The Death and Life of American Journalism

Let’s put this in context: imagine if the invasion and occupation of Iraq had been a genuinely international endeavor that had broad support and clearly defined goals. Then, imagine if, instead of being guided by neoconservative fantasists with their haphazard schemes and corrupt cronies, the occupation of Iraq had been organized by people who really were serious about creating a vibrant and fully functional democracy. Imagine if teams of Arab and Muslim democrats had been given the structural support and resources to start new media with a charge to tell it like it is, rather than L. Paul Bremer’s edicts—which one Iraqi editor interpreted as: “In other words, if you’re not with America, you’re with Saddam”—and you can begin to get the picture.³

Our point here is not to compare occupations. Rather, it is to suggest that the story of how Eisenhower and MacArthur used the power of the U.S. military to develop free and freewheeling press systems in post–World War II Germany and Japan offers useful insights about the prospect for successful government interventions in times of crisis for the purpose of creating media that encourage and sustain democracy. We would not suggest that the generals in Germany and Japan did everything right (there is much to criticize in any occupation by one land of another), and we are especially conscious of the excesses of censorship.⁴ Indeed, as the Cold War developed in the late 1940s it led to unwarranted U.S. abuses against the Left, especially in Japan.⁵ Nor would we attempt to suggest that circumstances in the United States today are comparable with those in Germany and Japan in the tenuous days after the fall of Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tôjô—fascists whose tenures illustrated the ease with which a free press can become a propaganda tool. But we think it is more than merely instructive that within the lifetimes of many living Americans (and virtually all of our parents and grandparents), the United States successfully initiated what one of Ike’s top aides correctly referred to as “the biggest newspaper enterprise in the world.”⁶

At a critical juncture, when American officials were faced with the daunting task of building functional democracies in occupied lands that had seen their civic and political infrastructures obliterated by fascist regimes, Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur—with muscular encouragement from Harry Truman—used the authority and resources of the U.S. government to establish media systems with competitive, at times combative, newspapers and independent broadcasting networks.

At the heart of the project was an understanding that a free press and broadcasting system were essential to the renewal and maintenance of a healthy democracy, and that at the core of that system had to be independent, well-trained and well-compensated journalists who understood their communities and countries, responded to the concerns of their readers and listeners and were prepared to challenge official and commercial propaganda and censorship. Nothing was left to chance. Ike and Mac did not wait for “the market” to come up with fixes; the work of establishing “a free and independent press” was too vital a task for that. ⁷

These lessons are vital to the current debate over the future of journalism in the United States, which occurs at another critical juncture. We think it is important to reflect on them in detail—not merely for instruction on what the United States has done in the past but also in hopes of tapping into the spirit of the initiative. Our task is different from that undertaken by Eisenhower and MacArthur. But we employ their story with the purpose of getting Americans thinking more seriously about the role of the state in fostering the sort of robust journalism that is as necessary today as it was in the postwar moment.

In the years following World War II, the United States essentially governed a portion of Germany (other sections of the defeated nation were controlled by the British, French and Soviets) and all of Japan. These occupations had as their stated purposes the “reconstruction” of formerly fascist states “on a democratic basis.”⁸ Essential to the project, Eisenhower and MacArthur both understood, was the establishment not just of constitutional protections for a free press but of an actual free press.

So vital was the link between the establishment of a functional press system and democratic renewal that, well before VE Day, as U.S. troops battled their way into Germany, they came with orders to preserve printing plants and to move immediately to help anti-Nazi Germans establish local newspapers. That process began when Aachener Nachrichten rolled off the presses in January 1945, in Aachen, the first German city to be captured by the advancing Allied forces. Four thousand Germans had defied Nazi evacuation orders and remained in the city, which for months after the arrival of the U.S. troops was such a dangerous place that the lawyer who was appointed as the city’s first non-Nazi mayor in more than a decade, Franz Oppenhoff, was murdered by a team of SS men and Hitler Youth parachuted in under orders from Heinrich Himmler to kill “collaborationists.” ⁹ Aachen was so violent and unstable, in fact, that the name of the anti-fascist publisher of Aachener Nachrichten was for a time kept secret in order to protect him from assassination.¹⁰ Yet, the publisher and his small team of reporters and editors knew their mission as they put the four-page paper out each week and rapidly built a circulation of 20,000 in the region along the Dutch and Belgian borders. “The attempt was to establish real news, not Military Government gazettes, since otherwise the papers would soon discredit themselves with the German people,” explained an official report by the U.S. military overseers of the project. “They are German newspapers and the publishers from the first have been told that they were working toward the time when Germany would have a completely free press.”¹¹

The roots of this initiative—and of the notion that a United States that wanted to advance President Franklin Roosevelt’s “four freedoms” in a postwar world would have to take a hands-on approach to the development of the sort of free and independent media that nurtures democracy—had been planted years earlier by Kent Cooper, the longtime general manager of the Associated Press.¹² Cooper was one of America’s highest-profile newsmen, a genuinely “dominant figure in world journalism” from the 1920s to the 1950s.¹³ In the aftermath of World War I, as an AP manager, Cooper was in Paris when the Versailles Treaty was being crafted. He argued aggressively for inclusion of a clause guaranteeing worldwide freedom of the press and actually earned the support of Colonel Edward M. House, who at the time was President Woodrow Wilson’s foreign-policy adviser.¹⁴ Cooper’s codicil was left out of the final peace agreement, but the AP man kept pressing the point.

During World War II, Cooper penned a series of essays on what he saw as the necessity of promoting free and independent media in the postwar era as part of any broader initiative to maintain peace and spread democracy.¹⁵ “The deep night that blotted out the truth need not fall on any country again, nor need there be maintained in most countries a murky twilight as far as knowledge of other peoples is concerned. Since it has been proved that poisoned news can generate a war, its antithesis, truthful news, should have a chance to prove that it can maintain the peace,” wrote Cooper shortly before VE Day. “Truthful news and a free press can do more than anything to avert war, but the acceptance of both must be real and sincere, not lip service paid to the ideals of a free press in countries which pride themselves on democratic institutions.”¹⁶ Translation: This is going to take some heavy lifting on the part of the Allies.

The man who was often described as a “no-nonsense journalist” and a “hard-headed realist” met with presidents, prime ministers, cabinet secretaries and generals, as well as editors and publishers, to promote the vision.¹⁷ He had considerable success in shaping the ideas of Roosevelt, with whom he corresponded regularly, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull.¹⁸ It was Hull who got the 1943 Moscow conference on post-fascist Italy to agree to this statement: “Freedom of speech, of religious worship, of political belief, of press and of public meeting shall be restored in full measure to the Italian people.”¹⁹ That move led Edwin L. James, the managing editor of The New York Times, to declare: “The matter of a free press is now on the peace table agenda.”²⁰

But what made this commitment “real and sincere, not lip service” was the determination of key players at the highest levels of government. Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, in particular, were given remarkable leeway in their commands to commit energy and resources to the development of newspapers, magazines and radio networks at points when Allied forces were still battling for control of Germany and Japan. The linkage between journalism and democracy was well understood, and official involvement in the development of free and independent media was recognized as necessary to the work of establishing the infrastructure of democratic renewal. “The program planned in the field of press before V-E Day was based on the fact that the Nazis had crushed the opposition press; forced democratic editors, journalists and publishers into exile, retirement or concentration camps; acquired financial control of newspapers and press facilities; dictated the make-up of content of papers, and channeled all news through governmental or semi-official press agencies,” the Americans observed. Hence the first step was to “wipe out the propaganda press which the Nazis had set up and to suspend or abolish the approximately 1,500 Nazi newspapers still being published up to V-E Day.”²¹

Then came the hard part. Eisenhower and his lieutenants—like MacArthur and his lieutenants in Japan, who referred to their work as “nursing Japanese newspapers”—were not about to leave the restructuring of old media and the development of new media to the market.²² They were not going to roll the dice and hope some rich guys would think it profitable to start establishing new newspapers and radio stations; after all, the rich guys had in many cases been willing collaborators with the fascists.²³

In Japan, MacArthur found newsmen in his ranks, like Major Daniel Imboden, a former reporter and editor from California, and sent them into the newsrooms of existing papers. Their mandate was to “[lecture] Japanese editors and reporters three times weekly on how to run an honest newspaper”—lesson one: don’t “follow the leader”; question, challenge and prod officials.²⁴ The lessons took when, after an autobiography of MacArthur became a runaway best seller and letter writers began to describe the general as “a living god,” the Nippon Times editorialized in 1946:

If the conception of government is something imposed upon the people by an outstanding god, great man or leader is not rectified, democratic government is likely to be wrecked. We fear the day after MacArthur’s withdrawal, that some living god might be searched out to bring the sort of dictatorship that made the Pacific War . . . The way to express the gratitude of the Japanese people toward General MacArthur for the wisdom with which he is managing post-war Japan and for his efforts to democratize the nation is not to worship him as a god but to cast away the servile spirit and gain the self-respect that would not bow its head to anybody.²⁵

In Germany, where the Nazis had integrated their propaganda network far more deeply into the old newspapers and radio networks than in Japan, the work of creating a new media system required a more ambitious intervention. Thus, “expert teams began the search for democratically-minded editors, journalists and publishers and seized Nazi printing plants, newsprint and news facilities.”²⁶

At Aachen, a socialist printer named Heinrich Hollands who had resisted the Nazis was given the license to publish the first post-Nazi newspaper. ²⁷ He was assisted by a team of European journalists and intellectuals, many of them with Jewish backgrounds, who had fled to the United States in the 1930s or 1940s and returned as U.S. Army officers or aides. Chief among these was Major Hans Habe, a former Austrian newspaperman who had been briefly imprisoned by the Germans before escaping, making his way to the United States. In exile Habe penned an account of the German invasion of France, A Thousand Shall Fall, which sold more than 3 million copies and was made into a Hollywood film. Habe hit the ground running in Germany, with a theory about the importance of staffing the country’s new newspapers with writers and editors who would not lecture Germans on how to be democrats but would rather make real the promise of democratic life by publishing diverse and dissenting ideas in competing journals.²⁸ Habe rallied refugee journalists, many of them socialists and communists, and survivors of the concentration camps to staff his “chain” of newspapers that within a year after VE Day would number 18.

The Austrian Jewish journalist Ernest Landau recalled Habe showing up at the displaced-persons camp at Feldafing and declaring: “You have nothing more to lose in this camp. We’re starting a newspaper in Munich. That’s where you belong. We need people like you.” Within days, Landau was effectively employed—thanks to the U.S. military—as a journalist, restarting a career that would eventually see him become editor in chief of the newspaper Neue Welt and then an editor at Bayerische Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio)²⁹—both projects developed by the U.S. authorities.

Landau became one of the thousands of German and Japanese journalists who were given jobs in some cases and kept in jobs in others by what TIME magazine referred to in a headline about the project as: “Uncle Sam, Publisher.”³⁰ Staffs on the papers in Germany and Japan were described by U.S. journalists as “astonishingly” large. Though newsprint shortages often restricted the number of pages in the editions of German papers to four or six—and sometimes of Japanese papers to just one—the numbers of reporters and editors hired onto the new papers in Germany and the restructured old papers of Japan were massive by U.S. and British standards. The theory was that, particularly at so contentious a moment, when both countries were in the thick of definitional debates over constitutional matters and the run-up to initial free elections, papers needed massive staffs to cover every side of every story.³¹

Some of the greatest German journalists, who had lost their jobs under the Nazis, got them back under Uncle Sam. They found themselves working out of the same buildings and using the same presses that they had before their papers were first censored, then sanctioned and finally shuttered by Hitler. Now they were under explicit orders to “build an objective, free democratic press.”³²

The American plan, from the start, was to evolve a free and independent press that would be owned by Germans. But in the immediate aftermath of World War II, in an exceptionally unstable country with millions of displaced people, a ruined economy and varying occupying powers competing for turf, the Americans ran newspapers as what General Lucius Clay referred to as “quasi-public institutions.” Initial plans to tightly censor and control the press were abandoned so that, in Clay’s words, “there should be a free flow of information to the people of Germany, particularly on matters connected with the building of democratic government.” ³³ This cost a great deal of money—the Americans secured printing plants and newsprint and set up distribution networks and then got about the work of establishing independent radio stations in the various German states under U.S. control.³⁴ The State Department authorized establishment of a revolving capital fund of $3.5 million to provide loans to German papers—and a number of other financial and structural supports were put in place to help the free and independent newspapers consolidate their positions and guard against financial takeover by neo-Nazis.³⁵ Some newspapers, such as Hans Habe’s Die Neue Zeitung, were directly subsidized.

The Americans were explicit about their mission. As in Japan under MacArthur, in Germany it was: “To use the authority of Military Government to strengthen the economic and community position of the democratic press and safeguard it as far as possible against attempts to destroy it in order to revive a press more to the liking of Nazis, militarists, racists and nationalists, and groups whose special interests demand a subservient press.”³⁶ To insure diversity of opinion was represented, the Americans chose several newspaper licensees in a given community so Germans had access to “varying political points of view rather than a single licensee with a single point of view.” In Aachen, a year after the first license went to a socialist, U.S. authorities authorized the establishment of a second newspaper by the more conservative burghers of the community.³⁷

Perhaps most important, financial structures were developed to assure that the newspapers could become and remain self-sustaining. From 1945 on, all newspapers were required to pay 20 percent of their gross receipts into a dedicated fund. This fund eventually contained RM 58,000,000 when payments were stopped. At that point, the fund began making grants to individual newspapers and to a cooperative that had been established to help newspapers acquire printing plants and equipment. This was all part of a strategy—in which the U.S. military intervened frequently to force owners of printing plants who had in many cases obtained their concessions from the Nazis to negotiate fair long-term agreements to publish newspapers and magazines offering a range of political and ideological perspectives.³⁸

In the area of broadcasting, it was determined that the best way to protect against the return of the old Reichsrundfunk (“Imperial Broadcasting”) propaganda model was to develop public radio and later television networks in the various German states. This decentralized model fostered the creation of strong individual broadcasting agencies for most German states—so that there would be no one-size-fits-all control of content from the national capital—and protected them from government interference and economic dependence on advertisers by assuring that most of the funding came from license fees from radio and TV owners. The funding scheme owed much to structures set up to develop Britain’s BBC and reflected the influence of the British occupation forces in Germany on their American counterparts.³⁹

There were disputes about censorship, access to newsprint and a thousand other issues in Germany, as there were in Japan.⁴⁰ Even as the U.S. authorities put editors on their “own responsibility,” there were still clashes, some of them journalistic, some of them extensions of the broader political tensions associated with the occupations.⁴¹ But several of the greatest challenges came from Washington, where officials who favored “hard occupations”—rigorously controlling the discourse—bristled at the tendency of German and Japanese newspapers to criticize U.S. officials and policies.

The first great test came just weeks after VE Day, when Elmer Davis, the Washington-based director of the Office of War Information, issued an order imposing a news blackout on Germany. “The reason is very simple,” said Davis. “Germany is a sick man. He now can have only what the doctors prescribe.” General Eisenhower cabled the White House immediately to object, and several days later President Truman opened a press conference by saying that the first issue of the day would be the vital matter of press freedom in Germany. “General Eisenhower has advised me that he has issued no policy or order (restricting communications). The general has expressed the personal opinion that a free press and a free flow of information and ideas should prevail in Germany,” said Truman, who concluded, “I agree with General Eisenhower.”⁴²

So, it appears, did a great many Germans. Within a year after VE Day, Major Hans Habe was in Washington celebrating the “terrific response” of the Germans to the paper he was editing at the time, Die Neue Zeitung. Habe delighted in noting his paper was being printed on the formerly Nazi-controlled presses that published the first editions of his arch nemesis Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The Munich-based Die Neue Zeitung had achieved a circulation of 1.6 million and was receiving an average of 1,100 letters to the editor each day—some critical of the U.S. occupation, some supportive, most reflecting on the day-to-day challenges of shaping the new Germany. “It was the objectivity of the American-controlled newspaper, reflected in the release of news not necessarily favorable to the Allies that made the deepest impression on the German readers,” Habe told The New York Times.⁴³

There would be additional battles, especially when Cold War sentiments gave rise to objections from Washington about the U.S. military putting communists and socialists in the news business. By 1950, as tensions heightened on the Korean Peninsula, MacArthur was aggressively cracking down on the Japanese Communist Party newspaper, Akhata (Red Flag), with the general effectively acknowledging that his actions were “violative of the broad philosophy which has guided the development of the free press in Japan.”⁴⁴ In 1953, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy crusaded generally against aid to German papers and specifically against what he alleged was a $3 million annual allocation for Hans Habe’s old paper, Die Neue Zeitung, complaining in a letter to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that “one of the most heavily subsidized papers is as of today run by a Communist editor.” As with many of McCarthy’s charges, this one was unfounded. But Die Neue Zeitung did criticize U.S. policies, treat dissenting and dissident political views with respect and, at its best, operate like the sort of “free and independent” newspaper Eisenhower had said he wanted. Responding to McCarthy, The New York Times would editorialize that the project “to help a really free press strike firm roots in German soil . . . has been a good investment.”⁴⁵

In other words, Joe McCarthy’s griping aside, by the time the United States military dialed down the occupations of Germany and Japan in the early 1950s, remarkably vibrant free and independent media systems were in place—along with functioning democracies. “West Germany, a nation without a single operating newspaper at war’s end, last week boasted 1,497 dailies and greater press freedom than at any other time in its history,” observed TIME magazine in 1957. “As newspapers throughout the country noted their tenth anniversaries, they reported that circulation (total: 17.3 million) and advertising revenues were also at record peaks.”⁴⁶ By the 1960s, U.S. publications were profiling Japanese newspapers as the most successful print publications in the world.

The media systems developed by the United States proved to be flexible enough to grow and evolve along democratic lines—with commercial sectors sufficiently vibrant to excite the most ambitious free marketer and space for cooperative and public-service ventures. Some of the newspapers and magazines created with assistance from the U.S. forces failed, and many new publications were created in the years after the “German Treaty” of 1955 officially ended the occupation. For example, Berlin’s respected Left-leaning daily newspaper, Die Tageszeitung (taz), was launched in 1978 and remains a muscular player in the local and national discourse, a scenario virtually unimaginable in the United States. Then there is the remarkable story of Berliner Zeitung, an old East German newspaper that after the fall of the wall transformed itself into a popular national daily that styles itself as “Germany’s Washington Post.”

The durability of the institutions and the structures the United States put in place in the late 1950s is easily observed—Aachener Nachrichten, the first paper started by the Americans, is still going strong, as are dozens of others. The systems were so durable, in fact, that in 2008 and 2009, when U.S. reporters went looking for models of media systems where newspapers were surviving—and in some cases even thriving—they found them in Germany and Japan. In the summer of 2008, as American newsrooms were imploding, Business Week headlined a story from Germany: “Where Newspapers Are Thriving.” And from Japan came headlines like “Newspapers: Still Big in Japan.” A Washington Post foreign correspondent explained:

Japanese newspapers are acting surprisingly spry, especially compared with their woebegone peers in the United States, where relentless declines in readership, circulation, advertising and profits have triggered buyouts, layoffs, hiring freezes and cutbacks in reportorial ambition.

Nearly all of this unpleasantness is on hold in Japan, at least for the time being.

While the circulation of U.S. newspapers has dropped more than 15 percent in the past decade, it has slipped just 3.2 percent here. Japan’s five big national dailies have kept nearly all their readers.

The Japanese remain the world’s greatest newspaper buyers, with 624 daily sales per thousand adults. That’s 2 1/2 times greater than in the United States, according to a 2008 estimate by the World Association of Newspapers. Slightly more than one daily newspaper, on average, is delivered to every household in this country. The Yomiuri newspaper, with a circulation of more than 10 million, is the world’s largest daily.

About one in 10 newsroom jobs in the United States has disappeared in the past decade, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The Washington Post has reduced its news staff in recent years by almost a quarter. But in Japan, large-scale layoffs and buyouts of reporters and editors are unheard of. “That is sacred ground,” said Megumi Tomita, director of management and circulation at the Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association. “We haven’t seen any decrease in the number of journalists.⁴⁷

Remarkably, most of the reports from Germany and Japan, while frequently noting the distinctive journalism ethics of those countries—including a higher regard for keeping reporters and editors on the job—as well as distinctive ownership structures, generally failed to mention the role of the U.S. government in establishing those ethics, structures and approaches.

As Americans wrestle with the question of how to renew and extend journalism that sustains democracy in the 21st century, however, we think it is more important than ever to recognize that our government has experience when it comes to establishing new media systems—and that this experience was forged in crisis. The U.S. government has intervened where the market could not be trusted to produce a free and independent press and a broadcasting system that was neither propagandistic nor deferent to economic special interests. The U.S. government has provided resources and established financial and ownership structures for media that were designed to be both self-sustaining and responsible to the mission of providing citizens with the information they need to be their own governors. Of course, there were missteps and stumbles along the way, indefensible deviations and boneheaded bumbles. But the willingness to intervene in bold and creative ways succeeded because, at the most fundamental level, there was an understanding that the mission could not fail. Kent Cooper, the old AP man, was right then and he’s still right now: truthful news and a free press remain as essential today as ever. What we need today, as was needed in 1945, is a recognition, extending from the grassroots to the highest levels of government, that, “the acceptance of both must be real and sincere, not lip service paid to the ideals of a free press in countries which pride themselves on democratic institutions.”

There are critical junctures where getting beyond “lip service” for the purpose of “help[ing] a really free press strike firm roots” requires an engaged and active government that respects that there will be times when journalism must be supported and sustained by official policies. At a critical juncture in 1945, General Eisenhower understood this, and so did General MacArthur. And they acted upon it. At a critical juncture today, we need to renew that understanding. And we need to act upon it with the same sense of purpose and recognition that, like Germany and Japan and every other democratic state, America needs a free and independent press.