Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America's Newspapers.

• Author: Thunborg, Annika

"You Americans talk about freedom of the press as freedom from governmental control. Sure enough, but what about Wall Street?" American journalists have heard these words from their European colleagues for years and, often, they have just ignored them.

To be sure, the idea that the media should be free of governmental control cannot be stated too often -- especially in a time when media around the world are struggling for independence. But this problem should not obscure concern about the other important separation: that between editorial content and management, dubbed in the media world as the separation between church and state.

Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America's Newspapers by James D. Squires illustrates this problem. Squires, the former editor of the Chicago Tribune, argues that newspaper journalism over the last 20 years has been transformed in the commercial interest. This has limited its independence from both business and government and has undermined its traditional role as upholder of democratic values in the public interest.

Until the late 1960s, Squires argues, print journalism was dominated by the old newspaper families -- the Pulitzers, Hearsts and Scrippses -- who, in Squires' rather idealistic view, upheld the idea of the press as independent from all outside influence. At the Tribune, for example, the elevator for the editorial department did not stop at the management floor. The owners obviously influenced their newspapers' voices, but these voices were so diverse that a variety of editorial opinions flourished. In this diversity, Squires argues, lay the strength of the American free press.

In the early 1970s, however, all this changed. Threatened by the popularity of television and by monopolies such as the Gannett Company, newspaper managers started to compromise their independence and, thereby, Squires suggests, their commitment to the First Amendment and to the public.

A first step by newspapers was to go public -- to sell out to investors on Wall Street, who were more interested in profit than in good journalism. A second step was to survey the newspapers' markets to see how profits could be raised. Audience profiles were created and shared with advertisers. Editorial content was matched with advertisers' desired audience profiles, and the final responsibility for newspaper content came to rest with the business executive instead of the editor. So, Squires contends, ended the separation between...