I

Liebling's "The Wayward Press" columns in the New Yorker , between 1945 and 1963, often poignantly described the development of a single-newspaper city. At the turn of the century there were over 2000 daily newspapers, and the numbers kept growing for the next two decades; some five hundred communities had competing daily newspapers; and almost all were owned by individuals with no other media holdings. The aftermath of World War II saw a decline to 1750 papers. In the ensuing three decades the decline halted because new starts (in places such as Cocoa Beach, Florida, and Maui) offset failures in some of the largest cities in the United States: New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, St. Louis, Washington. In the past decade there has been a new consolidation, dropping the number to about 1650.^[3]

Sometimes papers died because of competition or lack of readership. Sometimes they were killed. The afternoon Detroit News in 1960 "bought and instantly put down the Detroit Times . This was a clean suppression, without pretense. The News did not even bother to call itself the News-Times , but added, like a scalplock, to its masthead "including the best features from the Detroit Times —'18 extra comic strips.'" The price tag for the Times was $ 10 million, not bad for a paper "forced by rising costs to shut down." In reality, however, the News was not buying a newspaper, it was buying an afternoon monopoly. Hearst abandoned Detroit with the sale of the Times , then gained a monopoly in Albany in a swap with Gannett, in which Hearst killed its two Rochester dailies, leaving that city to Gannett. Similarly, in 1962 Hearst killed its morning Los Angeles paper while Chandler did the same for its afternoon paper, leaving Hearst's Herald-Examiner an afternoon monopoly and Chandler's Los Angeles Times a morning monopoly. Instead of competing afternoon papers and competing morning papers, fewer and fewer American cities had any competing papers. The number of cities with competing papers fell to 51 in 1963, to 37 in 1973, and to 30 in 1983; and it is now below that.

When profitable newspapers die, as Liebling demonstrated, rising costs are a smokescreen to cover the value of monopoly profits for the survivor.^[4]

While Liebling often chronicled the slow decline of the American daily, his New York City home, with its diverse array of papers, was of special interest to him. Writing in 1949, he noted that over the previous eighteen years, five newspapers had gone out of business. "If the trend continues, New York will be a one or two paper town by 1975." He was wrong; it kept several.^[5]

Even before Liebling died in 1963, another trend, long in existence, was superimposing itself on top of the single-paper monopolies. Simultaneous with the arrival of local monopoly was the emergence of national chains. (Frank Gannett hated "chain" for its obvious bondage connotations and strove, with success among newspapers, to have "group" substituted.) Virtually nonexistent at the turn of the century (8 groups controlling 27 papers), by 1935 there were 63 chains owning 328 papers, which included 40 percent of total US circulation. Just twenty-five years later, about a third of all newspapers were chain owned. The trend has continued, and by 1986 the five largest groups controlled 27 percent of daily newspaper circulation, with all chains controlling about 77 percent (although Gannett, the largest at 8.8 percent, is well below the 13.6 percent Hearst held in 1935).^[6]

Chain ownership raises the possibility of regional monopolies and national oligopolies. Additionally, as ownership became more concentrated, a related phenomenon further constricted the flow of information in the American press. Chains, their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, were often the death knell of serious local reporting and individualized (as opposed to canned) editorials, thereby diminishing the "robust" debate that New York Times had found at the heart of the First Amendment. Jerome Barron's writings, beginning with his seminal 1967 article, "Access to the Press—A New First Amendment Right," focused on the homogenization of the press and proposed various novel remedies.^[7]

Yet the forces pushing toward concentration were neither abating nor limited to newspapers. Ben Bagdikian became an important spokesman in the 1980s against the newer forms of integrated press oligopolies that dwarfed those existing during Liebling's lifetime. Writing in 1983, even before some of the spectacular media merg-

ers (such as Capital Cities/ABC; GE/RCA, where NBC is a subsidiary; and Fox/Murdoch), he portrayed a world in which just fifty corporations own more than half of the newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, book publishers, and movie studios. When he updated the book four years later, the fifty corporations had been reduced to twenty-nine. At the beginning of the 1960s, the five hundred largest companies listed in the Fortune 500 included nine media companies; when Bagdikian wrote, the number had jumped to twenty-one. Bagdikian's description of the media as a "Private Ministry of Information and Culture" explicitly captures the feeling of helplessness in the face of media power, with its potential manipulation of the marketplace of ideas. Given the historic association of freedom of the press with American democracy, the not unnatural concern is that the threats that concentration poses to a fully vibrant press are also threats to democracy.^[8]

Liebling's dismay over the death of competing newspapers and Bagdikian's fear that huge media conglomerates will set the terms of debate raise a crystal-clear question. Given the constraints of the First Amendment, is there anything the legal system can do to counter this growing concentration of private power?