He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press, and reported the following:
Broadly, my book is about the press and democracy, and page 99 is representative. It discusses whether you have a meaningful right of free speech if you can’t afford media machinery and if other people won’t share theirs. In essence, the issue is whether freedom of speech in a technological society is limited to rich people.Learn more about An Aristocracy of Critics at the Yale University Press website.
My book focuses on the Commission on Freedom of the Press, a committee of intellectuals convened in 1943 to ponder the contemporary meaning of free speech. Archibald MacLeish, a Pulitzer-winning poet who was serving as FDR’s Librarian of Congress, maintained that at the time of the First Amendment’s ratification in 1791, anyone who wanted to reach a mass audience could do so at modest expense by starting a newspaper or publishing a pamphlet. (Some historians say it wasn’t as cheap as MacLeish thought.) In the 1940s, by contrast, starting a metropolitan newspaper cost millions of dollars. Therefore, under MacLeish’s argument, freedom of speech had lost its original meaning.
He was touching on the concept of public access to the press. A right of access rests on what has been termed the positive First Amendment, a theory calling on the government to expand opportunities for free speech. As I explain in the Atlantic, the positive First Amendment is popular in academia, but it hasn’t made inroads in the courts, with the exception of broadcast regulation.
MacLeish didn’t spell out the policy implications of his argument. He may simply have wanted the Commission on Freedom of the Press to say that in an age of exorbitantly expensive media companies, owners must open their facilities to a variety of views; otherwise, the First Amendment can’t function as originally intended.
--Marshal Zeringue
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