Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Stephen Bates' new book is impeccably researched if not as well written. As Michael Luo describes in his very informative article for <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-future-of-democracy/how-can-the-press-best-serve-democracy"><i>The New Yorker</i></a>, Bates' book explores the little-known history of the Commission on the Freedom of the Press. This commission of academics and their ilk spent the early-mid 1940s discussing the First Amendment in all of its possible nuances in order to produce the classic text on Journalism, [book:A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books|986630]. Luo does a good job of demonstrating how the world of journalism of the 1940s faced similar issues as the press of today. Public and governmental distrust of the media and an abundance of fake and/or sensational news led the commission to believe that the First Amendment needed to be reconsidered. Discussion topics ranged from the "negative" vs. "positive" interpretation of the First Amendment (i.e. does the Amendment guarantee a robust press or merely a lack of governmental influence?), the threshold for truthful reporting and appropriate nuance, the relationship between the press and the government, the possibilities (or lack thereof) to control or enforce higher journalistic standards, the pros and cons of big and small newspapers, and the actual influence of the newspapers on the public, among others.

These are all interesting and complex questions, especially when trying to find practical answers. As per Nietzsche's second untimely meditation, one expects that Bates' book might lend some interesting insights on these questions for practical application today. After all, Bates suggests in his own initial chapters that his book will be the first recreation of the discussions and debates that informed <i>A Free and Responsible Press</i>. Certainly, Bates demonstrates how nuanced those debates were, in ways that were not necessarily reflected in <i>A Free and Responsible Press</i>. He gives ample room to each side of each debate, expressing the different philosophies and economic beliefs of the men in the commission. And yet, Bates recreates the Commissions's debates almost too well.

I can't imagine anyone who wishes they could spend more time mired in deadlocked committee debates. If such a person does exist, this book might appeal to them. Ideas are jumbled around, contradicted, shot down, resurrected, insisted upon, and generally debated <i>ad nauseum</i>. This provides ample ground for Bates to express the complexities of each of the topics at hand and yet it leaves the reader feeling like there are no real answers or, in any case, like no progress is being made towards realistic suggestions. Bates' own conclusion, if it can be said he has any at all, seems to be that the unresolvability of these issues is a testament, perhaps, to the supposed difficulty of the task that the Commission assigned itself. In Bates' own words, “important disputes remained unresolved and probably unresolvable.”

Even so, this book could have provided a fascinating, micro-historic narrative or an enlightening exploration of the theory behind modern journalism. It does neither. The book's pseudo-thematic organization threatens to split into so many individual biographies as there are chapters. Almost every chapter begins with a biographical sketch of one or two committee members from their birth through their post-committee life. This already degrades any sense of chronology or narrative flow that the reader can only identify when the Committee met and what they discussed with great difficulty. Moreover, each chapter transitions from biography to a discussion of one of the Commissions's main disputes. This gives the almost surely mistaken impression that certain members of the Commission's are connected in some particular way with only one position on one of the key discussion topics.

If only one change were to be made to Bates book to improve it, it would be to include more biographical information on it's two most interesting personages: Ruth Ingliss and Maude Phelps Hutchins. Ingliss, the only woman directly associated with the Commission (as a research assistant) was underappreciated and underutilized by the Commission. She was one of few people associated with the Commission who advocated for empirical research to be done to support the philosophical musings put forward by the white, primarily academic, male Commission members. "More than anyone else associated with the project," Bates writes, "she ended up disputing its key presuppositions.” "Although her scholarly credentials exceed those of the other researchers," Bates also wrote, she was "assigned . . . secretarial tasks." Maude Phelps Hutchins, the first wife of Commission secretary Robert Hutchins, was a celebrated "avant-garde artist and writer." She deliberately downplayed her own success to avoid upsetting her husband. Bates describes how “she asked Who’s Who to condense her entry in 1945 because she was embarrassed to discover it was longer than his [Robert Hutchins’]." Despite this, her husband continued to be demanding and suspicious of his wife's artistic and professional work. It is perhaps unsurprising that, after their divorce, she would write a poem "in which the narrator keeps, as a trophy, the still-warm severed hands of someone she loathes. Later, she wrote a short story in which an artist ends her twenty-five year marriage to an inattentive, taciturn husband–like Robert Hutchins, a boyish-looking intellectual who smokes a pipe–by fatally shooting him.”

Ultimately, Bates' book provides a detailed description of the Commission on the Freedom of the Press, an interesting effort to provide much-needed guidance to the Press. That guidance is as needed today as it was 80 years ago. Yet, upon reading Bates' account, one is left wondering why anyone gave much credibility to the Commission in the first place. They were disorganized, self-righteous, and unable to come to any real, innovative conclusions after two and a half years. Bate's book not only describes this but emphatically makes these inefficiencies and deadlock felt by his reader. The book is detailed, informative, and a slog.

Stephen Bates is an Associate Professor in Journalism and Media Studies and in this monograph, he examines the highly influential 1944 Commission on Freedom of the Press. Headed by Robert Hutchins from the University of Chicago, and continued for quite a while, the result of the investigation done by the Commission is the highly controversial report A Free and Responsible Press from 1947.

Tracing the entire history behind the Commission's work on the Report, Bates manages to elucidate some very important aspects of the American (and respectively, the majority of the world's) views on freedom, democracy, and the role of the media. Moreover, the author shows that many of the high-ranking members of the Commission such as the philosopher William Hocking, the poet Archibald MacLeish and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, are not cut out for the job, to put it as mildly as possible. They are also not all that unbiased considering that Hutchins had to run his choices by Henry Luce, the publisher of such magazines as Life, Time, and others.

Though not the first work dealing with the Commission on the Freedom of the Press and the repercussions of its 1947 report, An Aristocracy of Critics is a painstakingly researched and nicely written account on it.

In the Aristocracy of Critics, Stephen Bates introduces the reader to the Commission on Freedom of the Press. This commission was a group of public intellectuals who saw danger in the press of the 1940s such as partisan media and distorted news, activists who silence rather than rebut opponents, conspiracy theories, and the survival of American democracy. Sounds an awful lot like the United States in 2020. We go inside the walls of commission meetings to learn that when it came to these topics—the most learned men of the day were no more certain on these issues than they are today.

How have things changed today? Well the media has become more partisan and fragmented, conspiracy theories are pervasive, and American democracy is an open question. The only thing that has changed is the position of the intellectual as the loudest voices seem to be magnified and ascending and intellectual thought and debate have been marginalized in favor of the next greatest soundbite.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.