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.
On the outbreak of a justifiable street-car strike the newspapers were
disposed to treat it in a sympathetic way. Suddenly they veered, and
became unanimously hostile to the strikers. Inquiry showed that the big
merchants had threatened to withdraw their advertisements unless the
newspapers changed their attitude.
In the summer of 1908 disastrous fires raged in the northern Lake
country, and great areas of standing timber were destroyed. A prominent
organ of the lumber industry belittled the losses and printed reassuring
statements from lumbermen who were at the very moment calling upon the
state for a fire patrol. When taxed with the deceit, the organ pleaded
its obligation to support the market for the bonds which the lumber
companies of the Lake region had been advertising in its columns.
On account of agitating for teachers’ pensions, a teacher was summarily
dismissed by a corrupt school board, in violation of their own published
rule regarding tenure. An influential newspaper published the facts of
school-board grafting brought out in the teacher’s suit for
reinstatement until, through his club affiliations, a big merchant was
induced to threaten the paper with the withdrawal of his advertising. No
further reports of the revelations appeared.
During labor disputes the facts are usually distorted to the injury of
labor. In one case, strikers held a meeting on a vacant lot enclosed by
a newly-erected billboard. Forthwith appeared, in a yellow journal
professing warm friendship for labor, a front-page cut of the billboard
and a lurid story of how the strikers had built a “stockade,” behind
which they intended to bid defiance to the bluecoats. It is not
surprising that, when the van bringing these lying sheets appeared in
their quarter of the city, the libeled men overturned it.
During the struggle of carriage-drivers for a six-day week, certain
great dailies lent themselves to a concerted effort of the liverymen to
win public sympathy by making it appear that the strikers were
interfering with funerals. One paper falsely stated that a strong force
of police was being held in reserve in case of “riots,” and that
policemen would ride beside the non-union drivers of hearses. Another,
under the misleading headline, “Two Funerals stopped by Striking
Cabmen,” described harmless colloquies between hearse-drivers and
pickets. This was followed up with a solemn editorial, “May a Man go to
his Long Rest in Peace?” although, as a matter of fact, the strikers had
no intention of interfering with funerals.
The lying headline is a favorite device for misleading the reader. One
sheet prints on its front page a huge “scare” headline, “‘Hang Haywood
and a Million Men will march in Revenge,’ says Darrow.” The few readers
whose glance fell from the incendiary headline to the dispatch below it
found only the following: “Mr. Darrow, in closing the argument, said
that ‘if the jury hangs Bill Haywood, one million willing hands will
seize the banner of liberty by the open grave, and bear it on to
victory.’” In the same style, a dispatch telling of the death of an
English policeman, from injuries received during a riot precipitated by
suffragettes attempting to enter a hall during a political meeting, is
headed, “Suffragettes kill Policeman!”
The alacrity with which many dailies serve as mouthpieces of the
financial powers came out very clearly during the recent industrial
depression. The owner of one leading newspaper called his reporters
together and said in effect, “Boys, the first of you who turns in a
story of a lay-off or a shut-down gets the sack.” Early in the
depression the newspapers teemed with glowing accounts of the resumption
of steel mills and the revival of business, all baseless. After harvest
time they began to cheep, “Prosperity,” “Bumper Crops,” “Farmers buying
Automobiles.” In cities where banks and employers offered clearing-house
certificates instead of cash, the press usually printed fairy tales of
the enthusiasm with which these makeshifts were taken by depositors and
workingmen. The numbers and sufferings of the unemployed were ruthlessly
concealed from the reading public. A mass meeting of men out of work was
represented as “anarchistic” or “instigated by the socialists for
political effect.” In one daily appeared a dispatch under the heading
“Five Thousand Jobs Offered; only Ten apply.” It stated that the
Commissioner of Public Works of Detroit, misled by reports of dire
distress, set afoot a public work which called for five thousand men.
Only ten men applied for work, and all these expected to be bosses.
Correspondence with the official established the fact that the number of
jobs offered was five hundred, and that three thousand men applied for
them!
IV
On the desk of every editor and sub-editor of a newspaper run by a
capitalist promoter now [1910] under prison sentence lay a list of
sixteen corporations in which the owner was interested. This was to
remind them not to print anything damaging to these concerns. In the
office these corporations were jocularly referred to as “sacred cows.”
Nearly every form of privilege is found in the herd of “sacred cows”
venerated by the daily press.
The railroad company is a “sacred cow.” At a hearing before a state
railroad commission, the attorney of a shippers’ association got an
eminent magnate into the witness chair, with the intention of wringing
from him the truth regarding the political expenditures of his railroad.
At this point the commission, an abject creature of the railroads,
arbitrarily excluded the daring attorney from the case. The memorable
excoriation which that attorney gave the commission to its face was made
to appear in the papers as the _cause_ instead of the _consequence_ of
this exclusion. Subsequently, when the attorney filed charges with the
governor against the commission, one editor wrote an editorial stating
the facts and criticising the commissioners. The editorial was
suppressed after it was in type.
The public-service company is a “sacred cow.” In a city of the
Southwest, last summer [1909], while houses were burning from lack of
water for the fire hose, a lumber company offered to supply the firemen
with water. The water company replied that they had “sufficient.”
Neither this nor other damaging information concerning the company’s
conduct got into the columns of the local press. A yellow journal
conspicuous in the fight for cheaper gas by its ferocious onslaughts on
the “gas trust,” suddenly ceased its attack. Soon it began to carry a
full-page “Cook with gas” advertisement. The cow had found the entrance
to the sacred fold.
Traction is a “sacred cow.” The truth about Cleveland’s fight for the
three-cent fare has been widely suppressed. For instance, while Mayor
Johnson was superintending the removal of the tracks of a defunct street
railway, he was served with a court order enjoining him from tearing up
the rails. As the injunction was not indorsed, as by law it should be,
he thought it was an ordinary communication, and put it in his pocket to
examine later. The next day he was summoned to show reason why he should
not be found in contempt of court. When the facts came out, he was, of
course, discharged. An examination of the seven leading dailies of the
country shows that a dispatch was sent out from Cleveland stating that
Mayor Johnson, after acknowledging service, pocketed the injunction, and
ordered his men to proceed with their work. In the newspaper offices
this dispatch was then embroidered. One paper said the mayor told his
men to go ahead and ignore the injunction. Another had the mayor
intimating in advance that he would not obey an order if one were
issued. A third invented a conversation in which the mayor and his
superintendent made merry over the injunction. Not one of the seven
journals reported the mayor’s complete exoneration later.
The tax system is a “sacred cow.” During a banquet of two hundred
single-taxers, at the conclusion of their state conference, a man fell
in a fit. Reporters saw the trifling incident, yet the morning papers,
under big headlines, “Many Poisoned at Single-Tax Banquet,” told in
detail how a large number of banqueters had been ptomaine-poisoned. The
conference had formulated a single-tax amendment to the state
constitution, which they intended to present to the people for signature
under the new Initiative law. One paper gave a line and a half to this
most significant action. No other paper noticed it.
The party system is a “sacred cow.” When a county district court
declared that the Initiative and Referendum amendment to the Oregon
constitution was invalid, the item was spread broadcast. But when later
the Supreme Court of Oregon reversed that decision, the fact was too
trivial to be put on the wires.
The “man higher up” is a “sacred cow.” In reporting Prosecutor Heney’s
argument in the Calhoun case, the leading San Francisco paper omitted
everything on the guilt of Calhoun and made conspicuous certain
statements of Mr. Heney with reference to himself, with intent to make
it appear that his argument was but a vindication of himself, and that
he made no points against the accused. The argument for the defense was
printed in full, the “points” being neatly displayed in large type at
proper intervals. At a crisis in this prosecution a Washington dispatch
quoted the chairman of the Appropriations Committee as stating in the
House that “Mr. Heney received during 1908 $23,000, for which he
performed no service whatever for the Government.” It was some hours
before the report was corrected by adding Mr. Tawney’s concluding words,
“during that year.”
In view of their suppression and misrepresentation of vital truth, the
big daily papers, broadly speaking, must be counted as allies of those
whom—as Editor Dana reverently put it—“God has endowed with a genius for
saving, for getting rich, for bringing wealth together, for accumulating
and concentrating money.” In rallying to the side of the people they are
slower than the weeklies, the magazines, the pulpit, the platform, the
bar, the literati, the intellectuals, the social settlements, and the
universities.
Now and then, to be sure, in some betrayed and misgoverned city, a man
of force takes some little sheet, prints all the news, ventilates the
local situation, arouses the community, builds up a huge circulation,
and proves that truth-telling still pays. But such exploits do not
counteract the economic developments which have brought on the glacial
epoch in journalism. Note what happens later to such a newspaper. It is
now a valuable property, and as such it will be treated. The editor need
not repeat the bold strokes that won public confidence; he has only to
avoid anything that would forfeit it. Unconsciously he becomes, perhaps,
less a newspaper man, more a business man. He may make investments which
muzzle his paper here, form social connections which silence it there.
He may tire of fighting and want to “cash in.” In any case, when his
newspaper falls into the hands of others, it will be run as a business,
and not as a crusade.
V