Transcriber’s Note:

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THE PROFESSION OF JOURNALISM

OTHER COLLECTIONS

drawn from The Atlantic Monthly are published under the following titles:—

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

BOSTON

THE PROFESSION OF
JOURNALISM
A Collection of Articles on Newspaper Editing and Publishing, Taken from the Atlantic Monthly

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY

WILLARD GROSVENOR BLEYER, Ph.D.

Author of “Newspaper Writing and Editing” and “Types of News Writing”; Professor of Journalism in the University of Wisconsin

The Atlantic Monthly Press

BOSTON

Copyright, 1918, by

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, INC.

PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to bring together in convenient form a number of significant contributions to the discussion of the newspaper and its problems which have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in recent years. Although these articles were intended only for the readers of that magazine at the time of their original publication, they have permanent value for the general reader, for newspaper workers, and for students of journalism.

Practically every phase of journalism is taken up in these articles, including newspaper publishing, news and editorial policies, the influence of the press, yellow and sensational journalism, the problems of the newspaper in small cities, country journalism, the Associated Press, the law of libel, book-reviewing, dramatic criticism, “comics,” free-lance writing, and the opportunities in the profession. For readers who desire to make a further study of any of the important aspects of the press, a bibliography of such books and magazine articles as are generally available in public libraries has been appended.

Most of the authors of the articles in this volume are newspaper and magazine writers and editors whose long experience in journalism gives particular value to their analysis of conditions, past and present. Brief notes on the journalistic work of the writers are given in the Appendix.

For permission to reprint the articles the editor is indebted to the writers and to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

W. G. B.

University of Wisconsin,

January 12, 1918.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BY WILLARD GROSVENOR BLEYER

I

“The food of opinion,” as President Wilson has well said, “is the news of the day.” The daily newspaper, for the majority of Americans, is the sole purveyor of this food for thought. Citizens of a democracy must read and assimilate the day’s news in order to form opinions on current events and issues. Again, for the average citizen the newspaper is almost the only medium for the interpretation and discussion of questions of the day. The composite of individual opinions, which we call public opinion, must express itself in action to be effective. The newspaper, with its daily reiteration, is the most powerful force in urging citizens to act in accordance with their convictions. By reflecting the best sentiment of the community in which it is published, the newspaper makes articulate intelligent public opinion that might otherwise remain unexpressed. Since the success of democracy depends not only upon intelligent public opinion but upon political action in accordance with such opinion, it is not too much to say that the future of democratic government in this country depends upon the character of its newspapers.

Yet most newspaper readers not unnaturally regard the daily paper as an ephemeral thing to be read hurriedly and cast aside. Few appreciate the extent to which their opinions are affected by the newspaper they read. Nevertheless, to every newspaper reader—which means almost every person in this country—the conditions under which newspapers are produced and the influences that affect the character of news and editorials, should be matters of vital concern.

To newspaper workers and students of journalism the analysis of the fundamental questions of their profession is of especial importance. Discussion of current practices must precede all effort to arrive at definite standards for the profession of journalism. Only when the newspaper man realizes the probable effect of his work on the ideas and ideals of thousands of readers, and hence on the character of our democracy, does he appreciate the full significance of his news story, headline, or editorial.

The modern newspaper has developed so recently from simple beginnings into a great, complex institution that no systematic and extensive study has been made of its problems. Journalism has won recognition as a profession only within the last seventy-five years, and professional schools for the training of newspaper writers and editors have been in existence less than fifteen years. In view of these conditions, it is not surprising that definite principles and a generally accepted code of ethics for the practice of the profession have not been formulated.

Ideal conditions of newspaper editing and publishing are not likely to be brought about by legislation. So jealous are the American people of the liberty of their press that they hesitate, even when their very existence as a nation is threatened, to impose legal restrictions on the printing of news and opinion. If regulation does come, it should be the result, as it has been in the professions of law and medicine, of the creation of an enlightened public opinion in support of professional standards adopted by journalists themselves.

The present is an auspicious time to discuss such standards. The world war has put to the test, not only men and machinery, but every institution of society. Of each organized activity we ask, Is it serving most effectively the common good? Not simply service to the state, but service to society, is being demanded more and more of every individual and every institution. “These are the times which try men’s souls,” and that try no less the mediums through which men’s souls find expression. The newspaper, as the purveyor of “food of opinion” and as the medium for expressing opinion, must measure up to the test of the times.

II

The first step in a systematic analysis of the principles of journalism must be a consideration of the function of the newspaper in a democracy. In the varied and voluminous contents of a typical newspaper are to be found news of all kinds, editorial comment, illustrations of current events, recipes, comic strips, fashions, cartoons, advice on affairs of the heart, short stories, answers to questions on etiquette, dramatic criticism, chapters of a serial, book reviews, verse, a “colyum,” and advertisements. What in this mélange is the one element which distinguishes the newspaper from all other publications? It is the daily news. Weekly and monthly periodicals do everything that the newspaper does, except print the news from day to day.

Whatever other aims a newspaper may have, its primary purpose must be to give adequate reports of the day’s news. Although various inducements other than news may be employed to attract some persons to newspapers who would not otherwise read them regularly, nevertheless these features must not be so prominent or attractive that readers with limited time at their disposal will neglect the day’s news for entertainment.

To assist the public to grasp the significance of the news by means of editorial interpretation and discussion, to render articulate the best public sentiment, and to persuade citizens to act in accordance with their opinions, constitute an important secondary function of the newspaper. Even though the editorial may seem to exert a less direct influence upon the opinions and political action of the average citizen than it did in the period of great editorial leadership, nevertheless the interpretation and discussion of timely topics in the editorial columns of the daily press are a force in democratic government that cannot be disregarded.

Newspapers by their editorials can perform two peculiarly important services to the public. First, they can show the relation of state, national, and international questions to the home and business interests of their readers. Only as the great issues of the day are brought home to the average reader is he likely to become keenly interested in their solution. Second, newspapers in their editorials can point out the connection between local questions and state-wide, nation-wide, or world-wide movements. Only as questions at issue in a community are shown in their relation to larger tendencies will the average reader see them in a perspective that will enable him to think and act most intelligently.

In addition to fulfilling these two functions, the newspaper may supply its readers with practical advice and useful information, as well as with entertaining reading matter and illustrations. There is more justification for wholesome advice and entertainment in newspapers that circulate largely among classes whose only reading matter is the daily paper than there is in papers whose readers obtain these features from other periodicals. In view of the numberless cheap, popular magazines in this country, the extent to which daily newspapers should devote space and money to advice and entertainment deserves careful consideration. That without such consideration these features may encroach unjustifiably on news and editorials seems evident.

III

Since the primary function of the newspaper is to give the day’s news, the question arises, What is news? If from the point of view of successful democracy the value of news is determined by the extent to which it furnishes food for thought on current topics, we are at once given an important criterion for defining news and measuring news-values. Thus, news is anything timely which is significant to newspaper readers in their relation to the community, the state, and the nation.

This conception of news is not essentially at variance with the commonly accepted definition of it as anything timely that interests a number of readers, the best news being that which has greatest interest for the greatest number. The most vital matters for both men and women are their home and their business interests, their success and their happiness. Anything in the day’s news that touches directly or indirectly these things that are nearest and dearest to them, they will read with eagerness. As they may not always be able to see at once the relation of current events and issues to their home, business, and community interests, it is the duty of the newspaper to present news in such a way that its significance to the average reader will be clear. Every newspaper man knows the value of “playing up” the “local ends” of events that take place outside of the community in which his paper is published, but this method of bringing home to readers the significance to them of important news has not been as fully worked out as it will be. On this basis the best news is that which can be shown to be most closely related to the interests of the largest number of readers.

“But newspapers must publish entertaining news stories as well as significant ones,” insists the advocate of things as they are. This may be conceded, but only with three important limitations. First, stories for mere entertainment that deal with events of little or no news-value must not be allowed to crowd out significant news. Second, such entertaining news-matter must not be given so much space and prominence, or be made so attractive, that the average reader with but limited time in which to read his paper will neglect news of value. Third, events of importance must not be so treated as to furnish entertainment primarily, to the subordination of their true significance. To substitute the hors d’œuvres, relishes, and dessert of the day’s happenings for nourishing “food of opinion” is to serve an unbalanced, unwholesome mental diet. The relish should heighten, not destroy, a taste for good food.

IV

In order to furnish the average citizen with material from which to form opinions on all current issues, so that he may vote intelligently on men and measures, newspapers must supply significant news in as complete and as accurate a form as possible. The only important limitations to completeness are those imposed by the commonly accepted ideas of decency embodied in the phrase, “All the news that’s fit to print,” and by the rights of privacy. Carefully edited newspapers discriminate between what the public is entitled to know and what an individual has a right to keep private.

Inaccuracy, due to the necessity for speed in getting news into print, most newspapers agree must be reduced to a minimum. The establishment of bureaus of accuracy, and constant emphasis on such mottoes as “Accuracy First,” “Accuracy Always,” and “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so,” are steps in that direction.

Deliberate falsification of news for any purpose, good or bad, must be regarded as an indefensible violation of the fundamental purpose of the press. Any cause, no matter how worthy it may be, which cannot depend on facts and truth for its support does not deserve to have facts and truth distorted in its behalf.

The “faking” of news can never be harmless. Even though the fictitious touches in an apparently innocent “human-interest” or “feature” story may be recognized by most readers, yet the effect is harmful. “It’s only a newspaper story,” expresses the all-too-common attitude of a public whose confidence in the reliability of newspapers has been undermined by news stories wholly or partially “faked.”

The “coloring,” adulteration, and suppression of news as “food of opinion” is as dangerous to the body politic as similar manipulation of food-stuffs was to the physical bodies of our people before such practices were forbidden by law. How completely the opinions and moral judgments of a whole nation may be perverted by deliberate “coloring” and suppression of news, in this case by its own government, was demonstrated in Germany immediately before and during the world war.

The jury of newspaper readers must have “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” if it is to give an intelligent verdict.

V

The so-called “yellow journals” are glaring examples of newspapers built up on news and editorial policies shaped to attract undiscriminating readers by sensational methods. By constantly emphasizing sensational news and by “sensationalizing” and “melodramatizing” news that is not sufficiently startling, as well as by editorials stirring up class feeling among the masses against the monied and ruling classes, “yellow journals” have been able to outstrip all other papers in circulation.

Unquestionably the most serious aspect of the influence of sensational and yellow journalism is the distorted view of life thus given. Because these papers are widely read by the partially assimilated groups of foreign immigrants in large centres of population, like New York and Chicago, they exert a particularly dangerous influence by giving these future citizens a wrong conception of American society and government. That the false ideas of our life and institutions given to foreign elements of our population while they are in the process of becoming Americanized are a serious menace to this country, requires no proof. No matter who the readers may be, however, news that is “colored” to appear “yellow,” and misleading editorials, will always be dangerous to the public welfare.

VI

The treatment of sensational events, particularly those involving crime and scandal, undoubtedly constitutes one of the difficult problems of all newspapers. The demoralizing effect of accounts of criminal and vicious acts, when read by immature and morally unstable individuals, is generally admitted. On the other hand, fear of publicity and consequent disgrace to the wrong-doer and his family, is a powerful deterrent. Moreover, if newspapers suppressed news of crime and vice, citizens might remain ignorant of the extent to which they existed in the community, and consequently, with the aid of a corrupt local government, wrong-doing might flourish until it was a menace to every member of the community.

To give sufficient publicity to news of crime and scandal in order to provide the necessary deterrent effect, to furnish readers with the information to which they are entitled, and at the same time to present such news so that it will not give offense or encourage morally weak readers to emulate the criminal and the vicious, define the middle course which exponents of constructive journalism must steer.

VII

Criticisms of the newspaper of the present day should not leave us with the impression that the American press is deteriorating. No one who compares the newspaper of to-day with its predecessors of fifty, seventy-five, or a hundred years ago, can fail to appreciate how immeasurably superior in every respect is the press of the present day. In our newspapers now there is much less of narrow political partisanship, much less of editorial vituperation and personal abuse, much less of objectionable advertising, and relatively less news of crime and scandal. Viewed from a distance of more than half a century, great American editors loom large, but a critical study of the papers they edited shows their limitations. They were pioneers in a new land,—for modern journalism began but eighty-five years ago,—and as such, they deserve all honor for blazing the trail; but we must not be blind to the defects of the papers that they produced, any more than we may overlook the faults of the press of our own day.

The period of the struggle against slavery culminating in the Civil War was one of great editorial leadership. To say that it was the era of great “views-papers” and that the present is the day of great “news-papers” is to sum up the essential difference between the two periods. In terms of democratic government, this means that citizens of the older day were accustomed to accept as their own, political opinions furnished them ready-made by their favorite editor, whereas voters to-day want to form their own opinions on the basis of the news and editorials furnished them by their favorite paper. This greater independence of judgment, with its corollary, greater independence in voting, is a long step forward toward a more complete democracy.

VIII

The recent development of community spirit as a means of realizing more fully the ideals of democracy by fostering greater solidarity among the diverse elements of our population, has been reflected in the news policies of many papers. By “playing up” news that tends to the upbuilding of the community, and by “playing down,” and even eliminating entirely, news that tends to exert an unwholesome influence, newspapers in various parts of the country have developed a type of constructive journalism. Such consideration for the effect of news on readers as members of the community, and hence on community life, is one of the most important forward steps taken by the modern newspaper.

Although occasion may arise from time to time for newspapers to turn the searchlight of publicity on social and political corruption, the feeling is gaining strength that newspaper crusades in the interests of institutions and movements making for community uplift are even more important than the continued exposure of evils. Many aggressive, crusading papers, accordingly, have turned from a policy of exposing such conditions to the constructive purpose of showing how various agencies may be used for community development. “Searchlight” journalism is thus giving way to “sunlight” journalism. A constructive policy that aims to handle local news and “local ends” of all news in such a manner that they will exert a wholesome, upbuilding influence on the community, is one of the most potent forces making for a better democracy.

IX

With the entry of the United States into world-affairs in coöperation with other nations, a new duty was placed upon the American press. For a number of years before the world war the amount of foreign news in the average American newspaper was very limited. With the decline of weekly letters from foreign countries written by well-known correspondents, and the reliance by newspapers on the great press associations for foreign news, readers had had relatively less news of importance from abroad than formerly. The world war naturally changed this condition completely.

Unless the United States decides finally to return to its former policy of isolation, American citizens must be kept in touch with important movements in other nations, so that they can form intelligent opinions in regard to the relation of this country to these nations. Since the daily newspaper is the principal medium for presenting such news, it is clear that newspapers must be prepared to present significant foreign news in such a manner that it will attract readers, by connecting it with their interests as American citizens.

X

How the future will solve the problems of journalism must be largely a matter of conjecture. Temporarily the world war has given rise to peculiar problems, none of which, however, seems likely to have permanent effects on our newspapers. Censorship of news and of editorial discussion has precipitated anew the ever-perplexing question of the exact limits of the liberty of the press in war times. War, too, has made clearer the pernicious influence resulting from the dissemination throughout the world of “colored” news by means of semi-official news agencies subsidized and controlled by some of the European nations. The extent to which a whole nation may be kept in the dark by government control of news and discussion, as well as the impossibility of other nations getting important information to the people of such a country, has been strikingly exemplified by Germany and Austro-Hungary. The need of definite provision for international freedom of the press has been pointed out as an essential factor in any programme for permanent peace.

The rise in the price of print paper and increased cost of production, largely the result of war conditions, have led so generally to the raising of the price of papers from one to two cents that the penny paper bids fair to disappear entirely. This increase in price has not appreciably reduced circulation. To economize in the use of paper during the war, many papers have reduced the number of pages by cutting down the amount of reading matter. Whether or not these changes will continue when normal conditions of business are restored cannot be predicted.

Endowed newspapers, municipal newspapers, and even university newspapers, have been proposed as possible solutions of the problems of the press. Of these proposals only one, the municipal newspaper, has had a trial, and even that has not been tried under conditions that permit any conclusions as to its feasibility. Although there has been a marked tendency, hastened by the war, toward government ownership or control of railroad, telegraph, and telephone lines, which, like newspapers, are private enterprises that perform a public function, there has been no corresponding movement looking toward ownership or control of newspapers by the federal, state, or local government.

Effective organization of newspaper writers and editors has been urged as a means of establishing definite standards for the profession. It seems remarkable that in this age of organization newspaper workers are the only members of a great profession who have no national association. Newspaper publishers, circulation managers, advertising men, and the editor-publishers of weekly and small daily newspapers have such organizations. For free-lance writers there is the Authors’ League of America. In several Middle Western states organizations of city editors have been effected; but a movement to unite them into a national association has not as yet made much progress.

Two national newspaper conferences have been held under academic auspices to discuss the problems of journalism, the first at the University of Wisconsin in 1912, and the second at the University of Kansas, two years later. Although a number of leaders in the profession took part in the programmes and interesting discussion resulted, the attendance of newspaper workers was not sufficiently large to be representative of the country as a whole, and no permanent organization was effected.

That a national organization of newspaper men and women is neither impossible nor ineffectual has been demonstrated in Great Britain, where three of such associations have been active for a number of years. The Institute of Journalists of Great Britain, an association of newspaper editors and proprietors, holds an annual conference for the discussion of current questions in journalism and has had as its head such distinguished journalists as Robert Donald of the London Daily Chronicle, A. G. Gardiner of the London Daily News, and J. L. Garvin, formerly editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and now editor of the Observer. The other associations are the National Union of Journalists, composed exclusively of newspaper workers, which maintains “branches” and “district councils” in addition to the national association; and the Society of Women Journalists.

XI

There is no one simple solution for the complex problems of journalism. In so far as the newspaper is a private business enterprise, it will continue to adjust itself to the steadily advancing standards of the business world. “Service,” the new watchword in business, is already being taken up by the business departments of newspapers in relation to both advertisers and readers. The rejection of objectionable advertising and the guaranteeing of all advertising published have been among the first steps taken toward serving both readers and honest business men by protecting them against unscrupulous advertisers. When it is generally accepted in the business world that service, as well as honesty, is the best policy, no newspaper can long afford to pursue any other.

Nor need private ownership be a menace to the completeness and accuracy with which newspapers present news and opinion. Just as business men are coming to realize that truthful advertising is most effective and that a satisfied customer is the best advertiser, so newspapers are coming more and more to appreciate the fact that accuracy and fair play in news and editorials are also “good business.” Neither the public nor a majority of editors and publishers can afford to permit unscrupulous private ownership to impair seriously the usefulness and integrity of any newspaper.

In so far as the newspaper performs a public function, its usefulness will be measured by the character of the service that it renders. Its standing will be determined by the extent to which it serves faithfully the community, the state, and the nation. Whatever principles are formulated and whatever code is adopted for the profession of journalism will be based on the fundamental idea of service to the people—to the masses as well as to the classes.

Newspaper workers, from the “cub” reporter to the editor-in-chief, will be recognized as public servants, not as mere employees of a private business. The high standards maintained by them in newspaper offices will reinforce the ideal of public service held up before college men and women preparing themselves for journalism. The public will understand more fully than it ever has done the necessity of supporting heartily the standards established by newspapers themselves. Requests to “keep it out of the paper” and threats of “stop my paper” will be less frequent when advertisers, business men, and readers see that such attempts at coercion are an indefensible interference with an institution whose first duty is to the public.

With an ever-increasing appreciation of the value of its service in business relations and with an ever-broadening conception of its duties and responsibilities, the newspaper of to-morrow may be depended on to do its part in the greatest of all national and international tasks, that of “making the world safe for democracy.”

THE PROFESSION OF JOURNALISM

SOME ASPECTS OF JOURNALISM

BY ROLLO OGDEN

I

It is, in a way, a form of flattery, in the eyes of modern journalism, that it should be put on its defense—added to the fascinating list of “problems.” This is a tribute to its importance. The compliment may often seem oblique. An editor will, at times, feel himself placed in much the same category as a famous criminal—a warning, a horrible example, a target for reproof, but still an interesting object. That last is the redeeming feature. If the newspaper of to-day can only be sure that it excites interest in the multitude, it is content. For to force itself upon the general notice is the main purpose of its spirit of shrill insistence, which so many have noted and so many have disliked.

But the clamorous and assertive tone of the daily press may charitably be thought of as a natural reaction from its low estate of a few generations back. Upstart families or races usually have bad manners, and the newspaper, as we know it, is very much of an upstart. For long, its lot was contempt and contumely. In the first half of the eighteenth century, writing in general was reduced to extremities. Dr. Johnson says of Richard Savage that, “having no profession, he became by necessity an author.” But there was a lower deep, and that was journalism. Warburton wrote of one who is chiefly known by being pilloried in the Dunciad that he “ended in the common sink of all such writers, a political newspaper.” Even later it was recorded of the Rev. Dr. Dodd, author of the Beauties of Shakespeare, that he “descended so low as to become editor of a newspaper.” After that, but one step remained—to the gallows; and this was duly taken by Dr. Dodd in 1777, when he was hanged for forgery. A calling digged from such a pit may, without our special wonder, display something of the push and insolence natural in a class whose privileges were long so slender or so questioned that they must be loudly proclaimed for fear that they may be forgotten.

This flaunting and over-emphasis also go well with the charge that the press of to-day is commercialized. That accusation no one undertaking to comment on newspapers can pass unnoticed. Yet why should journalism be exempt? It is as freely asserted that colleges are commercialized; the theatre is accused of knowing no standard but that of the box-office; politics has the money-taint upon it; and even the church is arraigned for ignoring the teachings of St. James, and being too much a respecter of the persons of the rich. If it is true that the commercial spirit rules the press, it is at least in good company. In actual fact, occasional instances of gross and unscrupulous financial control of newspapers for selfish or base ends must be admitted to exist. There are undoubtedly some editors who bend their conscience to their dealing. Newspaper proprietors exist who sell themselves for gain. But this is not what is ordinarily meant by the charge of commercialization. Reference is, rather, to the newspaper as a money-making institution. “When shall we have a journal,” asked a clergyman not long ago, “that will be published without advertisements?”

The answer is, never—at least, I hope so, for the good of American journalism. We have no official press. We have no subsidized press. We have not even an endowed press. What that would be in this country I can scarcely imagine, but I am sure it would have little or no influence. A newspaper carries weight only as it can point to evidence of public sympathy and support. But that means a business side; it means patronage; it means an eye to money. A newspaper, like an army, goes upon its belly—though it does not follow that it must eat dirt. The dispute about being commercialized is always a question of more or less. When Horace Greeley founded the Tribune in 1841, he had but a thousand dollars of his own in cash. Yet his struggle to make the paper a going concern was just as intense as if he were starting it to-day with a capital (and it would be needed) of a million. Greeley, to his honor be it said, refused from the beginning to take certain advertisements. But so do newspaper proprietors to-day whose expenses per week are more than Greeley’s were for the first year.

The immensely large capital now required for the conduct of a daily newspaper in a great city has had important consequences. It has made the newspaper more of an institution, less of a personal organ. Men no longer designate journals by the owner’s or editor’s name. It used to be Bryant’s paper, or Greeley’s paper, or Raymond’s, or Bennett’s. Now it is simply Times, Herald, Tribune, and so on. No single personality can stamp itself upon the whole organism. It is too vast. It is a great piece of property, to be administered with skill; it is a carefully planned organization which best produces the effect when the personalities of those who work for it are swallowed up. The individual withers, but the newspaper is more and more. Journalism becomes impersonal. There are no more “great editors,” but there is a finer esprit de corps, better “team play,” an institution more and more firmly established and able to justify itself.

Large capital in newspapers, and their heightened earning power, tend to steady them. Freaks and rash experiments are also shut out by lack of means. Greeley reckoned up a hundred or more newspapers that had died in New York before 1850. Since that time it would be hard to name ten. I can remember but two metropolitan dailies within twenty-five years that have absolutely suspended publication. Only contrast the state of things in Parisian journalism. There must be at least thirty daily newspapers in the French capital. Few of them have the air of living off their own business. Yet the necessary capital and the cost of production are so much smaller than ours that their various backers can afford to keep them afloat. But this fact does not make their sincerity or purity the more evident. On the contrary, the rumor of sinister control is more frequently circulated in connection with the French press than with our own. Our higher capitalization helps us. Just because a great sum is invested, it cannot be imperiled by allowing unscrupulous men to make use of the newspaper property; for that way ruin lies, in the end. The corrupt employment has to be concealed. If it had been known surely, for example, that Mr. Morgan, or Mr. Ryan, or Mr. Harriman owned a New York newspaper, and was utilizing it as a means of furthering his schemes, support would speedily have failed it, and it would soon have dried up from the roots.

This give and take between the press and the public is vital to a just conception of American journalism. The editor does not nonchalantly project his thoughts into the void. He listens for the echo of his words. His relation to his supporters is not unlike Gladstone’s definition of the intimate connection between the orator and his audience. As the speaker gets from his hearers in mist what he gives back in shower, so the newspaper receives from the public as well as gives to it. Too often it gets as dust what it gives back as mud; but that does not alter the relation. Action and reaction are all the while going on between the press and its patrons. Hence it follows that the responsibility for the more crying evils of journalism must be divided.

I would urge no exculpation for the editor who exploits crime, scatters filth, and infects the community with moral poison. The original responsibility is his, and it is a fearful one. But it is not solely his. The basest and most demoralizing journal that lives, lives by public approval or tolerance. Its readers and advertisers have its life in their hands. At a word from them, it would either reform or die. They have the power of “recall” over it, as it is by some proposed to grant the people a power of recall over bad representatives in legislature or Congress. The very dependence of the press upon support gives its patrons the power of life and death over it.

Advertisers are known to go to a newspaper office to seek favors, sometimes improper, often innocent. Why should they, and mere readers, too, not exercise their implied right to protest against vulgarity, the exaggeration of the trivial, hysteria, indecency, immorality, in the newspaper which they are asked to buy or to patronize? To a journalist of the offensive class they could say: “You excuse yourself by alleging that you simply give what the public demands; but we say that your very assertion is an insult to us and an outrage upon the public. You say that nobody protests against your course; well, we are here to protest. You point to your sales; we tell you that, unless you mend your columns, we will buy no more.” There lies here, I am persuaded, a vast unused power for the toning up of our journalism. At any rate, the reform of a free press in a free people can be brought about only by some such reaction of the medium upon the instrument. Legislation direct would be powerless. Sir Samuel Romilly perceived this when he argued in Parliament against proposals to restrict by law the “licentious press.” He said that, if the press were more licentious than formerly, it was because it had not yet got over the evils of earlier arbitrary control; and the only sure way to reform it was to make it still more free. Romilly would doubtless have agreed that a free people will, in the long run, have as good newspapers as it wants and deserves to have.

As it is, public sentiment has a way, on occasion, of speaking through the press with astonishing directness and power. All the noise and extravagance, the ignorance and the distortion, cannot obscure this. There is a rough but great value in the mere publicity which the newspaper affords. The free handling of rulers has much for the credit side. When Senior was talking with Thiers in 1856, the conversation fell upon the severe press laws under Napoleon III. The Englishman said that perhaps these were due to the license of newspapers in the time of the foregoing republic, when their attacks on public men were often the extreme of scurrility. “C’était horrible,” said Thiers; “mais, pour moi, j’aime mieux être gouverné par des honnêtes gens qu’on traite comme des voleurs, que par des voleurs qu’on traite en honnêtes gens.”[^[1]] And when you have some powerful robbers to invoke the popular verdict upon, there is nothing like modern journalism for doing the job thoroughly. Those great names in our business and political firmament which lately have fallen like Lucifer, dreaded exposure in the press most of all. Courts and juries they could have faced with equanimity; or, rather, their lawyers would have done it for them in the most beautiful illustration of the law’s delay. But the very clamor of newspaper publicity was like an embodied public conscience pronouncing condemnation—every headline an officer. I know of no other power on earth that could have stripped away from these rogues every shelter which their money could buy, and have been to them such an advance section of the Day of Judgment. In the immense publicity that dogged them they saw that worst of all punishments described by Shelley:—

—when thou must appear to be

That which thou art internally;

And after many a false and fruitless crime,

Scorn track thy lagging fall.

[1]. “It is terrible, but for my part, I would rather be governed by honest men who are treated as though they were thieves, than by thieves who are treated as though they were honest men.”—Ed.

II

It is, no doubt, a belief in this honestly and wholesomely scourging power of newspapers which has made the champions of modern democracy champions also of the freedom of the press. It has not been seriously hampered or shackled in this country; but the history of its emancipation from burdensome taxation in England shows how the progressive and reactionary motives or temperaments come to view. When Gladstone was laboring, fifty years ago, to remove the last special tax upon newspapers, Lord Salisbury—he was then Lord Robert Cecil—opposed him with some of his finest sneers. Could it be maintained that a person of any education could learn anything from a penny paper? It might be said that the people would learn from the press what had been uttered by their representatives in Parliament, but how much would that add to their education? They might even discover the opinions of the editor. All this was very interesting, but it did not carry real instruction to the mind. To talk about a tax on newspapers being a tax on knowledge was a prostitution of real education. And so on. But contrast this with John Bright’s opinion. In a letter written in 1885, but not published till this year, he said: “Few men in England owe so much to the press as I do. Its progress has been very great. I was one of those who worked earnestly to overthrow the system of taxation which from the time of Queen Anne had fettered, I might almost say, strangled it out of existence.... I hope the editors and conductors of our journals may regard themselves as under a great responsibility, as men engaged in the great work of instructing and guiding our people.... On the faithful performance of their duties, on their truthfulness and their adherence to the moral law, the future of our country depends.”

To pass from these ideals to the tendencies and perplexities of newspapers as they are is not possible without the sensation of a jar. For specimens of the faults found in even the reputable press by fair-minded men we may turn to a recent address before a university audience by Professor Butcher. Admitting that journalism had never before been “so many-sided, so well informed, so intellectually alert,” he yet noted several literary and moral defects. Of these he dwelt first upon “hasty production.” “Formerly, the question was, who is to have the last word; now it is a wild race between journalists as to who will get the first word.” The professor found the marks of hurry written all over modern newspapers. Breathless haste could not but affect the editorial style. “It is smartly pictorial, restless, impatient, emphatic.” This charge no editor of a daily paper can find it in his heart confidently to attempt to repel. His work has to be done under narrow and cramping conditions of time. The hour of going to press is ever before him as an inexorable fate. And that judgments formed and opinions expressed under such stress are often of a sort that one would fain withdraw, no sane writer for the press thinks of denying. This ancient handicap of the pressman was described by Cowper in 1780. “I began to think better of his [Burke’s] cause,” he wrote to the Rev. Mr. Unwin, “and burnt my verses. Such is the lot of the man who writes upon the subject of the day; the aspect of affairs changes in an hour or two, and his opinion with it; what was just and well-deserved satire in the morning, in the evening becomes a libel; the author commences his own judge, and, while he condemns with unrelenting severity what he so lately approved, is sorry to find that he has laid his leaf gold upon touchwood, which crumbled away under his finger.”

While all this is sorrowfully true,—to none so sorrowful as those who have it frequently borne in upon them by personal experience,—it is, after all, du métier. It is a condition under which the work must be done, or not at all. A public which occasionally disapproves of a newspaper too quick on the trigger would not put up at all with one which held its fire too long. And there is, when all is said, a good deal of the philosophy of life in the compulsion to “go to press.” Only in that spirit can the rough work of the world get done. The artist may file and polish endlessly; the genius may brood; but the newspaper man must cut short his search for the full thought or the perfect phrase, and get into type with the best at the moment attainable. At any rate, this makes for energy decision, and a ready practicality. Life is made up of such compromises, such forced adjustments, such constant striving for the ideal with the necessitated acceptance of the closest approach to it possible, as are of the very atmosphere in the office of a daily newspaper. But the result is got. The pressure may be bad for literary technique but at all events it forces out the work. If Lord Acton had known something of the driving motives of a journalist, he would not have spent fifty years collecting material for a great history of liberty, and then died before being quite persuaded in his own mind that he was ready to write it. The counsel of wisdom which Mr. Brooke gives in Middlemarch need never be addressed to a newspaper writer; that he must “pull up” in time, every day teaches him.

Professor Butcher also drew an ingenious parallel between the Sophists of ancient Greece and present-day journalists. It was not very flattering to the latter. One of the points of comparison was that “their pretensions were high and their basis of knowledge generally slight.” Now, “ignorance,” added the uncomplimentary professor, “has its own appropriate manner, and most journalists, being very clever fellows, are, when they are ignorant, conscious of their ignorance. A fine, elusive manner is therefore adopted; it is enveloped in a haze.” To this charge, also, a bold and full plea of not guilty cannot be entered by a newspaper man. If his own conscience would allow it, he knows that too many of his own calling would rise up to confute him. The jokes, flings, stories, confessions are too numerous about the easy and empty assumptions of omniscience by the press. Mr. Barrie has, in his reminiscential When a Man’s Single, told too many tales out of the sanctum. Some of them bear on the point in hand. For example:—

“‘I am not sure that I know what the journalistic instinct precisely is,’ Rob said, ‘and still less whether I possess it.’

“‘Ah, just let me put you through your paces,’ replied Simms. ‘Suppose yourself up for an exam. in journalism, and that I am your examiner. Question One: The house was soon on fire; much sympathy is expressed with the sufferers. Can you translate that into newspaper English?’

“‘Let me see,’ answered Rob, entering into the spirit of the examination. ‘How would this do: In a moment the edifice was enveloped in shooting tongues of flame; the appalling catastrophe has plunged the whole street into the gloom of night’?

“‘Good. Question Two: A man hangs himself; what is the technical heading for this?’

“‘Either “Shocking Occurrence” or “Rash Act.’”

“‘Question Three: Pabulum, Cela va sans dire, Par excellence, Ne plus ultra. What are these? Are there any more of them?’

“‘They are scholarships,’ replied Rob; ‘and there are two more, namely, Tour de force and Terra firma.’

“‘Question Four: A. (a soldier) dies at 6 P.M. with his back to the foe; B. (a philanthropist) dies at 1 A.M.; which of these, speaking technically, would you call a creditable death?’

“‘The soldier’s, because time was given to set it.’

“‘Quite right. Question Five: Have you ever known a newspaper which did not have the largest circulation and was not the most influential advertising medium?’

“‘Never.’

“‘Well, Mr. Angus,’ said Simms, tiring of the examination, ‘you have passed with honors.’”

Many cynical admissions by the initiate could be quoted. The question was recently put to a young man who had a place on the staff of a morning newspaper: “Are you not often brought to a standstill for lack of knowledge?” “No,” he replied, “as a rule I go gayly ahead, and without a pause. My only difficulty is when I happen to know something of the subject.” But no one takes these sarcasms too seriously. They are a part of the Bohemian tradition of journalism. But Bohemianism has gone out of the newspaper world, as the profession has become more specialized, more of a serious business. Even in his time, Jules Janin, writing to Madame de Girardin apropos of her École des Journalistes, happily exposed the “assumption that good leading articles ever were or ever could be produced over punch and broiled bones, amidst intoxication and revelry.”

Editors may still be ignorant, but at any rate they are not unblushingly devil-may-care about it. They do not take their work as a pure lark. They try to get their facts right. And the appreciation of accurate knowledge, if not always the market for it, is certainly higher now in newspaper offices than it used to be. The multiplied apparatus of information has done at least that for the profession. Much of its knowledge may be “index-learning,” but at any rate it gets the eel by the tail. And the editor has a fairish retort for the general writer in the fact that the latter might more often be caught tripping if he had to produce his wisdom on demand and get it irrevocably down in black and white and in a thousand hands without time for consideration or amendment. This truth was frankly put by Motley in a letter to Holmes in 1862: “I take great pleasure in reading your prophecies, and intend to be just as free in hazarding my own.... If you make mistakes, you shall never hear of them again, and I promise to forget them. Let me ask the same indulgence from you in return. This is what makes letter-writing a comfort, and journalism dangerous.”

It is a distinction which an editor may well lay to his soul when accused of being a mere Gigadibs—

You, for example, clever to a fault,

The rough and ready man who write apace,

Read somewhat seldomer, think, perhaps, even less.

Even in journalism, the Spanish proverb holds that knowing something does not take up any room—el saber no ocupa lugar. Special information is, as I often have occasion to say to applicants for work, the one thing that gives a stranger a chance in a newspaper office. The most out-of-the-way knowledge has a trick of falling pat to the day’s need. A successful London journalist got his first foothold by knowing all about Scottish Disruption, when that struggle between the Established and Free churches burst upon the horizon. The editor simply had to have the services of a man who could tell an interested English public all about the question which was setting the heather afire. Similarly, not long since, a young American turned up in New York with apparently the most hopeless outfit for journalistic work. He had spent eight years in Italy studying mediæval church history—and that was his basis for thinking he could write for a daily paper of the palpitating present! But it happened just then that the aged Leo XIII drew to his end, and here was a man who knew all the Papabili—cardinals and archbishops; who understood thoroughly the ceremony and procedure of electing a pope; who was drenched in all the actualities of the situation, and who could, therefore, write about it with an intelligence and sympathy which made his work compel acceptance, and gave him entrance into journalism by the unlikely Porta Romana. It is but an instance of the way in which a profession growing more serious is bound to take knowledge more seriously.

III

It is, however, what Sir Wemyss Reid called the “Wegotism” of the press that some fastidious souls find more offensive than its occasional betrayals of crass ignorance. Lecky remarked upon it, in his chapters on the rise of newspapers in England. “Few things to a reflecting mind are more curious than the extraordinary weight which is attached to the anonymous expression of political opinion. Partly by the illusion of the imagination, partly by the weight of emphatic assertion, a plural pronoun, conspicuous type, and continual repetition, unknown men are able, without exciting any surprise or sense of incongruity, to assume the language of the accredited representatives of the nation, and to rebuke, patronize, or insult its leading men with a tone of authority which would not be tolerated from the foremost statesmen of their time.”

A remedy frequently suggested is signed editorials. Let the Great Unknown come out from behind his veil of anonymity, and drop his “plural of majesty.” Then we should know him for the insignificant and negligible individual he is. It is true that some hesitating attempts of that kind have been made in this country, mostly in the baser journalism, but they have not succeeded. There is no reason to think that this practice will ever take root among us. It arose in France under conditions of rigorous press censorship, and really goes in spirit with the wish of government or society to limit that perfect freedom of discussion which anonymous journalism alone can enjoy. Legal responsibility is, of course, fixed in the editor and proprietors. Nor is the literary disguise, as a rule, of such great consequence, or so difficult to penetrate. Most editors would feel like making the same answer to an aggrieved person that Swift gave to one of his victims. In one of his short poems he threw some of his choicest vitriol upon one Bettesworth, a lawyer of considerable eminence, who in a rage went to Swift and demanded whether he was the author of that poem. The Dean’s reply was: “Mr. Bettesworth, I was in my youth acquainted with great lawyers who, knowing my disposition to satire, advised me that, if any scoundrel or blockhead whom I had lampooned should ask, ‘Are you the author of this paper?’ I should tell him that I was not the author; and therefore I tell you, Mr. Bettesworth, that I am not the author of these lines.”

But the real defense of impersonal journalism lies in the conception of a newspaper, not as an individual organ, but as a public institution. Walter Bagehot, in his Physics and Politics, uses the newspaper as a good illustration of an organism subduing everything to type. Individual style becomes blended in the common style. The excellent work of assistant editors is ascribed to their chief, just as his blunders are shouldered off upon them. It becomes impossible to dissect out the separate personalities which contribute to the making up of the whole. The paper represents, not one man’s thought, but a body of opinion. Behind what is said each day stands a long tradition. Writers, reviewers, correspondents, clientele, add their mite, but it is little more than Burns’s snowflake falling into the river. The great stream flows on. I would not minimize personality in journalism. It has counted enormously; it still counts. But the institutional, representative idea is now most telling. The play of individuality is much restricted; has to do more with minor things than great policies. John Stuart Mill, in a letter of 1863 to Motley, very well hit off what may be called the chance rôle of the individual in modern journalism: “The line it [the London Times] takes on any particular question is much more a matter of accident than is supposed. It is sometimes better than the public, and sometimes worse. It was better on the Competitive Examinations and on the Revised Educational Code, in each case owing to the accidental position of a particular man who happened to write on it—both which men I could name to you.”

Wendell Phillips told of once taking a letter to the editor of a Boston paper, whom he knew, with a request that it be published. The editor read it over, and said, “Mr. Phillips, that is a very good and interesting letter, and I shall be glad to publish it; but I wish you would consent to strike out the last paragraph.”

“Why,” said Phillips, “that paragraph is the precise thing for which I wrote the whole letter. Without that it would be pointless.”

“Oh, I see that,” replied the editor; “and what you say in it is perfectly true,—the very children in the streets know that it is true. I fully agree with it all myself. Yet it is one of those things which it will not do to say publicly. However, if you insist upon it, I will publish the letter as it stands.”

It was published the next morning, and along with it a short editorial reference to it, saying that a letter from Mr. Phillips would be found in another column, and that it was extraordinary that so keen a mind as his should have fallen into the palpable absurdity contained in the last paragraph.

The story suggests the harmful side of the interaction between press and public. It sometimes puts a great strain upon the intellectual honesty of the editor. He is doubtful how much truth his public will bear. His audience may seem to him, on occasions, minatory, as well as, on others, encouraging. So hard is it for the journalist to be sure, with Dr. Arnold, that the times will always bear what an honest man has to say. At this point, undoubtedly, we come upon the moral perils of the newspaper man. And when outsiders believe that he writes to order, or without conviction, they naturally hold a low view of his occupation.

Journalism, wrote Mrs. Mark Pattison in 1879, “harms those, even the most gifted, who continue in it after early life. They cannot honestly write the kind of thing required for their public if they are really striving to reach the highest level of thought and work possible to themselves.” If this were always and absolutely true, little could be said for the Fourth Estate. We should all have to agree with James Smith, of Rejected Addresses fame:—

Hard is his lot who edits, thankless job!

A Sunday journal for the factious mob.

With bitter paragraph and caustic jest,

He gives to turbulence the day of rest,

Condemn’d this week rash rancor to instil,

Or thrown aside, the next, for one who will.

Alike undone, or if he praise or rail

(For this affects his safety, that his sale),

He sinks, alas, in luckless limbo set—

If loud for libel, and if dumb for debt.

The real libel, however, would be the assertion that the work of American journalism is done to any large extent in that spirit of the galley slave. With all its faults, it is imbued with the desire of being of public service. That is often overlaid by other motives—money-making, timeserving, place-hunting. But at the high demand of a great moral or political crisis, it will assert itself, and editors will be found as ready as their fellows to hazard their all for the common weal. To show what sort of fire may burn at the heart of the true journalist, I append a letter never before published:—

“New York, April 23, 1867.

“There is a man here named Barnard, on the bench of the Supreme Court. Some years ago he kept a gambling saloon in San Francisco, and was a notorious blackleg and vaurien. He came then to New York, plunged into the basest depths of city politics, and emerged Recorder. After two or three years he got by the same means to be a judge of the Supreme Court. His reputation is now of the very worst. He is unscrupulous, audacious, barefaced, and corrupt to the last degree. He not only takes bribes, but he does not even wait for them to be offered him. He sends for suitors, or rather for their counsel, and asks for the money as the price of his judgments. A more unprincipled scoundrel does not breathe. There is no way in which he does not prostitute his office, and in saying this I am giving you the unanimous opinion of the bar and the public. His appearance on the bench I consider literally an awful occurrence. Yet the press and bar are muzzled,—for that is what it comes to,—and this injurious scoundrel has actually got possession of the highest court in the State, and dares the Christian public to expose his villainy.

“If I were satisfied that, if the public knew all this, it would lie down under it, I would hand the Nation over to its creditors and take myself and my children out of the community. I will not believe that yet. I am about to say all I dare say—as yet—in the Nation to-morrow. Barnard is capable of ruining us, if he thought it worth his while, and could of course imprison me for contempt, if he took it into his head, and I should have no redress. You have no idea what a labyrinth of wickedness and chicane surrounds him. Moreover, I have no desire either for notoriety or martyrdom, and am in various ways not well fitted to take a stand against rascality on such a scale as this. But this I do think, that it is the duty of every honest man to do something. Barnard has now got possession of the courts, and if he can silence the press also, where is reform to come from?... I think some movement ought to be set on foot having for its object the hunting down of corrupt politicians, the exposure of jobs, the sharpening of the public conscience on the whole subject of political purity. If this cannot be done, the growing wealth will kill—not the nation, but the form of government without which, as you and I believe, the nation would be of little value to humanity.”

This was written to Professor Charles Eliot Norton by the late Edwin Lawrence Godkin. The Barnard referred to was, of course, the infamous judge from whom, a few years later, the judicial robes were stripped. Mr. Godkin’s attack upon him was, so far as I know, the first that was made in print. But the passion of indignation which glowed in that great journalist, with his willingness to hazard his own fortunes in the public behalf, only sets forth conspicuously what humbler members of the press feel as their truest motive and their noblest reward.

PRESS TENDENCIES AND DANGERS

BY OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD

The passing of the Boston Journal, in the eighty-fourth year of its age, by merger with the Boston Herald has rightly been characterized as a tragedy of journalism. Yet it is no more significant than the similar merger of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Leader, or the New York Press and the New York Sun. All are in obedience to the drift toward consolidation which has been as marked in journalism as in other spheres of business activity—for this is purely a business matter. True, in the cases of the Sun and the Press Mr. Munsey’s controlling motive was probably the desire to obtain the Associated Press service for the Sun, which he could have secured in no other way. But Mr. Munsey was not blind to the advantages of combining the circulation of the Press and the Sun, and has profited by it.

It is quite possible that there will be further consolidations in New York and Boston before long; at least conditions are ripe for them. Chicago has now only four morning newspapers, including the Staats-Zeitung, but one of these has an uncertain future before it. The Herald of that city is the net result of amalgamations which successively wiped out the Record, the Times, the Chronicle, and the Inter-Ocean. It is only a few years ago that the Boston Traveler and the Evening Herald were consolidated, and Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Portland (Oregon), and Philadelphia are other cities in which there has been a reduction in the number of dailies.

In the main it is correct to say that the decreasing number of newspapers in our larger American cities is due to the enormously increased costs of maintaining great dailies. This has been found to limit the number which a given advertising territory will support. It is a fact, too, that there are few other fields of enterprise in which so many unprofitable enterprises are maintained. There is one penny daily in New York which has not paid a cent to its owners in twenty years; during that time its income has met its expenses only once. Another of our New York dailies loses between $400,000 and $500,000 a year, if well-founded report is correct, but the deficit is cheerfully met each year. It may be safely stated that scarcely half of our New York morning and evening newspapers return an adequate profit.

The most striking fact about the recent consolidations is that this leaves Cleveland with only one morning newspaper, the Plain Dealer. It is the sixth city in size in the United States, yet it has not appeared to be large enough to support both the Plain Dealer and the Leader, not even with the aid of what is called “foreign,” or national, advertising, that is, advertising which originates outside of Cleveland. There are now many other cities in which the seeker after morning news is compelled to take it from one source only, whatever his political affiliations may be: in Indianapolis, from the Star; in Detroit, from the Free Press; in Toledo, from the Times; in Columbus, from the State Journal; in Scranton, from the Republican; in St. Paul, from the Pioneer Press; and in New Orleans, from the Times-Picayune. This circumstance comes as a good deal of a shock to those who fancy that at least the chief political parties should have their representative dailies in each city—for that is the old American tradition.

Turning to the State of Michigan, we find that the development has gone even further, for here are some sizable cities with no morning newspaper and but one in the evening field. In fourteen cities whose population has more than doubled during the last twenty-five years the number of daily newspapers printed in the English language has shrunk from 42 to only 23. In nine of these fourteen cities there is not a single morning newspaper; they have but one evening newspaper each to give them the news of the world, unless they are content to receive their news by mail from distant cities. On Sunday they are better off, for there are seven Sunday newspapers in these towns. In the five cities having more than one newspaper, there are six dailies that are thought to be unprofitable to their owners, and it is believed that, within a short time, the number of one-newspaper cities will grow to twelve, in which case Detroit and Grand Rapids will be the only cities with morning dailies. It is reported by competent witnesses that the one-newspaper towns are not only well content with this state of affairs, but that they actively resist any attempt to change the situation, the merchants in some cases banding together voluntarily to maintain the monopoly by refusing advertising to those wishing to start competition.

It is of course true that in the larger cities of the East there are other causes than the lack of advertising to account for the disappearance of certain newspapers. Many of them have deserved to perish because they were inefficiently managed or improperly edited. The Boston Transcript declares that the reason for the Journal’s demise was lack “of that singleness and clearness of direction and purpose which alone establish confidence in and guarantee abiding support of a newspaper.” If some of the Hearst newspapers may be cited as examples of successful journals that have neither clearness nor honesty of purpose, it is not to be questioned that a newspaper with clear-cut, vigorous personalities behind it is far more likely to survive than one that does not have them. But it does not help the situation to point out, as does the Columbia (S. C.) State, that “sentiment and passion” have been responsible for the launching of many of the newspaper wrecks; for often sentiment and the righteous passion of indignation have been responsible for the foundation of notable newspapers such as the New York Tribune, whose financial success was, for a time at least, quite notable. It is the danger that newspaper conditions, because of the enormously increased costs and this tendency to monopoly, may prevent people who are actuated by passion and sentiment from founding newspapers, which is causing many students of the situation much concern. What is to be the hope for the advocates of new-born and unpopular reforms if they cannot have a press of their own, as the Abolitionists and the founders of the Republican party set up theirs in a remarkably short time, usually with poverty-stricken bank accounts?

If no good American can read of cities having only one newspaper without concern,—since democracy depends largely upon the presenting of both sides of every issue,—it does not add any comfort to know that it would take millions to found a new paper, on a strictly business basis, in our largest cities. Only extremely wealthy men could undertake such a venture,—precisely as the rejuvenated Chicago Herald has been financed by a group of the city’s wealthiest magnates,—and even then the success of the undertaking would be questionable if it were not possible to secure the Associated Press service for the newcomer.

The “journal of protest,” it may be truthfully said, is to-day being confined, outside of the Socialistic press, to weeklies of varying types, of which the Survey, the Public, and the St. Louis Mirror, are examples; and scores of them fall by the wayside. The large sums necessary to establish a journal of opinion are being demonstrated by the New Republic. Gone is the day when a Liberator can be founded with a couple of hundred dollars as capital. The struggle of the New York Call to keep alive, and that of some of our Jewish newspapers, are clear proof that conditions to-day make strongly against those who are fired by passion and sentiment to give a new and radical message to the world.

True, there is still opportunity in small towns for editorial courage and ability; William Allen White has demonstrated that. But in the small towns the increased costs due to the war are being felt as keenly as in the larger cities. Ayer’s Newspaper Directory shows a steady shrinkage during the last three years in the weeklies, semi-weeklies, tri-weeklies, and semi-monthlies, there being 300 less in 1916 than in 1914. There lies before me a list of 76 dailies and weeklies over which the funeral rites have been held since January 1, 1917; to some of them the government has administered the coup de grace. There are three Montreal journals among them, and a number of little German publications, together with the notorious Appeal to Reason and a couple of farm journals: 21 states are represented in the list, which is surely not complete.

Many dailies have sought to save themselves by increasing their price to two cents, as in Chicago, Pittsburg, Buffalo, and Philadelphia; and everywhere there has been a raising of mail-subscription and advertising rates, in an effort to offset the enormous and persistent rise in the cost of paper and labor. It is indisputable, however, that, if we are in for a long war, many of the weaker city dailies and the country dailies must go to the wall, just as there have been similar failures in every one of the warring nations of Europe.

Surveying the newspaper field as a whole, there has not been of late years a marked development of the tendency to group together a number of newspapers under one ownership in the manner of Northcliffe. Mr. Hearst, thanks be to fortune, has not added to his string lately; his group of Examiners, Journals, and Americans is popularly believed not to be making any large sums of money for him, because the weaker members offset the earnings of the prosperous ones, and there is reputed to be great managerial waste.[^[2]] When Mr. Munsey buys another daily, he usually sells an unprosperous one or adds another grave to his private and sizable newspaper cemetery. The Scripps-McRae Syndicate, comprising some 22 dailies, has not added to its number since 1911.

[2]. Mr. Hearst acquired the Boston Advertiser in November 1917, shortly after this article was written.-Ed.

In Michigan the Booth Brothers control six clean, independent papers, which, for the local reasons given above, exercise a remarkable influence. The situation in that state shows clearly how comparatively easy it would be for rich business men, with selfish or partisan purpose, to dominate public opinion there and poison the public mind against anything they disliked. It is a situation to cause much uneasiness when one looks into the more distant future and considers the distrust of the press because of a far-reaching belief that the large city newspaper, being a several-million-dollar affair, must necessarily have managers in close alliance with other men in great business enterprises,—the chamber of commerce, the merchants’ association group,—and therefore wholly detached from the aspirations of the plain people.

Those who feel thus will be disturbed by another remarkable consolidation in the field of newspaper-making—the recent absorption of a large portion of the business of the American Press Association by the Western Newspaper Union. The latter now has an almost absolute monopoly in supplying “plate” and “ready to print” matter to the small daily newspapers and the country weeklies—“patent insides” is a more familiar term. The Western Newspaper Union to-day furnishes plate matter to nearly fourteen thousand newspapers—a stupendous number. In 1912 a United States court in Chicago forbade this very consolidation as one in restraint of trade; to-day it permits it because the great rise in the cost of plate matter, from four to seventeen cents a pound, seems to necessitate the extinction of the old competition and the establishment of a monopoly. The court was convinced that this field of newspaper enterprise will no longer support two rival concerns. An immense power which could be used to influence public opinion is thus placed in the hands of the officers of a money-making concern, for news matter is furnished as well as news photogravures.

Only the other day I heard of a boast that a laudatory article praising a certain astute Democratic politician had appeared in no less than 7,000 publications of the Union’s clients. Who can estimate the value of such an advertisement? Who can deny the power enormously to influence rural public opinion for better or for worse? Who can deny that the very innocent aspect of such a publication makes it a particularly easy, as well as effective, way of conducting propaganda for better or for worse? So far it has been to the advantage of both the associations to carry the propaganda matter of the great political parties,—they deny any intentional propaganda of their own,—but one cannot help wondering whether this will always be the case, and whether there is not danger that some day this tremendous power may be used in the interest of some privileged undertaking or some self-seeking politicians. At least, it would seem as if our law-makers, already so critical of the press, might be tempted to declare the Union a public-service corporation and, therefore, bound to transmit all legitimate news offered to it.

In the strictly news-gathering field there is probably a decrease of competition at hand. The Allied governments abroad and our courts at home have struck a hard blow at the Hearst news-gathering concern, the International News Association, which has been excluded from England and her colonies, Italy, and France, and has recently been convicted of news-stealing and falsification on the complaint of the Associated Press. The case is now pending an appeal in the Supreme Court, when the decision of the lower court may be reversed. If, as a result of these proceedings, the association eventually goes out of business, it will be to the public advantage, that is, if honest, uncolored news is a desideratum. This will give to the Associated Press—the only press association which is altogether coöperative and makes no profit by the sale of its news—a monopoly in the morning field. If this lack of organized competition—it is daily competing with the special correspondents of all the great newspapers—has its drawbacks, it is certainly reassuring that throughout this unprecedented war the Associated Press has brought over an enormous volume of news with a minimum of just complaints as to the fidelity of that news—save that it is, of course, rigidly censored in every country, and particularly in passing through England. It has met vast problems with astounding success.

But it is in considerable degree dependent upon foreign news agencies, like Reuter’s, the Havas Agency in France, the Wolf Agency in Germany, and others, including the official Russian agency. Where these are not frankly official agencies, they are the creatures of their governments and have been either deliberately used by them to mislead others, and particularly foreign nations, or to conceal the truth from their own subjects. As Dean Walter Williams, of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, has lately pointed out, if there is one thing needed after this war, it is the abolition of these official and semi-official agencies with their frequent stirring up of racial and international hatreds. A free press after the war is as badly needed as freedom of the seas and freedom from conscienceless kaisers and autocrats.

At home, when the war is over, there is certain to be as relatively striking a slant toward social reorganization, reform, and economic revolution as had taken place in Russia, and is taking place in England as related by the London Times. When that day comes here, the deep smouldering distrust of our press will make itself felt. Our Fourth Estate is to have its day of overhauling and of being muckraked. The perfectly obvious hostility toward newspapers of the present Congress, as illustrated by its attempt to impose a direct and special tax upon them; its rigorous censorship in spite of the profession’s protest of last spring; and the heavy additional postage taxes levied upon some classes of newspapers and the magazines, goes far to prove this. But even more convincing is the dissatisfaction with the metropolitan press in every reform camp and among the plain people. It has grown tremendously because the masses are, rightly or wrongly, convinced that the newspapers with heavy capital investments are a “capitalistic” press and, therefore, opposed to their interests.

This feeling has grown all the more because so many hundreds of thousands who were opposed to our going to war and are opposed to it now still feel that their views—as opposed to those of the prosperous and intellectual classes—were not voiced in the press last winter. They know that their position to-day is being misrepresented as disloyal or pro-German by the bulk of the newspapers. In this situation many are turning to the Socialistic press as their one refuge. They, and multitudes who have gradually been losing faith in the reliability of our journalism, for one reason or another, can still be won back if we journalists will but slake their intense thirst for reliable, trustworthy news, for opinions free from class bias and not always set forth from the point of view of the well-to-do and the privileged. How to respond to this need is the greatest problem before the American press. Meanwhile, on the business side we drift toward consolidation on a resistless economic current, which foams past numberless rocks, and leads no man knows whither.

THE WANING POWER OF THE PRESS

BY FRANCIS E. LEUPP

I

After the last ballot had been cast and counted in the recent mayoralty contest in New York, the successful candidate paid his respects to the newspapers which had opposed him. This is equivalent to saying that he paid them to the whole metropolitan press; for every great daily newspaper except one had done its best to defeat him, and that one had given him only a left-handed support.[^[3]] The comments of the mayor-elect, although not ill-tempered, led up to the conclusion that in our common-sense generation nobody cares what the newspapers say.

[3]. The conditions here referred to in the election of Mayor Gaynor in 1909 were almost duplicated in 1917, when Mayor Mitchel was defeated for reëlection, although all the New York newspapers, except the two Hearst papers and the Socialist daily, supported him.—Ed.

Unflattering as such a verdict may be, probably a majority of the community, if polled as a jury, would concur in it. The airy dismissal of some proposition as “mere newspaper talk” is heard at every social gathering, till one who was brought up to regard the press as a mighty factor in modern civilization is tempted to wonder whether it has actually lost the power it used to wield among us. The answer seems to me to depend on whether we are considering direct or indirect effects. A newspaper exerts its most direct influence through its definite interpretation of current events. Its indirect influence radiates from the amount and character of the news it prints, the particular features it accentuates, and its method of presenting these. Hence it is always possible that its direct influence may be trifling, while its indirect influence is large; its direct influence harmless, but its indirect influence pernicious; or vice versa.

A distinction ought to be made here like that which we make between credulity and nerves. The fact that a dwelling in which a mysterious murder has been committed may for years thereafter go begging in vain for a tenant, does not mean that a whole cityful of fairly intelligent people are victims of the ghost obsession; but it does mean that no person enjoys being reminded of midnight assassination every time he crosses his own threshold; for so persistent a companionship with a discomforting thought is bound to depress the best nervous system ever planted in a human being. So the constant iteration of any idea in a daily newspaper will presently capture public attention, whether the idea be good or bad, sensible or foolish. Though the influence of the press, through its ability to keep certain subjects always before its readers, has grown with its growth in resources and patronage, its hold on popular confidence has unquestionably been loosened during the last forty or fifty years. To Mayor Gaynor’s inference, as to most generalizations of that sort, we need not attach serious importance. The interplay of so many forces in a political campaign makes it impracticable to separate the influence of the newspapers from the rest, and either hold it solely accountable for the result, or pass it over as negligible; for if we tried to formulate any sweeping rules, we should find it hard to explain the variegated records of success and defeat among newspaper favorites. But it may be worth while to inquire why an institution so full of potentialities as a free press does not produce more effect than it does, and why so many of its leading writers to-day find reason to deplore the altered attitude of the people toward it.

Not necessarily in their order of importance, but for convenience of consideration, I should list the causes for this change about as follows: the transfer of both properties and policies from personal to impersonal control; the rise of the cheap magazine; the tendency to specialization in all forms of public instruction; the fierceness of competition in the newspaper business; the demand for larger capital, unsettling the former equipoise between counting-room and editorial room; the invasion of newspaper offices by the universal mania of hurry; the development of the news-getting at the expense of the news-interpreting function; the tendency to remould narratives of fact so as to confirm office-made policies; the growing disregard of decency in the choice of news to be specially exploited; and the scant time now spared by men of the world for reading journals of general intelligence.

In the old-style newspaper, in spite of the fact that the editorial articles were usually anonymous, the editor’s name appeared among the standing notices somewhere in every issue, or was so well known to the public that we talked about “what Greeley thought” of this or that, or wondered “whether Bryant was going to support” a certain ticket, or shook our heads over the latest sensational screed in “Bennett’s paper.” The identity of such men was clear in the minds of a multitude of readers who might sometimes have been puzzled to recall the title of the sheet edited by each. We knew their private histories and their idiosyncrasies; they were to us no mere abstractions on the one hand, or wire-worked puppets on the other, but living, moving, sentient human beings; and our acquaintance with them enabled us, as we believed, to locate fairly well their springs of thought and action. Indeed, their very foibles sometimes furnished our best exegetical key to their writings.

When a politician whom Bryant had criticised threatened to pull his nose, and Bryant responded by stalking ostentatiously three times around the bully at their next meeting in public, the readers of the Evening Post did not lose faith in the editor because he was only human, but guessed about how far to discount future utterances of the paper with regard to his antagonist. When Bennett avowed his intention of advertising the Herald without the expenditure of a dollar, by attacking his enemies so savagely as to goad them into a physical assault, everybody understood the motives behind the warfare on both sides, and attached to it only the significance that the facts warranted. Knowing Dana’s affiliations, no one mistook the meaning of the Sun’s dismissal of General Hancock as “a good man, weighing two hundred and fifty pounds, but ... not Samuel J. Tilden.” And Greeley’s retort to Bryant, “You lie, villain! willfully, wickedly, basely lie!” and his denunciation of Bennett as a “low-mouthed, blatant, witless, brutal scoundrel,” though not preserved as models of amenity for the emulation of budding editors, were felt to be balanced by the delicious frankness of the Tribune’s announcement of “the dissolution of the political firm of Seward, Weed & Greeley by the withdrawal of the junior partner.”

With all its faults, that era of personal journalism had some rugged virtues. In referring to it, I am reminded of a remark made to me, years ago, by the oldest editor then living,—so old that he had employed Weed as a journeyman, and refused to hire Greeley as a tramp printer,—that “in the golden age of our craft, every editor wore his conscience on his arm, and carried his dueling weapon in his hand, walked always in the light where the whole world could see him, and was prepared to defend his published opinions with his life if need be.” Without going to that extreme, it is easy to sympathize with the veteran’s view that a man of force, who writes nothing for which he is not ready to be personally responsible, commands more respect from the mass of his fellows than one who shields himself behind a rampart of anonymity, and voices only the sentiments of a profit-seeking corporation.

Of course, the transfer of our newspapers from personal to corporate ownership and control was not a matter of preference, but a practical necessity. The expense of modernizing the mechanical equipment alone imposed a burden which few newspaper proprietors were able to carry unaided. Add to that the cost of an ever-expanding news-service, and the higher salaries demanded by satisfactory employees in all departments, and it is hardly wonderful that one private owner after another gave up his single-handed struggle against hopeless financial odds, and sought aid from men of larger means. Partnership relations involve so many risks, and are so hard to shift in an emergency, that resort was had to the form of a corporation, which afforded the advantage of a limited liability, and enabled a shareholder to dispose of his interest if he tired of the game. Since the dependence of a newspaper on the favor of an often whimsical public placed it among the least attractive forms of investment, even under these well-guarded conditions, the capitalists who were willing to take large blocks of stock were usually men with political or speculative ends to gain, to which they could make a newspaper minister by way of compensating them for the hazards they faced.

These newcomers were not idealists, like the founders and managers of most of the important journals of an earlier period. They were men of keen commercial instincts, evidenced by the fact that they had accumulated wealth. They naturally looked at everything through the medium of the balance-sheet. Here was a paper with a fine reputation, but uncertain or disappearing profits; it must be strengthened, enlarged, and made to pay. Principles? Yes, principles were good things, but we must not ride even good things to death. The noblest cause in creation cannot be promoted by a defunct newspaper, and to keep its champion alive there must be a net cash income. The circulation must be pushed, and the advertising patronage increased. More circulation can be secured only by keeping the public stirred up. Employ private detectives to pursue the runaway husband, and bring him back to his wife; organize a marine expedition to find the missing ship; send a reporter into the Soudan to interview the beleaguered general whose own government is powerless to reach him with an army. Blow the trumpet, and make ringing announcements every day. If nothing new is to be had, refurbish something so old that people have forgotten it, and spread it over lots of space. Who will know the difference?

What one newspaper did, that others were forced to do or be distanced in the competition. It all had its effect. A craving for excitement was first aroused in the public, and then satisfied by the same hand that had aroused it. Nobody wished to be behind the times, so circulations were swelled gradually to tenfold their old dimensions. Rivalry was worked up among the advertisers in their turn, till a half-page in a big newspaper commanded a price undreamed of a few years before. Thus one interest was made to foster another, each increase of income involving also an increase of cost, and each additional outlay bringing fresh returns. In such a race for business success, with such forces behind the runners, can we marvel at the subsidence of ideals which in the days of individual control and slower gait were uppermost? With the capitalists’ plans to promote, and powerful advertisers to conciliate by emphasizing this subject or discreetly ignoring that, is not the wonder rather that the moral quality of our press has not fallen below its present standard?

Even in our day we occasionally find an editor who pays his individual tribute to the old conception of personal responsibility by giving his surname to his periodical or signing his leading articles himself. In such newspaper ventures as Mr. Bryan and Mr. La Follette have launched within a few years, albeit their motives are known to be political and partisan, more attention is attracted by one of their deliverances than by a score of impersonal preachments. Mr. Hearst, the high priest of sensational journalism, though not exploiting his own authority in the same way, has always taken pains to advertise the individual work of such lieutenants as Bierce and Brisbane; and he, like Colonel Taylor of Boston, early opened his editorial pages to contributions from distinguished authors outside of his staff, with their signatures attached. A few editors I have known who, in whatever they wrote with their own hands, dropped the diffusive “we” and adopted the more direct and intimate “I.” These things go to show that even journalists who have received most of their training in the modern school appreciate that trait in our common human nature which prompts us to pay more heed to a living voice than to a talking-machine.

II

The importance of a responsible personality finds further confirmation in the evolution of the modern magazine. From being what its title indicates, a place of storage for articles believed to have some permanent value, the magazine began to take on a new character about twenty years ago. While preserving its distinct identity and its originality, it leaped boldly into the newspaper arena, and sought its topics in the happenings of the day, regardless of their evanescence. It raised a corps of men and women who might otherwise have toiled in obscurity all their lives, and gave them a chance to become authorities on questions of immediate interest, till they are now recognized as constituting a limited but highly specialized profession. One group occupied itself with trusts and trust magnates; another with politicians whose rise had been so meteoric as to suggest a romance behind it; another with the inside history of international episodes; another with new religious movements and their leaders, and so on.

What was the result? The public following which the newspaper editors used to command when they did business in the open, but which was falling away from their anonymous successors, attached itself promptly to the magazinists. The citizen interested in insurance reform turned eagerly to all that emanated from the group in charge of that topic; whoever aspired to take part in the social uplift bought every number of every periodical in which the contributions of another group appeared; the hater of monopoly paid a third group the same compliment. What was more, the readers pinned their faith to their favorite writers, and quoted Mr. Steffens and Miss Tarbell and Mr. Baker on the specialty each had taken, with much the same freedom with which they might have quoted Darwin on plant-life, or Edison on electricity. If any anonymous editor ventured to question the infallibility of one of these prophets of the magazine world, the common multitude wasted no thought on the merits of the issue, but sided at once with the teacher whom they knew at least by name, against the critic whom they knew not at all. The uncomplimentary assumption as to the latter always seemed to be that, as only a subordinate part of a big organism, he was speaking, not from his heart, but from his orders; and that he must have some sinister design in trying to discredit an opponent who was not afraid to stand out and face his fire.

Apropos, let us not fail to note the constant trend, of recent years, toward specialization in every department of life and thought. There was a time when a pronouncement from certain men on nearly any theme would be accepted by the public, not only with the outward respect commanded by persons of their social standing, but with a large measure of positive credence. One who enjoyed a general reputation for scholarship might set forth his views this week on a question of archæology, next week on the significance of the latest earthquake, and a week later on the new canals on the planet Mars, with the certainty that each outgiving would affect public opinion to a marked degree; whereas nowadays we demand that the most distinguished members of our learned faculty stick each to his own hobby; the antiquarian to the excavations, the seismologist to the tremors of our planet, the astronomer to our remoter colleagues of the solar system. It is the same with our writers on political, social, and economic problems. Whereas the old-time editor was expected to tell his constituency what to think on any subject called up by the news overnight, it is now taken for granted that even news must be classified and distributed between specialists for comment; and the very sense that only one writer is trusted to handle any particular class of topics inspires a desire in the public to know who that writer is before paying much attention to his opinions.

The intense competition between newspapers covering the same field sometimes leads to consequences which do not strengthen the esteem of the people at large for the press at large. Witness the controversy which arose over the conflicting claims of Commander Peary and Dr. Cook as the original discoverer of the North Pole. One newspaper syndicate having, at large expense, procured a narrative directly from the pen of Cook, and another accomplished a like feat with Peary, to which could “we, the people,” look for an unbiased opinion on the matters in dispute? An admission by either that its star contributor could trifle with the truth was equivalent to throwing its own exploit into bankruptcy. So each was bound to stand by the claimant with whom it had first identified itself, and fight the battle out like an attorney under retainer; and what started as a serious contest of priority in a scientific discovery threatened to end as a wrangle over a newspaper “beat.”

Then, too, we must reckon with the progressive acceleration of the pace of our twentieth-century life generally. Where we walked in the old times, we run in these; where we ambled then, we gallop now. It is the age of electric power, high explosives, articulated steel frames, in the larger world; of the long-distance telephone, the taxicab, and the card-index, in the narrower. The problem of existence is reduced to terms of time-measurement, with the detached lever substituted for the pendulum because it produces a faster tick.

What is the effect of all this on the modernized newspaper? It must be first on the ground at every activity, foreseen or unforeseeable, as a matter of course. Its reporter must get off his “story” in advance of all his rivals. Never mind strict accuracy of detail—effect is the main thing; he is writing, not for expert accountants, or professional statisticians, or analytic philosophers, but for the public; and what the public wants is, not dry particulars, but color, vitality, heat. Pictures being a quicker medium of communication with the reader’s mind than printed text, nine-tenths of our daily press is illustrated, and the illustrations of distant events are usually turned out by artists in the home office from verbal descriptions. What signifies it if only three cars went off the broken bridge, and the imaginative draftsman put five into his picture because he could not wait for the dispatch of correction which almost always follows the lurid “scoop”? Who is harmed if the telegram about the suicide reads “shots” instead of “stabs,” and the artist depicts the self-destroyer clutching a smoking pistol instead of a dripping dirk?

It is the province of the champion of the up-to-date cult to minimize the importance of detail. The purpose of the picture, he argues, is to stamp a broad impression instantaneously on the mind, and thus spare it the more tedious process of reading. And if one detail too many is put in, or one omitted which ought to have been there, whoever is sufficiently interested to read the text will discover the fault, and whoever is not will give it no further thought anyway. As to the descriptive matter, suppose it does contain errors? The busy man of our day does not read his newspaper with the same solemn intent with which he reads history. What he asks of it is a lightning-like glimpse of the world which will show him how far it has moved in the last twelve hours; and he will not pause to complain of a few deviations from the straight line of truth, especially if it would have taken more than the twelve hours to rectify them.

This would perhaps be good logic if the pure-food law were broadened in scope so as to apply to mental pabulum, and every concocter of newspaper stories and illustrations were compelled to label his adulterated products. Then the consumer who does not object to a diet of mixed fact and falsehood, accuracy and carelessness, so long as the compound is so seasoned as to tickle his palate, could have his desire, while his neighbor who wishes an honest article or nothing at all could have his also. As it is, with no distinguishing marks, we are liable to buy one thing and get another.

The new order of “speed before everything” has brought about its changes at both ends of a newspaper staff. The editorial writer who used to take a little time to look into the ramifications of a topic before reducing his opinions to writing, feels humiliated if an event occurs on which he cannot turn off a few comments at sight; but he has still a refuge in such modifying clauses as “in the light of the meagre details now before us,” or “as it appears at this writing,” or “in spite of the absence of full particulars, which may later change the whole aspect of affairs.”

No such covert offers itself to the news-getter in the open field. What he says must be definite, outright, unqualified, or the blue pencil slashes remorselessly through his “it is suspected,” or “according to a rumor which cannot be traced to its original source.” What business has he to “suspect”? He is hired to know. For what, pray, is the newspaper paying him, if not for tracing rumors to their original source; and further still, if so instructed? He is there to be, not a thinker, but a worker; a human machine like a steam potato-digger, which, supplied with the necessary energizing force from behind, drives its prods under nature’s mantle, and grubs out the succulent treasures she is trying to conceal.

III

Nowhere is the change more patent than in the department of special correspondence. At an important point like Washington, for instance, the old corps of writers were men of mature years, most of whom had passed an apprenticeship in the editorial chair, and still held a semi-editorial relation to the newspapers they represented. They had studied political history and economics, social philosophy, and kindred subjects, as a preparation for their life-work, and were full of a wholesome sense of responsibility to the public as well as to their employers. Poore, Nelson, Boynton, and others of their class, were known by name, and regarded as authorities, in the communities to which they daily ministered. They were thoughtful workers as well as enterprising. They went for their news to the fountain-head, instead of dipping it out of any chance pool by the wayside. When they sent in to their home offices either fact or prophecy, they accompanied it with an interpretation which both editors and public knew to be no mere feat in lightning guesswork; and the fame which any of them prized more than a long calendar of “beats” and “exclusives” was that which would occasionally move a worsted competitor to confess, “I missed that news; but if —— sent it out, it is true.”

When, in the later eighties, the new order came, it came with a rush. The first inkling of it was a notice received, in the middle of one busy night, by a correspondent who had been faithfully serving a prominent Western newspaper for a dozen years, to turn over his bureau to a young man who up to that time had been doing local reporting on its home staff. Transfers of other bureaus followed fast. A few were left, and still remain, undisturbed in personnel or character of work. Here and there, too, an old-fashioned correspondent was retained, but retired to an emeritus post, with the privilege of writing a signed letter when the spirit moved him; while a nimbler-footed successor assumed titular command and sent the daily dispatches. The bald fact was that the newspaper managers had bowed to the hustling humor of the age. They no longer cared to serve journalistic viands, which required deliberate mastication, to patrons who clamored for a quick lunch. So they passed on to their representatives at a distance the same injunction they were incessantly pressing upon their reporters at home: “Get the news, and send it while it is hot. Don’t wait to tell us what it means or what it points to; we can do our own ratiocinating.”

Is the public a loser by this obscuration of the correspondent’s former function? I believe so. His appeal is no longer put to the reader directly: he becomes the mere tool of the newspaper, which in its turn furnishes to the reader such parts of his and other communications as it chooses, and in such forms as best suit its ulterior purposes. Doubtless this conduces to a more perfect administrative coördination in the staff at large, but it greatly weakens the correspondent’s sense of personal responsibility. Poore had his constituency, Boynton had his, Nelson had his. None of these men would, under any conceivable stress of competition, have wittingly misled the group of readers he had attached to himself; nor would one of them have tolerated any tampering in the home office with essential matters in a contribution to which he had signed his name. Indeed, so well was this understood that I never heard of anybody’s trying to tamper with them. It occasionally happened that the correspondent set forth a view somewhat at variance with that expressed on the editorial page of the same paper; but each party to this disagreement respected the other, and the public was assumed to be capable of making its own choice between opposing opinions clearly stated. A special virtue of the plan of independent correspondence lay in the opportunity it often afforded the habitual reader of a single newspaper to get at least a glance at more than one side of a public question.

Among the conspicuous fruits of the new régime is the direction sometimes sent to a correspondent to “write down” this man or “write up” that project. He knows that it is a case of obey orders or resign, and it brings to the surface all the Hessian he may have in his blood. If he is enough of a casuist, he will try to reconcile good conscience with worldly wisdom by picturing himself as a soldier commanded to do something of which he does not approve. Disobedience at the post of duty is treachery; resignation in the face of an unwelcome billet is desertion. So he does what he is bidden, though it may be at the cost of his self-respect and the esteem of others whose kind opinion he values. I have had a young correspondent come to me for information about something under advisement at the White House, and apologize for not going there himself by showing me a note from his editor telling him to “give the President hell.” As he had always been treated with courtesy at the White House, he had not the hardihood to go there while engaged in his campaign of abuse.

Another, who had been intimate with a member of the administration then in power, was suddenly summoned one day to a conference with the publisher of his paper. He went in high spirits, believing that the invitation must mean at least a promotion in rank or an increase of salary. He returned crestfallen. Several days afterward he revealed to me in confidence that the paper had been unsuccessfully seeking some advertising controlled by his friend, and that the publisher had offered him one thousand dollars for a series of articles—anonymous, if he preferred—exposing the private weaknesses of the eminent man, and giving full names, dates, and other particulars as to a certain unsavory association in which he was reported to find pleasure! Still another brought me a dispatch he had prepared, requesting me to look it over and see whether it contained anything strictly libelous. It proved to be a forecast of the course of the Secretary of the Treasury in a financial crisis then impending. “Technically speaking,” I said, after reading it, “there is plenty of libelous material in this, for it represents the Secretary as about to do something which, to my personal knowledge, he has never contemplated, and which would stamp him as unfit for his position if he should attempt it. But as a matter of fact he will ignore your story, as he is putting into type to-day a circular which is to be made public to-morrow, telling what his plan really is, and that will authoritatively discredit you.”

“Thank you,” he answered, rather stiffly. “I have my orders to pitch into the Secretary whenever I get a chance. I shall send this to-day, and to-morrow I can send another saying that my exclusive disclosures forced him to change his programme at the last moment.”

These are sporadic cases, I admit, yet they indicate a mischievous tendency; just as each railway accident is itself sporadic, but too frequent fatalities from a like cause on the same line point to something wrong in the management of the road. It is not necessary to call names on the one hand, or indulge in wholesale denunciation on the other, in order to indicate the extremes to which the current pace in journalism must inevitably lead if kept up. The broadest-minded and most honorable men in our calling realize the disagreeable truth. A few of the great newspapers, too, have the courage to cling still to the old ideals, both in their editorial attitude and in their instructions to their news-gatherers. Possibly their profits are smaller for their squeamishness; but that the better quality of their patronage makes up in a measure for its lesser quantity, is evident to any one familiar with the advertising business. Moreover, in the character of its employees and in the zeal and intelligence of their service, a newspaper conducted on the higher plane possesses an asset which cannot be appraised in dollars and cents. Of one such paper a famous man once said to me, “I disagree with half its political views; I am regarded as a personal enemy by its editor; but I read it religiously every day, and it is the only daily that enters the front door of my home. It is a paper written by gentlemen for gentlemen; and, though it exasperates me often, it never offends my nostrils with the odors of the slums.”

This last remark leads to another consideration touching the relaxed hold of the press on public confidence: I refer to the topics treated in the news columns, and the manner of their presentation. Its importance is attested by the sub-titles or mottoes adopted by several prominent newspapers, emphasizing their appeal to the family as a special constituency. In spite of the intense individualism, the reciprocal independence of the sexes, and the freedom from the trammels of feudal tradition of which we Americans boast, the social unit in this country is the family. Toward it a thousand lines of interest converge, from it a thousand lines of influence flow. Public opinion is unconsciously moulded by it, for the atmosphere of the home follows the father into his office, the son into his college, the daughter into her intimate companionships. The newspaper, therefore, which keeps the family in touch with the outside world, though it may have to be managed with more discretion than one whose circulation is chiefly in the streets, finds its compensation in its increased radius of influence of the subtler sort. For such a field, nothing is less fit than the noisome domestic scandals and the gory horrors which fill so much of the space in newspapers of the lowest rank, and which in these later years have made occasional inroads into some of a higher grade. Unfortunately, these occasional inroads do more to damage the general standing of the press than the habitual revel in vulgarity. For a newspaper which frankly avows itself unhampered by niceties of taste can be branded and set aside as belonging in the impossible category; whereas, when one with a clean exterior and a reputation for respectability proves unworthy, its faithlessness arouses in the popular mind a distrust of all its class.

And yet, whatever we may say of the modern press on its less commendable side, we are bound to admit that newspapers, like governments, fairly reflect the people they serve. Charles Dudley Warner once went so far as to say that no matter how objectionable the character of a paper may be, it is always a trifle better than the patrons on whom it relies for its support. I suspect that Mr. Warner’s comparison rested on the greater frankness of the bad paper, which, by very virtue of its mode of appeal, is bound to make a brave parade of its worst qualities; whereas the reader who is loudest in proclaiming in public his repugnance for horrors, and his detestation of scandals, may in private be buying daily the sheet which peddles both most shamelessly.

This sort of conventional hypocrisy among the common run of people is easier to forgive than the same thing among the cultivated few whom we accept as mentors. I stumbled upon an illuminating incident about five years ago which I cannot forbear recalling here. A young man just graduated from college, where he had attracted some attention by the cleverness of his pen, was invited to a position on the staff of the New York Journal. Visiting a leading member of the college faculty to say farewell, he mentioned this compliment with not a little pride. In an instant the professor was up in arms, with an earnest protest against his handicapping his whole career by having anything to do with so monstrous an exponent of yellow journalism. The lad was deeply moved by the good man’s outburst, and went home sorrowful. After a night’s sleep on it, he resolved to profit by the admonition, and accordingly called upon the editor, and asked permission to withdraw his tentative acceptance. In the explanation which followed he inadvertently let slip the name of his adviser. He saw a cynical smile cross the face of Mr. Hearst, who summoned a stenographer, and in his presence dictated a letter to the professor, requesting a five-hundred-word signed article for the next Sunday’s issue and inclosing a check for two hundred and fifty dollars. On Sunday the ingenuous youth beheld the article in a conspicuous place on the Journal’s editorial page, with the professor’s full name appended in large capitals.

We have already noted some of the effects produced on the press by the hurry-skurry of our modern life. Quite as significant are sundry phenomena recorded by Dr. Walter Dill Scott as the result of an inquiry into the reading habits of two thousand representative business and professional men in a typical American city. Among other things, he discovered that most of them spent not to exceed fifteen minutes a day on their newspapers. As some spent less, and some divided the time between two or three papers, the average period devoted to any one paper could safely be placed at from five to ten minutes. The admitted practice of most of the group was to look at the headlines, the table of contents, and the weather reports, and then apparently at some specialty in which they were individually interested. The editorial articles seem to have offered them few attractions, but news items of one sort or another engaged seventy-five per cent of their attention.

In an age as skeptical as ours, there is nothing astonishing in the low valuation given, by men of a class competent to do their own thinking, to anonymous opinion; but it will strike many as strange that this class takes no deeper interest in the news of the day. The trained psychologist may find it worth while to study out here the relation of cause and effect. Does the ordinary man of affairs show so scant regard for his newspaper because he no longer believes half it tells him, or only because his mind is so absorbed in matters closer at hand, and directly affecting his livelihood? Have the newspapers perverted the public taste with sensational surprises till it can no longer appreciate normal information normally conveyed?

Professor Münsterberg would doubtless have told us that the foregoing statistics simply justify his charge against Americans as a people; that we have gone leaping and gasping through life till we have lost the faculty of mental concentration, and hence that few of us can read any more. Whatever the explanation, the central fact has been duly recognized by all the yellow journals, and by some also which have not yet passed beyond the cream-colored stage. The “scare heads” and exaggerated type which, as a lure for purchasers, filled all their needs a few years ago, are no longer regarded as sufficient, but have given way to startling bill-board effects, with huge headlines, in block-letter and vermilion ink, spread across an entire front page.

The worst phase of this whole business, however, is one which does not appear on the surface, but which certainly offers food for serious reflection. The point of view from which all my criticisms have been made is that of the citizen of fair intelligence and education. It is he who has been weaned from his faith in the organ of opinion which satisfied his father, till he habitually sneers at “mere newspaper talk”; it is he who has descended from reading to simply skimming the news, and who consciously suffers from the errors which adulterate, and the vulgarity which taints, that product. But there is another element in the community which has not his well-sharpened instinct for discrimination; which can afford to buy only the cheapest, and is drawn toward the lowest, daily prints; which, during the noon hour and at night, finds time to devour all the tenement tragedies, all the palace scandals, and all the incendiary appeals designed to make the poor man think that thrift is robbery. Over that element we find the vicious newspaper still exercising an enormous sway; and, admitting that so large a proportion of the outwardly reputable press has lost its hold upon the better class of readers, what must we look for as the resultant of two such unbalanced forces?

Not a line of these few pages has been written in a carping, much less in a pessimistic spirit. I love the profession in whose practice I passed the largest and happiest part of my life; but the very pride I feel in its worthy achievements makes me, perhaps, the more sensitive to its shortcomings as these reveal themselves to an unprejudiced scrutiny. The limits of this article as to both space and scope forbid my following its subject into some inviting by-paths: as, for instance, the distinction to be observed between initiative and support in comparing the influence of the modern newspaper with that of its ancestor of a half-century ago. I am sorry, also, to put forth so many strictures without furnishing a constructive sequel. It would be interesting, for example, to weigh such possibilities as an endowed newspaper which should do for the press, as a protest against its offenses of deliberation and its faults of haste and carelessness, what an endowed theatre might do for the rescue of the stage from a condition of chronic inanity. But it must remain for a more profound philosopher, whose function is to specialize in opinion rather than to generalize in comment, to show what remedies are practicable for the disorders which beset the body of our modern journalism.

NEWSPAPER MORALS

BY H. L. MENCKEN

I

Aspiring, toward the end of my nonage, to the black robes of a dramatic critic, I took counsel with an ancient whose service went back to the days of Our American Cousin, asking him what qualities were chiefly demanded by the craft.

“The main idea,” he told me frankly, “is to be interesting, to write a good story. All else is dross. Of course, I am not against accuracy, fairness, information, learning. If you want to read Lessing and Freytag, Hazlitt and Brunetière, go read them: they will do you no harm. It is also useful to know something about Shakespeare. But unless you can make people read your criticisms, you may as well shut up your shop. And the only way to make them read you is to give them something exciting.”

“You suggest, then,” I ventured, “a certain—ferocity?”

“I do,” replied my venerable friend. “Read George Henry Lewes, and see how he did it—sometimes with a bladder on a string, usually with a meat-axe. Knock somebody on the head every day—if not an actor, then the author, and if not the author, then the manager. And if the play and the performance are perfect, then excoriate someone who doesn’t think so—a fellow critic, a rival manager, the unappreciative public. But make it hearty; make it hot! The public would rather be the butt itself than have no butt in the ring. That is Rule Number 1 of American psychology—and of English, too, but more especially of American. You must give a good show to get a crowd, and a good show means one with slaughter in it.”

Destiny soon robbed me of my critical shroud, and I fell into a long succession of less æsthetic newspaper berths, from that of police reporter to that of managing editor, but always the advice of my ancient counselor kept turning over and over in my memory, and as chance offered I began to act upon it, and whenever I acted upon it I found that it worked. What is more, I found that other newspaper men acted upon it too, some of them quite consciously and frankly, and others through a veil of self-deception, more or less diaphanous. The primary aim of all of them, no less when they played the secular Iokanaan than when they played the mere newsmonger, was to please the crowd, to give a good show; and the way they set about giving that good show was by first selecting a deserving victim, and then putting him magnificently to the torture.

This was their method when they were performing for their own profit only, when their one motive was to make the public read their paper; but it was still their method when they were battling bravely and unselfishly for the public good, and so discharging the highest duty of their profession. They lightened the dull days of midsummer by pursuing recreant aldermen with bloodhounds and artillery, by muckraking unsanitary milk-dealers, or by denouncing Sunday liquor-selling in suburban parks—and they fought constructive campaigns for good government in exactly the same gothic, melodramatic way. Always their first aim was to find a concrete target, to visualize their cause in some definite and defiant opponent. And always their second aim was to shell that opponent until he dropped his arms and took to ignominious flight. It was not enough to maintain and to prove: it was necessary also to pursue and overcome, to lay a specific somebody low, to give the good show aforesaid.

Does this confession of newspaper practice involve a libel upon the American people? Perhaps it does—on the theory, let us say, that the greater the truth, the greater the libel. But I doubt if any reflective newspaper man, however lofty his professional ideals, will ever deny any essential part of that truth. He knows very well that a definite limit is set, not only upon the people’s capacity for grasping intellectual concepts, but also upon their capacity for grasping moral concepts. He knows that it is necessary, if he would catch and inflame them, to state his ethical syllogism in the homely terms of their habitual ethical thinking. And he knows that this is best done by dramatizing and vulgarizing it, by filling it with dynamic and emotional significance, by translating all argument for a principle into rage against a man.

In brief, he knows that it is hard for the plain people to think about a thing, but easy for them to feel. Error, to hold their attention, must be visualized as a villain, and the villain must proceed swiftly to his inevitable retribution. They can understand that process; it is simple, usual, satisfying; it squares with their primitive conception of justice as a form of revenge. The hero fires them too, but less certainly, less violently than the villain. His defect is that he offers thrills at second-hand. It is the merit of the villain, pursued publicly by a posse comitatus, that he makes the public breast the primary seat of heroism, that he makes every citizen a personal participant in a glorious act of justice. Wherefore it is ever the aim of the sagacious journalist to foster that sense of personal participation. The wars that he wages are always described as the people’s wars, and he himself affects to be no more than their strategist and claque. When the victory has once been gained, true enough, he may take all the credit without a blush; but while the fight is going on he always pretends that every honest yeoman is enlisted, and he is even eager to make it appear that the yeomanry began it on their own motion, and out of the excess of their natural virtue.

I assume here, as an axiom too obvious to be argued, that the chief appeal of a newspaper, in all such holy causes, is not at all to the educated and reflective minority of citizens, but frankly to the ignorant and unreflective majority. The truth is that it would usually get a newspaper nowhere to address its exhortations to the former; for, in the first place, they are too few in number to make their support of much value in general engagements, and, in the second place, it is almost always impossible to convert them into disciplined and useful soldiers. They are too cantankerous for that, too ready with embarrassing strategy of their own. One of the principal marks of an educated man, indeed, is the fact that he does not take his opinions from newspapers—not, at any rate, from the militant, crusading newspapers. On the contrary, his attitude toward them is almost always one of frank cynicism, with indifference as its mildest form and contempt as its commonest. He knows that they are constantly falling into false reasoning about the things within his personal knowledge,—that is, within the narrow circle of his special education,—and so he assumes that they make the same, or even worse, errors about other things, whether intellectual or moral. This assumption, it may be said at once, is quite justified by the facts.

I know of no subject, in truth, save perhaps baseball, on which the average American newspaper, even in the larger cities, discourses with unfailing sense and understanding. Whenever the public journals presume to illuminate such a matter as municipal taxation, for example, or the extension of local transportation facilities, or the punishment of public or private criminals, or the control of public-service corporations, or the revision of city charters, the chief effect of their effort is to introduce into it a host of extraneous issues, most of them wholly emotional, and so they contrive to make it unintelligible to all earnest seekers after the truth.

But it does not follow thereby that they also make it unintelligible to their special client, the man in the street. Far from it. What they actually accomplish is the exact opposite. That is to say, it is precisely by this process of transmutation and emotionalization that they bring a given problem down to the level of that man’s comprehension, and, what is more important, within the range of his active sympathies. He is not interested in anything that does not stir him, and he is not stirred by anything that fails to impinge upon his small stock of customary appetites and attitudes. His daily acts are ordered, not by any complex process of reasoning, but by a continuous process of very elemental feeling. He is not at all responsive to purely intellectual argument, even when its theme is his own ultimate benefit, for such argument quickly gets beyond his immediate interest and experience. But he is very responsive to emotional suggestion, particularly when it is crudely and violently made; and it is to this weakness that the newspapers must ever address their endeavors. In brief, they must try to arouse his horror, or indignation, or pity, or simply his lust for slaughter. Once they have done that, they have him safely by the nose. He will follow blindly until his emotion wears out. He will be ready to believe anything, however absurd, so long as he is in his state of psychic tumescence.

In the reform campaigns which periodically rock our large cities,—and our small ones, too,—the newspapers habitually make use of this fact. Such campaigns are not intellectual wars upon erroneous principles, but emotional wars upon errant men: they always revolve around the pursuit of some definite, concrete, fugitive malefactor, or group of malefactors. That is to say, they belong to popular sport rather than to the science of government; the impulse behind them is always far more orgiastic than reflective. For good government in the abstract, the people of the United States seem to have no liking, or, at all events, no passion. It is impossible to get them stirred up over it, or even to make them give serious thought to it. They seem to assume that it is a mere phantasm of theorists, a political will-o’-the-wisp, a utopian dream—wholly uninteresting, and probably full of dangers and tricks. The very discussion of it bores them unspeakably, and those papers which habitually discuss it logically and unemotionally—for example, the New York Evening Post—are diligently avoided by the mob. What the mob thirsts for is not good government in itself, but the merry chase of a definite exponent of bad government. The newspaper that discovers such an exponent—or, more accurately, the newspaper that discovers dramatic and overwhelming evidence against him—has all the material necessary for a reform wave of the highest emotional intensity. All that it need do is to goad the victim into a fight. Once he has formally joined the issue, the people will do the rest. They are always ready for a man-hunt, and their favorite quarry is the man of politics. If no such prey is at hand, they will turn to wealthy debauchees, to fallen Sunday-school superintendents, to money barons, to white-slave traders, to un-sedulous chiefs of police. But their first choice is the boss.

In assaulting bosses, however, a newspaper must look carefully to its ammunition, and to the order and interrelation of its salvos. There is such a thing, at the start, as overshooting the mark, and the danger thereof is very serious. The people must be aroused by degrees, gently at first, and then with more and more ferocity. They are not capable of reaching the maximum of indignation at one leap: even on the side of pure emotion they have their rigid limitations. And this, of course, is because even emotion must have a quasi-intellectual basis, because even indignation must arise out of facts. One fact at a time! If a newspaper printed the whole story of a political boss’s misdeeds in a single article, that article would have scarcely any effect whatever, for it would be far too long for the average reader to read and absorb. He would never get to the end of it, and the part he actually traversed would remain muddled and distasteful in his memory. Far from arousing an emotion in him, it would arouse only ennui, which is the very antithesis of emotion. He cannot read more than three columns of any one subject without tiring: 6,000 words, I should say, is the extreme limit of his appetite. And the nearer he is pushed to that limit, the greater the strain upon his psychic digestion. He can absorb a single capital fact, leaping from a headline, at one colossal gulp; but he could not down a dissertation in twenty. And the first desideratum in a headline is that it deal with a single and capital fact. It must be, “McGinnis Steals $1,257,867.25,” not, “McGinnis Lacks Ethical Sense.”

Moreover, a newspaper article which presumed to tell the whole of a thrilling story in one gargantuan installment would lack the dynamic element, the quality of mystery and suspense. Even if it should achieve the miracle of arousing the reader to a high pitch of excitement, it would let him drop again next day. If he is to be kept in his frenzy long enough for it to be dangerous to the common foe, he must be led into it gradually. The newspaper in charge of the business must harrow him, tease him, promise him, hold him. It is thus that his indignation is transformed from a state of being into a state of gradual and cumulative becoming; it is thus that reform takes on the character of a hotly contested game, with the issue agreeably in doubt. And it is always as a game, of course, that the man in the street views moral endeavor. Whether its proposed victim be a political boss, a police captain, a gambler, a fugitive murderer, or a disgraced clergyman, his interest in it is almost purely a sporting interest. And the intensity of that interest, of course, depends upon the fierceness of the clash. The game is fascinating in proportion as the morally pursued puts up a stubborn defense, and in proportion as the newspaper directing the pursuit is resourceful and merciless, and in proportion as the eminence of the quarry is great and his resultant downfall spectacular. A war against a ward boss seldom attracts much attention, even in the smaller cities, for he is insignificant to begin with and an inept and cowardly fellow to end with; but the famous war upon William M. Tweed shook the whole nation, for he was a man of tremendous power, he was a brave and enterprising antagonist, and his fall carried a multitude of other men with him. Here, indeed, was sport royal, and the plain people took to it with avidity.

But once such a buccaneer is overhauled and manacled, the show is over, and the people take no further interest in reform. In place of the fallen boss, a so-called reformer has been set up. He goes into office with public opinion apparently solidly behind him: there is every promise that the improvement achieved will be lasting. But experience shows that it seldom is. Reform does not last. The reformer quickly loses his public. His usual fate, indeed, is to become the pet butt and aversion of his public. The very mob that put him into office chases him out of office. And after all, there is nothing very astonishing about this change of front, which is really far less a change of front than it seems. The mob has been fed, for weeks preceding the reformer’s elevation, upon the blood of big and little bosses; it has acquired a taste for their chase, and for the chase in general. Now, of a sudden, it is deprived of that stimulating sport. The old bosses are in retreat; there are yet no new bosses to belabor and pursue; the newspapers which elected the reformer are busily apologizing for his amateurish errors—a dull and dispiriting business. No wonder it now becomes possible for the old bosses, acting through their inevitable friends on the respectable side,—the “solid” business men, the takers of favors, the underwriters of political enterprise, and the newspapers influenced by these pious fellows,—to start the rabble against the reformer. The trick is quite as easy as that but lately done. The rabble wants a good show, a game, a victim: it doesn’t care who that victim may be. How easy to convince it that the reformer is a scoundrel himself, that he is as bad as any of the old bosses, that he ought to go to the block for high crimes and misdemeanors! It never had any actual love for him, or even any faith in him; his election was a mere incident of the chase of his predecessor. No wonder that it falls upon him eagerly, butchering him to make a new holiday!

This is what has happened over and over again in every large American city—Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburg, New Orleans, Baltimore, San Francisco, St. Paul, Kansas City. Every one of these places has had its melodramatic reform campaigns and its inevitable reactions. The people have leaped to the overthrow of bosses, and then wearied of the ensuing tedium. A perfectly typical slipping back, to be matched in a dozen other cities, is going on in Philadelphia to-day [1914]. Mayor Rudolph Blankenberg, a veteran war-horse of reform, came into office through the downfall of the old bosses, a catastrophe for which he had labored and agitated for more than thirty years. But now the old bosses are getting their revenge by telling the people that he is a violent and villainous boss himself. Certain newspapers are helping them; they have concealed but powerful support among financiers and business men; volunteers have even come forward from other cities—for example, the Mayor of Baltimore. Slowly but surely this insidious campaign is making itself felt; the common people show signs of yearning for another auto-da-fé. Mayor Blankenberg, unless I am the worst prophet unhung, will meet with an overwhelming defeat in 1915.[^[4]] And it will be a very difficult thing to put even a half-decent man in his place: the victory of the bosses will be so nearly complete that they will be under no necessity of offering compromises. Employing a favorite device of political humor, they may select a harmless blank cartridge, a respectable numskull, what is commonly called a perfumer. But the chances are that they will select a frank ringster, and that the people will elect him with cheers.

[4]. This was written in 1914. The overthrow of Blankenberg took place as forecast, and Philadelphia has since enjoyed boss rule again, with plentiful scandals.—H. L. M.

II

Such is the ebb and flow of emotion in the popular heart—or perhaps, if we would be more accurate, the popular liver. It does not constitute an intelligible system of morality, for morality, at bottom, is not at all an instinctive matter, but a purely intellectual matter: its essence is the control of impulse by an ideational process, the subordination of the immediate desire to the distant aim. But such as it is, it is the only system of morality that the emotional majority is capable of comprehending and practicing; and so the newspapers, which deal with majorities quite as frankly as politicians deal with them, have to admit it into their own system. That is to say, they cannot accomplish anything by talking down to the public from a moral plane higher than its own: they must take careful account of its habitual ways of thinking, its moral thirsts and prejudices, its well-defined limitations. They must remember clearly, as judges and lawyers have to remember it, that the morality subscribed to by that public is far from the stern and arctic morality of professors of the science. On the contrary, it is a mellower and more human thing; it has room for the antithetical emotions of sympathy and scorn; it makes no effort to separate the criminal from his crime.

The higher moralities, running up to that of Puritans and archbishops, allow no weight to custom, to general reputation, to temptation; they hold it to be no defense of a ballot-box stuffer, for example, that he had scores of accomplices and that he is kind to his little children. But the popular morality regards such a defense as sound and apposite; it is perfectly willing to convert a trial on a specific charge into a trial on a general charge. And in giving judgment it is always ready to let feeling triumph over every idea of abstract justice; and very often that feeling has its origin and support, not in matters actually in evidence, but in impressions wholly extraneous and irrelevant.

Hence the need of a careful and wary approach in all newspaper crusades, particularly on the political side. On the one hand, as I have said, the astute journalist must remember the public’s incapacity for taking in more than one thing at a time, and on the other hand, he must remember its disposition to be swayed by mere feeling, and its habit of founding that feeling upon general and indefinite impressions. Reduced to a rule of everyday practice, this means that the campaign against a given malefactor must begin a good while before the capital accusation—that is, the accusation upon which a verdict of guilty is sought—is formally brought forward. There must be a shelling of the fortress before the assault; suspicion must precede indignation. If this preliminary work is neglected or ineptly performed, the result is apt to be a collapse of the campaign. The public is not ready to switch from confidence to doubt on the instant; if its general attitude toward a man is sympathetic, that sympathy is likely to survive even a very vigorous attack. The accomplished mob-master lays his course accordingly. His first aim is to arouse suspicion, to break down the presumption of innocence—supposing, of course, that he finds it to exist. He knows that he must plant a seed, and tend it long and lovingly, before he may pluck his dragon-flower. He knows that all storms of emotion, however suddenly they may seem to come up, have their origin over the rim of consciousness, and that their gathering is really a slow, slow business. I mix the figures shamelessly, as mob-masters mix their brews!

It is this persistence of an attitude which gives a certain degree of immunity to all newcomers in office, even in the face of sharp and resourceful assault. For example, a new president. The majority in favor of him on Inauguration Day is usually overwhelming, no matter how small his plurality in the November preceding, for common self-respect demands that the people magnify his virtues: to deny them would be a confession of national failure, a destructive criticism of the Republic. And that benignant disposition commonly survives until his first year in office is more than half gone. The public prejudice is wholly on his side: his critics find it difficult to arouse any indignation against him, even when the offenses they lay to him are in violation of the fundamental axioms of popular morality. This explains why it was that Mr. Wilson was so little damaged by the charge of federal interference in the Diggs-Caminetti case—a charge well supported by the evidence brought forward, and involving a serious violation of popular notions of virtue. And this explains, too, why he survived the oratorical pilgrimages of his Secretary of State at a time of serious international difficulty—pilgrimages apparently undertaken with his approval, and hence at his political risk and cost. The people were still in favor of him, and so he was not brought to irate and drum-head judgment. No roar of indignation arose to the heavens. The opposition newspapers, with sure instinct, felt the irresistible force of public opinion on his side, and so they ceased their clamor very quickly.

But it is just such a slow accumulation of pin-pricks, each apparently harmless in itself, that finally draws blood; it is by just such a leisurely and insidious process that the presumption of innocence is destroyed, and a hospitality to suspicion created. The campaign against Governor Sulzer in New York offers a classic example of this process in operation, with very skillful gentlemen, journalistic and political, in control of it. The charges on which Governor Sulzer was finally brought to impeachment were not launched at him out of a clear sky, nor while the primary presumption in his favor remained unshaken. Not at all. They were launched at a carefully selected and critical moment—at the end, to wit, of a long and well-managed series of minor attacks. The fortress of his popularity was bombarded a long while before it was assaulted. He was pursued with insinuations and innuendoes; various persons, more or less dubious, were led to make various charges, more or less vague, against him; the managers of the campaign sought to poison the plain people with doubts, misunderstandings, suspicions. This effort, so diligently made, was highly successful; and so the capital charges, when they were brought forward at last, had the effect of confirmations, of corroborations, of proofs. But if Tammany had made them during the first few months of Governor Sulzer’s term, while all doubts were yet in his favor, it would have got only scornful laughter for its pains. The ground had to be prepared; the public mind had to be put into training.

The end of my space is near, and I find that I have written of popular morality very copiously, and of newspaper morality very little. But, as I have said before, the one is the other. The newspaper must adapt its pleading to its clients’ moral limitations, just as the trial lawyer must adapt his pleading to the jury’s limitations. Neither may like the job, but both must face it to gain a larger end. And that end, I believe, is a worthy one in the newspaper’s case quite as often as in the lawyer’s, and perhaps far oftener. The art of leading the vulgar, in itself, does no discredit to its practitioner. Lincoln practiced it unashamed, and so did Webster, Clay, and Henry. What is more, these men practiced it with frank allowance for the naïveté of the people they presumed to lead. It was Lincoln’s chief source of strength, indeed, that he had a homely way with him, that he could reduce complex problems to the simple terms of popular theory and emotion, that he did not ask little fishes to think and act like whales. This is the manner in which the newspapers do their work, and in the long run, I am convinced, they accomplish about as much good as harm thereby. Dishonesty, of course, is not unknown among them: we have newspapers in this land which apply a truly devilish technical skill to the achievement of unsound and unworthy ends. But not as many of them as perfectionists usually allege. Taking one with another, they strive in the right direction. They realize the massive fact that the plain people, for all their poverty of wit, cannot be fooled forever. They have a healthy fear of that heathen rage which so often serves their uses.

Look back a generation or two. Consider the history of our democracy since the Civil War. Our most serious problems, it must be plain, have been solved orgiastically, and to the tune of deafening newspaper urging and clamor. Men have been washed into office on waves of emotion, and washed out again in the same manner. Measures and policies have been determined by indignation far more often than by cold reason. But is the net result evil? Is there even any permanent damage from those debauches of sentiment in which the newspapers have acted insincerely, unintelligently, with no thought save for the show itself? I doubt it. The effect of their long and melodramatic chase of bosses is an undoubted improvement in our whole governmental method. The boss of to-day is not an envied first citizen, but a criminal constantly on trial. He himself is debarred from all public offices of honor, and his control over other public officers grows less and less. Elections are no longer boldly stolen; the humblest citizen may go to the polls in safety and cast his vote honestly; the machine grows less dangerous year by year; perhaps it is already less dangerous than a camorra of utopian and dehumanized reformers would be. We begin to develop an official morality which actually rises above our private morality. Bribe-takers are sent to jail by the votes of jurymen who give presents in their daily business, and are not above beating the street-car company.

And so, too, in narrower fields. The white-slave agitation of a year or so ago was ludicrously extravagant and emotional, but its net effect is a better conscience, a new alertness. The newspapers discharged broadsides of 12–inch guns to bring down a flock of buzzards—but they brought down the buzzards. They have libeled and lynched the police—but the police are the better for it. They have represented salicylic acid as an elder brother to bichloride of mercury—but we are poisoned less than we used to be. They have lifted the plain people to frenzies of senseless terror over drinking-cups and neighbors with coughs—but the death-rate from tuberculosis declines. They have railroaded men to prison, denying them all their common rights—but fewer malefactors escape to-day than yesterday.

The way of ethical progress is not straight. It describes, to risk a mathematical pun, a sort of drunken hyperbola. But if we thus move onward and upward by leaps and bounces, it is certainly better than not moving at all. Each time, perhaps, we slip back, but each time we stop at a higher level.

NEWSPAPER MORALS: A REPLY

BY RALPH PULITZER

The striking article in the March Atlantic by Mr. Henry L. Mencken, on “Newspaper Morals,” is so full of palpable facts supporting plausible fallacies that simple justice to press and “proletariat” seems to render proper a few thoughts in answer to it.

Mr. Mencken’s main facts, summarized, are as follows: that press and public often approach public questions too superficially and sentimentally; that the sense of proportion is too often lost in the heat of campaigns; that the truth is too often obscured by the intrusion of irrelevant personalities; and that after the intemperate extremes of reform waves there always come reactions into indifference to the evils but yesterday so furiously fought.

Mr. Mencken’s fallacies are: the supercilious assumption that these weaknesses are not matters of human temperament running up and down through a certain proportion of every division of society, but that, on the contrary, they are class affairs, never tainting the educated classes, but limited to “the man in the street,” “the rabble,” “the mob”; that apparently the emotionalizing of public questions by the press is to be censured in principle and sneered at in practice; that it means a deliberate truckling by the newspapers to the ignorant tastes of the masses when the press fights a public evil by attacking, with argument and indignation mingled, a man who personifies that evil, instead of opposing the general principle of that evil with a wholly passionless intellectualism.

A general fallacy which affects Mr. Mencken’s whole article lies in criticising as offenses against “newspaper morals” those imperfections which, where they exist at all, could properly be criticised only under such criteria as suggested by “Newspaper Intellectuals,” or “Newspapers as the Exponents of Pure Reason.”

Mr. Mencken first exposes and deprecates the “aim” of the newspapers to “knock somebody on the head every day,” “to please the crowd, to give a good show, by first selecting a deserving victim and then putting him magnificently to the torture,” and even to fight “constructive campaigns for good government in exactly the same gothic, melodramatic way.”

Now “muck-raking” rather than incense-burning is not a deliberate aim so much as a spontaneous instinct of the average newspaper. Nor is there anything either mysterious or reprehensible about this. The public, of all degrees, is more interested in hitting Wrong than in praising Right, because fortunately we are still in an optimistic state of society, where Right is taken for granted and Wrong contains the element of the unusual and abnormal. If the day shall ever come when papers will be able to “expose” Right and regard Wrong as a foregone conclusion, they will doubtless quickly reverse their treatment of the two. In an Ali Baba’s cave it might be natural for a paper to discover some man’s honesty; in a yoshiwara it might be reasonable for it to expatiate on some woman’s virtue. But while honesty and virtue and rightness are assumed to be the normal condition of men and women and things in general, it does not seem either extraordinary or culpable that people and press should be more interested in the polemical than in the platitudinous; in blame than in painting the lily; in attack than in sending laudatory coals to Newcastle. It scarcely needs remark, however, that when the element of surprise is introduced by some deed of exceptional heroism or abnegation or inspiration, the newspapers are not slow in giving it publicity and praise.

Mr. Mencken finds it deplorable that “a very definite limit is set, not only upon the people’s capacity for grasping intellectual concepts, but also upon their capacity for grasping moral concepts”; that, therefore, it is necessary “to visualize their cause in some definite and defiant opponent ... by translating all arguments for a principle into rage against a man.” Far be it from me to deny that people and papers are too prone to get diverted from the pursuit of some principle by acrimonious personalities wholly ungermane to that principle. But the protest against this should not lead to unfair extremes in the opposite direction. If Mr. Mencken’s ideal is a nation of philosophers calmly agreeing on the abstract desirability of honesty while serenely ignoring the specific picking of their own pockets, we have no ground for argument. But until we reach such a semi-imbecile Utopia, it would seem to be no reflection on “the people’s” intellectual or moral concepts that they should refuse to excite themselves over any theoretical wrong until their attention is focused on some practical manifestation of it, in the concrete acts of some specific individual.

May I add, parenthetically, that some papers and many acutely intellectual gentlemen find it far more convenient and comfortable to generalize virtuously than to particularize virtuously? Nor does it require merely moral or physical courage to reduce the safely general to the disagreeably personal. It requires no despicable amount of intellectual acumen as well.

Mr. Mencken next proceeds to “assume here, as an axiom too obvious to be argued, that the chief appeal of a newspaper in all such holy causes is not at all to the educated and reflective minority of citizens, but to the ignorant and unreflective majority.” On the contrary, it is very far from being “too obvious to be argued.” A great many persons of guaranteed education are sadly destitute of any reflectiveness whatsoever, while an appalling number of “the ignorant” have the effrontery to be able to reflect very efficiently. This is apart from the fact that the general intelligence among many of the ignorant is matched only by the abysmal stupidity of many of the educated.

Thus it is that the decent paper makes its appeal on public questions to the numerically large body of reflective “ignorance” and to the numerically small body of reflective education, leaving it to the demagogic papers, which are the exception at one end, to inflame the unreflective ignorant, and to the sycophantic papers at the other end to pander to the unreflective educated.

As to Mr. Mencken’s charge that he knows of “no subject, save perhaps baseball, on which the average American newspaper discourses with unfailing sense and understanding,” I know of no subject at all, even including baseball, on which the most exceptionally gifted man in the world discourses with unfailing sense and understanding. But I do know this: that, considering the immense range of subjects which the American paper is called upon to discuss, and its meagre limits of time in which to prepare for such discussion, the failings of that paper in sense and understanding are probably rarer than would be those under the same conditions of Mr. Mencken’s most fastidious selection.

“But,” Mr. Mencken continues, “whenever the public journals presume to illuminate such a matter as municipal taxation, for example, or the extension of local transportation facilities, or the punishment of public or private criminals, or the control of public-service corporations, or the revision of city charters, the chief effect of their effort is to introduce into it a host of extraneous issues, most of them wholly emotional, and so they continue to make it unintelligible to all earnest seekers after truth.” Here again it is all a matter of point of view. If Mr. Mencken’s earnest seekers after truth wish to evolve ideological schemes of municipal taxation, or supramundane extensions of transportation facilities, or transcendental control of public-service corporations, or academic revisions of city charters, then, indeed, the newspaper discussions of these questions would be bewildering to these visionary workers in the realms of pure reason. For the newspapers “presume” to regard these questions, not as theoretical problems, to be solved under theoretical conditions, on theoretical populations, to theoretical perfection, but as workable projects for a workaday world, in which the most beautiful abstract reasoning must stand the test of flesh-and-blood conditions; they regard emotional issues as so far, indeed, from being extraneous that the human nature of the humblest men and women must be weighed in the balance against the nicest syllogisms of the precisest logic. And this is nothing that Mr. Mencken need condescend to apologize for so long as “newspaper morals” are under discussion. For it must be obvious that the honest exposition and analysis of public questions from a human as well as a scientific point of view is a higher moral service to the community than an exclusively scientific, wholly unsympathetic search after truth by those who regard populations as mere subjects for the demonstration of principles.

It is precisely the honorable prerogative of newspapers not only to clarify but to vivify, to galvanize dead hypotheses into living questions, to make the educated and the ignorant alike feel that public questions should interest and stir all good citizens and not merely engross social philosophers and political theorists.

But here let me avoid joining Mr. Mencken in the pitfall of generalizations, by drawing a sharp distinction between the great run of decent papers which do honestly emotionalize public questions and the relatively few papers which unscrupulously hystericalize these questions.

Mr. Mencken is entirely correct when he admits that this emotionalizing brings these problems down to a “man’s comprehension, and, what is more important, within the range of his active sympathies.” But he again shows a very unfortunate class arrogance when he identifies this man as “the man in the street.” If Mr. Mencken searched earnestly enough after truth, he would find this man to be about as extensively the man at the ticker, the man in the motor-car, the man at the operating table, the man in the pulpit. In the same vein he continues that the only papers which discuss good government unemotionally “are diligently avoided by the mob.” If Mr. Mencken only included with his proletariat the mob of stockbrokers and doctors and engineers and lawyers and college graduates generally, who refuse to read these logical and unemotional discussions, he would unfortunately be quite right. It would be a beautiful thing indeed if we had with us to-day one hundred millions of “earnest seekers after truth,” all busily engaged in discussing “good government in the abstract,” “logically and unemotionally.” If they were only thus dispassionately busied, it is quite true that things would not be as at present, when “they are always ready for a man hunt and their favorite quarry is a man of politics. If no such prey is at hand, they will turn to wealthy debauchees, to fallen Sunday-school superintendents, to money barons, to white-slave traders.” In those halcyon times the one hundred million calm abstractionists would discuss the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on bosses, or, failing this, the ultimate effect of wealth on eroticism, the obscure relations between proselyting and decadence, or the effect of the white-slave traffic on the gold reserve.

But in our present unregenerate epoch Mr. Mencken is quite right in holding that it is generally the specific evils of government or society which bring about reform waves, which in turn crystallize themselves into general principles. It is a shockingly practical process, I admit; but then, we are a shockingly practical people, who prefer sordid results to inspired theories. And at that we are not in such bad company. For in no country in the world is there such a thing as a “revealed” civilization. On the contrary, civilization has always been for the most part purely empirical, and progress will ever remain so.

There is, therefore, cause not for shame but for pride when a newspaper reveals some specific iniquity, and by not merely expounding its isolated character to the public intelligence, but also by interpreting its general menace to the public imagination and bringing home its inherent evil to the public conscience, arouses that public to social legislation, criminal prosecution, or political reform.

Mr. Mencken next assaults once more his unfortunate “man in the street” by declaring that “it is always as a game, of course, that the man in the street views moral endeavor.... His interest in it is almost always a sporting interest.” On the contrary, here at last we have a case where a class distinction can fairly be drawn. “The man in the street” is a naïve man who takes his melodrama seriously, who believes robustly in blacks and whites without subtilizing them into intermediate shades, for whom villains and heroes really exist. He is the last person on earth to view the moral endeavor of a political or social campaign as a game. It is the supercilious class, with its sophistication and attendant cynicism, to whom such campaigns tend to take on the aspect of sporting events and games of skill.

But it is not necessary to go into the details of Mr. Mencken’s theory as to the depraved nature of popular participation in political reform. Its gist is contained in his truly shocking statement that the war on the Tweed ring and its extirpation was to the “plain people” nothing but “sport royal”! Any one who can take one of the most inspiring civic victories in the history, not alone of a city, but of a nation, and degrade the spirit that brought it about to the level of the cockpit or the bull ring, supplies an argument that needs no reinforcing against his prejudices on this whole subject.

Mr. Mencken justly deplores the reactions which follow upon reform successes, but unjustly concentrates the blame on the fickleness of “the rabble.” This evil is not a matter of mob-psychology but of unstable human nature, high and low. These revulsions and reactions are the shame, impartially, of all classes of our communities. They permeate the educated atmosphere of fastidious clubs as extensively as they do the ignorant miasma of vulgar saloons. If they induce the “ignorant and unreflective” plebeian to sit in his shirt-sleeves with his legs up, resting his feet, on election day, instead of doing his duty at the polls, do they not equally congest the golf links with “earnest seekers after truth” busily engaged in sacrificing ballots to Bogeys?

I wholly agree with Mr. Mencken’s strictures on the public morality which holds it to be a relevant defense for a ballot-box stuffer “that he is kind to his little children.” The sentimentalism which so frequently perverts a proper public conception of public morality is sickening. But here again the indictment should be against average human nature, educated or ignorant, and not against the “man in the street” as a class and alone. To this man the fact that the ballot-box stuffer is kind to his little children may carry more weight than to the man of education and culture. To the latter the fact that some monopoly-breeding, law-defying, legislation-bribing, railroad-wrecking gentleman is kind to his fellow citizens by donating to them picture galleries and free libraries may carry more weight than to the former. Is not the one just as much as the other “ready to let feeling triumph over every idea of abstract justice”?

Again, with Mr. Mencken’s prescription for making a successful newspaper crusade there can be no quarrel, save that here once more he suggests, by referring to the newspaper as a “mob-master,” that these methods are exclusively applicable to the same long-suffering “man in the street.” These methods on which Mr. Mencken elaborates are the rather obvious ones used by every lawyer, clergyman, statesman, or publicist the world over who has a forensic fight to make and win against some public evil—accusation, iteration, cumulation, and climax. If these methods are used by “mob-masters,” they are equally used by snob-servants, and incidentally by the great mass of honest newspapers which are neither the one thing nor the other.

At the end of his article, having set up a man of straw which he found it impossible to knock down, Mr. Mencken patronizingly pats it on the back:—

“The newspaper must adapt its pleading to its client’s moral limitations, just as the trial lawyer must adapt his pleading to the jury’s limitations. Neither may like the job, but both must face it to gain a larger end. And that end is a worthy one in the newspaper’s case quite as often as in the lawyer’s, and perhaps far oftener. The art of leading the vulgar in itself does no discredit to its practitioner. Lincoln practised it unashamed, and so did Webster, Clay, and Henry.”

Alas for this well-intentioned effort at amends! It is impossible to agree with Mr. Mencken even here when he praises press and public with such faint damnation.

A decent newspaper does not and must not adapt its pleadings to its clients’ moral limitations. Intellectual limitations? Yes. It is restricted by a line beyond which intelligence and education alike would be at sea, and which only specialists and experts would understand. But moral limitations? No. The paper in this regard is less like the lawyer and more like the judge. A judge can properly adapt his charge in simplicity of form to the intellectual limitations of the jury, but it will scarcely be contended that he may adapt his charge in its substance to the moral limitations of the jury. No more can any self-respecting paper palter with what it believes to be the right and the truth because of any moral limitations in its constituency. Demagogic papers may do it. Class-catering papers may do it. But the decent press which lies between does not thus stultify itself.

And now to Mr. Mencken’s condescending conclusion:—

“Our most serious problems, it must be plain, have been solved orgiastically and to the tune of deafening newspaper urging and clamor.... But is the net result evil?... I doubt it.... The way of ethical progress is not straight.... But if we thus move onward and upward by leaps and bounces, it is certainly better than not moving at all. Each time, perhaps, we slip back, but each time we stop at a higher level.”

Why, then, sweepingly reflect on the morals of the press, if by humanizing abstract principles, by emotionalizing academic doctrines, by personifying general theories, it has accomplished this progress? Granted that in the heat of battle it fails to handle the cold conceptions of austere philosophers with proper scientific etiquette. Granted that it makes blunders in technical statements which to the preciosity of specialists seem inexcusable. Granted that it mixes its science and its sentiment in a manner to shock the gentlemen of disembodied intellects. Granted that the press has many more such intellectual peccadilloes on its conscience.

But if the press does these things honestly, it does them morally, and does not need to excuse them by their results, even though these results are in very truth infinitely more precious to humanity than could be those obtained by the chill endeavors of what Mr. Mencken himself, with the perfect accuracy of would-be irony, describes as “a Camorra of Utopian and dehumanized reformers.”

THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS

BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS

I

Most of the criticism launched at our daily newspapers hits the wrong party. Granted that they sensationalize vice and crime, “play up” trivialities, exploit the private affairs of prominent people, embroider facts, and offend good taste with screech, blare, and color. All this may be only the means of meeting the demand, of “giving the public what it wants.” The newspaper cannot be expected to remain dignified and serious now that it caters to the common millions, instead of, as formerly, to the professional and business classes. To interest errand-boy and factory-girl and raw immigrant, it had to become spicy, amusing, emotional, and chromatic. For these, blame, then, the American people.

There is just one deadly, damning count against the daily newspaper as it is coming to be, namely, it does not give the news.

For all its pretensions, many a daily newspaper is not “giving the public what it wants.” In spite of these widely trumpeted prodigies of costly journalistic “enterprise,” these ferreting reporters and hurrying correspondents, these leased cables and special trains, news, good “live” news, “red-hot stuff,” is deliberately being suppressed or distorted. This occurs oftener now than formerly, and bids fair to occur yet oftener in the future.

And this in spite of the fact that the aspiration of the press has been upward. Venality has waned. Better and better men have been drawn into journalism, and they have wrought under more self-restraint. The time when it could be said, as it was said of the Reverend Dr. Dodd, that one had “descended so low as to become editor of a newspaper,” seems as remote as the Ice Age. The editor who uses his paper to air his prejudices, satisfy his grudges, and serve his private ambitions, is going out. Sobered by a growing realization of their social function, newspaper men have come under a sense of responsibility. Not long ago it seemed as if a professional spirit and a professional ethics were about to inspire the newspaper world; and to this end courses and schools of journalism were established, with high hopes. The arrest of this promising movement explains why nine out of ten newspaper men of fifteen years’ experience are cynics.

As usual, no one is to blame. The apostasy of the daily press is caused by three economic developments in the field of newspaper publishing.

II

In the first place, the great city daily has become a blanket sheet with elaborate presswork, printed in mammoth editions that must be turned out in the least time. The necessary plant is so costly, and the Associated Press franchise is so expensive, that the daily newspaper in the big city has become a capitalistic enterprise. To-day a million dollars will not begin to outfit a metropolitan newspaper. The editor is no longer the owner, for he has not, and cannot command, the capital needed to start it or buy it. The editor of the type of Greeley, Dana, Medill, Story, Halstead, and Raymond, who owns his paper and makes it his astral body, the projection of his character and ideals, is rare. Perhaps Mr. Watterson and Mr. Nelson [the late William R. Nelson of the Kansas City Star] are the best recent representatives of the type.

More and more the owner of the big daily is a business man who finds it hard to see why he should run his property on different lines from the hotel proprietor, the vaudeville manager, or the owner of an amusement park. The editors are hired men, and they may put into the paper no more of their conscience and ideals than comports with getting the biggest return from the investment. Of course, the old-time editor who owned his paper tried to make money,—no sin that!—but just as to-day the author, the lecturer, or the scholar tries to make money, namely, within the limitations imposed by his principles and his professional standards. But, now that the provider of the newspaper capital hires the editor instead of the editor hiring the newspaper capital, the paper is likelier to be run as a money-maker pure and simple—a factory where ink and brains are so applied to white paper as to turn out the largest possible marketable product. The capitalist-owner means no harm, but he is not bothered by the standards that hamper the editor-owner. He follows a few simple maxims that work out well enough in selling shoes or cigars or sheet-music. “Give people what they want, not what you want.” “Back nothing that will be unpopular.” “Run the concern for all it is worth.”

This drifting of ultimate control into the hands of men with business motives is what is known as “the commercialization of the press.”

The significance of it is apparent when you consider the second economic development, namely, the growth of newspaper advertising. The dissemination of news and the purveying of publicity are two essentially distinct functions, which, for the sake of convenience, are carried on by the same agency. The one appeals to subscribers, the other to advertisers. The one calls for good faith, the other does not. The one is the corner-stone of liberty and democracy, the other a convenience of commerce. Now, the purveying of publicity is becoming the main concern of the newspaper, and threatens to throw quite into the shade the communication of news or opinions. Every year the sale of advertising yields a larger proportion of the total receipts, and the subscribers furnish a smaller proportion. Thirty years ago, advertising yielded less than half of the earnings of the daily newspapers. To-day, it yields at least two thirds. In the larger dailies the receipts from advertisers are several times the receipts from the readers, in some cases constituting ninety per cent of the total revenues. As the newspaper expands to eight, twelve, and sixteen pages, while the price sinks to three cents, two cents, one cent, the time comes when the advertisers support the newspaper. The readers are there to read, not to provide funds. “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” When news columns and editorial page are a mere incident in the profitable sale of mercantile publicity, it is strictly “businesslike” to let the big advertisers censor both.

Of course, you must not let the cat out of the bag, or you will lose readers, and thereupon advertising. As the publicity expert, Deweese, frankly puts it, “The reader must be flimflammed with the idea that the publisher is really publishing the newspaper or magazine for him.” The wise owner will “maintain the beautiful and impressive bluff of running a journal to influence public opinion, to purify politics, to elevate public morals, etc.” In the last analysis, then, the smothering of facts in deference to the advertiser finds a limit in the intelligence and alertness of the reading public. Handled as “a commercial proposition,” the newspaper dares not suppress such news beyond a certain point, and it can always proudly point to the unsuppressed news as proof of its independence and public spirit.

The immunity enjoyed by the big advertiser becomes more serious as more kinds of business resort to advertising. Formerly, readers who understood why accidents and labor troubles never occur in department stores, why dramatic criticisms are so lenient, and the reviews of books from the publishers who advertise are so good-natured, could still expect from their journal an ungloved freedom in dealing with gas, electric, railroad, and banking companies. But now the gas people advertise, “Cook with gas,” the electric people urge you to put your sewing-machine on their current, and the railroads spill oceans of ink to attract settlers or tourists. The banks and trust companies are buyers of space, investment advertising has sprung up like Jonah’s gourd, and telephone and traction companies are being drawn into the vortex of competitive publicity. Presently, in the news-columns of the sheet that steers by the cash-register, every concern that has favors to seek, duties to dodge, or regulations to evade, will be able to press the soft pedal.

A third development is the subordination of newspapers to other enterprises. After a newspaper becomes a piece of paying property, detachable from the editor’s personality, which may be bought and sold like a hotel or mill, it may come into the hands of those who will hold it in bondage to other and bigger investments. The magnate-owner may find it to his advantage not to run it as a newspaper pure and simple, but to make it—on the sly—an instrument for coloring certain kinds of news, diffusing certain misinformation, or fostering certain impressions or prejudices in its clientele. In a word, he may shape its policy by non-journalistic considerations. By making his paper help his other schemes, or further his political or social ambitions, he will hurt it as a money-maker, no doubt, but he may contrive to fool enough of the people enough of the time. Aside from such thraldom, newspapers are subject to the tendency of diverse businesses to become tied together by the cross-investments of their owners. But naturally, when the shares of a newspaper lie in the safe-deposit box cheek by jowl with gas, telephone, and pipeline stock, a tenderness for these collateral interests is likely to affect the news columns.

III

That in consequence of its commercialization, and its frequent subjection to outside interests, the daily newspaper is constantly suppressing important news, will appear from the instances that follow. They are hardly a third of the material that has come to the writer’s attention.

A prominent Philadelphia clothier visiting New York was caught perverting boys, and cut his throat. His firm being a heavy advertiser, not a single paper in his home city mentioned the tragedy. One New York paper took advantage of the situation by sending over an extra edition containing the story. The firm in question has a large branch in a Western city. There too the local press was silent, and the opening was seized by a Chicago paper.

In this same Western city the vice-president of this firm was indicted for bribing an alderman to secure the passage of an ordinance authorizing the firm to bridge an alley separating two of its buildings. Representatives of the firm requested the newspapers in which it advertised to ignore the trial. Accordingly the five English papers published no account of the trial, which lasted a week and disclosed highly sensational matter. Only the German papers sent reporters to the trial and published the proceedings.

In a great jobbing centre, one of the most prominent cases of the United States District Attorney was the prosecution of certain firms for misbranding goods. The facts brought out appeared in the press of the smaller centres, but not a word was printed in the local papers. In another centre, four firms were fined for selling potted cheese which had been treated with preservatives. The local newspapers stated the facts, but withheld the names of the firms—a consideration they are not likely to show to the ordinary culprit.

In a trial in a great city it was brought out by sworn testimony that, during a recent labor struggle which involved teamsters on the one hand and the department stores and the mail-order houses on the other, the employers had plotted to provoke the strikers to violence by sending a long line of strike-breaking wagons out of their way to pass a lot on which the strikers were meeting. These wagons were the bait to a trap, for a strong force of policemen was held in readiness in the vicinity, and the governor of the state was at the telephone ready to call out the militia if a riot broke out. Fortunately, the strikers restrained themselves, and the trap was not sprung. It is easy to imagine the headlines that would have been used if labor had been found in so diabolical a plot. Yet the newspapers unanimously refused to print this testimony.

In the same city, during a strike of the elevator men in the large stores, the business agent of the elevator-starters’ union was beaten to death, in an alley behind a certain emporium, by a “strong-arm” man hired by that firm. The story, supported by affidavits, was given by a responsible lawyer to three newspaper men, each of whom accepted it as true and promised to print it. The account never appeared.

In another city the sales-girls in the big shops had to sign an exceedingly mean and oppressive contract which, if generally known, would have made the firms odious to the public. A prominent social worker carried these contracts, and evidence as to the bad conditions that had become established under them, to every newspaper in the city. Not one would print a line on the subject.