One of the factors which have accelerated a change in the press freedom concept has been the rise of the idea of egalitarianism. It grew rapidly in the latter part of the nineteenth century and has been gaining great momentum in the last generation. Equality-especially in social or public institutions-has been the modern watchword, not only in sociology but in various schools of psychology and philosophy.
In one sense, egalitarianism has supplanted in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the libertarian impulse which was dominant in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This does not mean that people are really becoming more equal; rather more realistically it means that such an intellectual climate is conducive to new elite of intellectuals who are assuming a kind of priestly power.
If one is for the concept of equality, then he must at least show that he is against any preferred position for journalists who largely control the contents of our mass media. An audience member is envisioned as equal to the editor of the newspaper and his voice should be listened to in respect of the newspaper’s content and positions; his ideas and information should be considered for publication equally with those of the journalists, and his freedom of access to the press should be equal to the editor’s freedom of editorial self- determinism. Forgotten or ignored is the fact that the editor cannot practice editorial self-determinism if he must provide journalistically equal members of the public access to his paper’s columns.
Egalitarianism, of course, is a curious and even an impossible concept. Like social responsibility or loyalty it sounds good, but falls to pieces on analysis. We do not have, we never have had, nor will we ever have, an egalitarian press.
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Even if every citizen had an equal amount of money with which to get into the media business, we would not have any egalitarian press. For there are innumerable other factors which would militate against it. For example, equally wealthy (or equally poor) people would not have the same temperament, or education, or motivation, or talents-or even opportunity- to go into journalism.
The word opportunity should be noted in the above list; usually it is felt that money automatically provides journalistic opportunity, but it is not that simple. You can have the money-and even the education, ability and motivation-to start a newspaper, but the opportunity may not be present; for example, the community in which you wish to live and work cannot support another newspaper. You are therefore not really journalistically equal to the person who can (and does) start a newspaper. And, even if you were to start one too, it is a fact that one of the newspapers would have a larger circulation than the other, that one would sell more advertising that one would have better writers, that one would deal more forcefully with the issues or that one would have more pages than the other every day. Journalistic egalitarianism is only a term, full of noble connotations, but signifying nothing.