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.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.