite modest, and even so were widely ignored at the time.

So why a book now about that book?

Bates believes that the report, and even more so the history of the commission and debates the members had with each other that didn't get into the report, has a lot to say to us about our own time. 

Does it?

Maybe. But that will have to be the subject for another post.    

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