亏损十几年的华盛顿邮报是如何保持媒体独立服务公众利益的

The Newspaper Guild, in the course of giving its Heywood Broun awards in early 1948, said of the Post: “In these days when playing it safe and treading softly is so general, the record of The Washington Post in 1947 is truly extraordinary. It is a vivid demonstration of what an outstanding newspaper is like and what it can do in serving its readers, its community and the country.”

BY MID-1948, the Post was still a rocky, if lively, paper, whose eight hundred employees were a proud, generally hardworking lot. In the fifteen years since my father’s purchase, circulation had risen from 50,000 to 180,000 daily, while advertising had gone from four million lines to twenty-three million. The Post had been awarded numerous prizes, including five major awards for reporting, three for editorials, one for cartooning, and three for public service. Around this time, my father decided to pass the paper on to Phil and me.

According to a page-one article in the Post, to ensure its continued independence and a responsible ownership in the event the paper ever had to be sold, my father appointed “a self-perpetuating committee of five persons who will hold full power of approval or veto over the disposition of voting shares in the Post subsequent to the control now exercised by Mr. and Mrs. Philip L. Graham....” The committee—originally made up of James Conant, president of Harvard University; Millicent MacIntosh, dean of Barnard College; Judge Bolitha J. Laws, chief justice of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia; Colgate Darden, president of the University of Virginia; and Chester Barnard, president of the Rockefeller Foundation—had absolutely no authority over or responsibility for the policies or operation of the paper, but had “absolute discretion” to approve or disapprove potential owners subsequent to ownership by Phil and me.

To survive, a newspaper must be a commercial success. At the same time, a newspaper has a relation to the public interest which is different from that of other commercial enterprises. This is more than ever apparent in these days when our free institutions are under their severest trial and closest scrutiny. The citizens of a free country have to depend on a free press for the information necessary to the intelligent discharge of their duties of

citizenship. That is why the Constitution gives newspapers express protection from Government interference. ... It is also possible for the public interest to be defeated by the way a newspaper is conducted since the principal restraint upon a newspaper owner is his self-restraint.