from arraigning and preaching. To urge the editor, under the thumb of
the advertiser or of the owner, to be more independent, is to invite him
to remove himself from his profession. As for the capitalist-owner, to
exhort him to run his newspaper in the interests of truth and progress
is about as reasonable as to exhort the mill-owner to work his property
for the public good instead of for his private benefit.
What is needed is a broad new avenue to the public mind. Already
smothered facts are cutting little channels for themselves. The immense
vogue of the “muck-raking” magazines is due to their being vehicles for
suppressed news. Non-partisan leaders are meeting with cheering response
when they found weeklies in order to reach their natural following. The
Socialist Party supports two dailies, less to spread their ideas than to
print what the capitalistic dailies would stifle. Civic associations,
municipal voters’ leagues, and legislative voters’ leagues, are
circulating tons of leaflets and bulletins full of suppressed facts.
Within a year [1909–10] five cities have, with the tax-payers’ money,
started journals to acquaint the citizens with municipal happenings and
affairs. In many cities have sprung up private non-partisan weeklies to
report civic information. Moreover, the spoken word is once more a
power. The demand for lecturers and speakers is insatiable, and the
platform bids fair to recover its old prestige. The smotherers are
dismayed by the growth of the Chautauqua circuit. Congressional speeches
give vent to boycotted truth, and circulate widely under the franking
privilege. City clubs and Saturday lunch clubs are formed to listen to
facts and ideas tabooed by the daily press. More is made of public
hearings before committees of councilmen or legislators.
When all is said, however, the defection of the daily press has been a
staggering blow to democracy.
Many insist that the public is able to recognize and pay for the truth.
“Trust the public” and _in the end_ merit will be rewarded. Time and
again men have sunk money in starting an honest and outspoken sheet,
confident that soon the public would rally to its support. But such
hopes are doomed to disappointment. The editor who turns away bad
advertising or defies his big patrons cannot lay his copy on the
subscriber’s doorstep for as little money as the editor who purveys
publicity for all it is worth; and the masses will not pay three cents
when another paper that “looks just as good” can be had for a cent. In a
word, the art of simulating honesty and independence has outrun the
insight of the average reader.
To conclude that the people are not able to recognize and pay for the
truth about current happenings simply puts the dissemination of news in
a class with other momentous social services. Because people fail to
recognize and pay for good books, endowed libraries stud the land.
Because they fail to recognize and pay for good instruction, education
is provided free or at part cost. Just as the moment came when it was
seen that private schools, loan libraries, commercial parks, baths,
gymnasia, athletic grounds, and playgrounds would not answer, so the
moment is here for recognizing that the commercial news-medium does not
adequately meet the needs of democratic citizenship.
Endowment is necessary, and, since we are not yet wise enough to run a
public-owned daily newspaper, the funds must come from private sources.
In view of the fact that in fifteen years large donations aggregating
more than a thousand million of dollars have been made for public
purposes in this country, it is safe to predict that, if the usefulness
of a non-commercial newspaper be demonstrated, funds will be
forthcoming. In the cities, where the secret control of the channels of
publicity is easiest, there are likely to be founded financially
independent newspapers, the gift of public-spirited men of wealth.
The ultimate control of such a foundation constitutes a problem. A
newspaper free to ignore the threats of big advertisers or powerful
interests, one not to be bought, bullied, or bludgeoned, one that might
at any moment blurt out the damning truth about police protection to
vice, corporate tax-dodging, the grabbing of water frontage by
railroads, or the non-enforcement of the factory laws, would be of such
strategic importance in the struggle for wealth that desperate efforts
would be made to chloroform it. If its governing board perpetuated
itself by coöptation, it would eventually be packed with “safe” men, who
would see to it that the newspaper was run in a “conservative” spirit;
for, in the long run, those who can watch for an advantage _all_ the
time will beat the people, who can watch only _some_ of the time.
Chloroformed the endowed newspaper will be, unless it be committed to
the onward thought and conscience of the community. This could be done
by letting vacancies on the governing board be filled in turn by the
local bar association, the medical association, the ministers’ union,
the degree-granting faculties, the federated teachers, the central labor
union, the chamber of commerce, the associated charities, the public
libraries, the non-partisan citizens’ associations, the improvement
leagues, and the social settlements. In this way the endowment would
rest ultimately on the chief apexes of moral and intellectual worth in
the city.
While giving, with headline, cut, and cartoon, the interesting
news,—forgeries and accidents, society and sports, as well as business
and politics,—the endowed newspaper would not dramatize crime, or gossip
of private affairs; above all, it would not “fake,” “doctor,” or
sensationalize the news. Too self-respecting to use keyhole tactics, and
too serious to chronicle the small beer of the wedding trousseau or the
divorce court, such a newspaper could not begin to match the commercial
press in circulation. But it would reach those who reach the public
through the weeklies and monthlies, and would inform the teachers,
preachers, lecturers, and public men, who speak to the people eye to
eye.
What is more, it would be a _corrective newspaper_, giving a wholesome
leverage for lifting up the commercial press. The big papers would not
dare be caught smothering or “cooking” the news. The revelations of an
independent journal that everybody believed, would be a terror to them,
and, under the spur of a competitor not to be frightened, bought up, or
tired out, they would be compelled, in sheer self-preservation, to tell
the truth much oftener than they do.
The Erie Canal handles less than a twentieth of the traffic across the
State of New York, yet, by its standing offer of cheap transportation,
it exerts a regulative pressure on railway rates which is realized only
when the canal opens in the spring. On the same principle, the endowed
newspaper in a given city might print only a twentieth of the daily
press output, and yet exercise over the other nineteen twentieths an
influence great and salutary.
THE PERSONAL EQUATION IN JOURNALISM
BY HENRY WATTERSON
I
The daily newspaper, under modern conditions, embraces two parts very
nearly separate and distinct in their requirements—the journalistic and
the commercial.
The aptitude for producing a commodity is one thing, and the aptitude
for putting this commodity on the market is quite another thing. The
difference is not less marked in newspaper-making than in other
pursuits. The framing and execution of contracts for advertising, for
printing-paper and ink, linotyping and press-work; the handling of money
and credits; the organization of the telegraphic service and postal
service; the supervision of machinery—in short, the providing of the
vehicle and the power that turns its wheels—is the work of a single
mind, and usually it is engrossing work. It demands special talent and
ceaseless activity and attention all day long, and every day in the
year. Except it be sufficient, considerable success is out of the
question. Sometimes its sufficiency is able to float an indifferent
product. Without it the best product is likely to languish.
The making of the newspaper, that is, the collating of the news and its
consistent and uniform distribution and arrangement, the representation
of the mood and tense of the time, a certain continuity, more or less,
of thought and purpose,—the popularization of the commodity,—call for
energies and capacities of another sort. The editor of the morning
newspaper turns night into day. When others sleep he must be awake and
astir. His is the only vocation where versatility is not a hindrance or
a diversion; where the conventional is not imposed upon his personality.
He should be many-sided, and he is often most engaging when he seems
least heedful of rule. Yet nowhere is ready and sound discretion in
greater or more constant need. The editor must never lose his head.
Sure, no less than prompt, judgment is required at every turning. It is
his business to think for everybody. Each subordinate must be so drilled
and fitted to his place as to become in a sense the replica of his
chief. And, even then, when at noon he goes carefully over the work of
the night before, he will be fortunate if he finds that all has gone as
he planned it, or could wish it.
I am assuming that the make-up of the newspaper is an autocracy: the
product of one man, the offspring of a policy; the man indefatigable and
conscientious, the policy fixed, sober, and alert. In the famous
sea-fight the riffraff of sailors from all nations, whom Paul Jones had
picked up wherever he could find them, responded like the parts of a
machine to the will of their commander. They seemed inspired, the
British Captain Pearson testified before the Court of Inquiry. So in a
well-ordered newspaper office, when at midnight wires are flashing and
feet are hurrying, and to the onlooking stranger chaos seems to reign,
the directing mind and hand have their firm grip upon the tiller-ropes,
which extend from the editorial room to the composing-room, from the
composing-room to the press-room, and from the press-room to the
breakfast-table.
II
Personal journalism had its origin in the crude requirements of the
primitive newspaper. An editor, a printer, and a printer’s devil, were
all-sufficient. For half a century after the birth of the daily
newspaper in America, one man did everything which fell under the head
of editorial work. The army of reporters, telegraphers, and writers,
duly officered and classified, which has come to occupy the larger
field, was undreamed of by the pioneers of Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
Individual ownership was the rule. Little money was embarked. Commonly
it was “So-and-So’s paper.” Whilst the stories of private war, of
pistols and coffee, have been exaggerated, the early editors were much
beset; were held to strict accountability for what appeared in their
columns; sometimes had to take their lives in their hands. In certain
regions the duello flourished—one might say became the fashion. Up to
the War of Secession, the instance of an editor who had not had a
personal encounter, indeed, many encounters, was a rare one. Not a few
editors acquired celebrity as “crack shots,” gaining more reputation by
their guns than by their pens.
The familiar “Stop my paper” was personally addressed, an ebullition of
individual resentment.
“Mr. Swain,” said an irate subscriber to the founder of the
_Philadelphia Ledger_, whom he met one morning on his way to his place
of business, “I have stopped your paper, sir—I have stopped your paper.”
Mr. Swain was a gentleman of dignity and composure. “Indeed,” said he,
with a kindly intonation; “come with me and let us see about it.”
When the two had reached the spot where the office of the _Ledger_
stood, nothing unusual appeared to have happened: the building was still
there, the force within apparently engaged in its customary activities.
Mr. Swain looked leisurely about him, and turning upon his now expectant
but thoroughly puzzled fellow townsman, he said,—
“Everything seems to be as I left it last night. Stop my paper, sir! How
could you utter such a falsehood!”
Mr. James Gordon Bennett, the elder, was frequently and brutally
assailed. So was Mr. Greeley. Mr. Prentice, though an expert in the use
of weapons, did not escape many attacks of murderous intent. Editors
fought among themselves, anon with fatal result, especially about
Richmond in Virginia, and Nashville in Tennessee, and New Orleans. So
self-respecting a gentleman, and withal so peaceful a citizen, as Mr.
William Cullen Bryant, fell upon a rival journalist with a horsewhip on
Broadway, in New York. The prosy libel suit has come to take the place
of the tragic street duel,—the courts of law to settle what was formerly
submitted to the code of honor,—the star part of “fighting editor”
having come to be a relic of bygone squalor and glory. The call to arms
in 1861 found few of the editorial bullies ready for the fray, and no
one of them made his mark as a soldier in battle. They were good only on
parade. Even the South had its fill of combat, valor grew too common to
be distinguished, and, out of a very excess of broil and blood, along
with multiplied opportunities for the display of courage, gun-play got
its quietus. The good old times, when it was thought that a man who had
failed at all else could still keep a hotel and edit a newspaper, have
passed away. They are gone forever. If a gentleman kills his man
nowadays, even in honest and fair fight, they call it murder. Editors
have actually to be educated to their work, and to work for their
living. The soul of Bombastes has departed, and journalism is no longer
irradiated and advertised by the flash of arms.
We are wont to hear of the superior integrity of those days. There will
always be in direct accountability a certain sense of obligation lacking
to the anonymous and impersonal. Most men will think twice before they
commit their thoughts to print where their names are affixed. Ambition
and vanity, as well as discretion, play a restraining part here; they
play it, even though there be no provocation to danger. Yet, seeing that
somebody must be somewhere back of the pen, the result would appear
still to be referable to private character.
Most of the personal journalists were in alliance with the contemporary
politicians; all of them were the slaves of party. Many of them were
without convictions, holding to the measures of the time the relation
held by the play-actors to the parts that come to them on the stage.
Before the advent of the elder Bennett, independent journalism was
unknown. In the “partnership” of Seward, Weed, and Greeley,—Mr. Greeley
himself described it, he being “the junior member,”—office, no less than
public printing, was the object of two members at least of the firm.
Lesser figures were squires instead of partners, their chiefs as knights
of old. Callender first served, then maligned, Jefferson. Croswell was
the man-at-arms of the Albany Regency, valet to Mr. Van Buren. Forney
played majordomo to Mr. Buchanan until Buchanan, becoming President,
left his poor follower to hustle for himself; a signal, but not
anomalous, piece of ingratitude. Prentice held himself to the orders of
Clay. Even Raymond, set up in business by the money of Seward’s friends,
could call his soul his own only toward the end of his life, and then by
a single but fatal misstep brought ruin upon the property his genius had
created.
Not, indeed, until the latter third of the last century did independent
journalism acquire considerable vogue, with Samuel Bowles and Charles A.
Dana to lead it in the East, and Murat Halstead and Horace White,
followed by Joseph Medill, Victor F. Lawson, Melville E. Stone, and
William R. Nelson, in the West.
III
The new school of journalism, sometimes called impersonal and taking its
lead from the counting-room, which generally prevails, promises to
become universal in spite of an individualist here and there uniting
salient characteristics to controlling ownership—a union which in the
first place created the personal journalism of other days.
Here, however, the absence of personality is more apparent than real.
Control must be lodged somewhere. Whether it be upstairs, or downstairs,
it is bound to be—if successful—both single-minded and arbitrary, the
embodiment of the inspiration and the will of one man; the expression
made to fit the changed conditions which have impressed themselves upon
the writing and the speaking of our time.
Eloquence and fancy, oratory and rhetoric, have for the most part given
place in our public life to the language of business. More and more do
budgets usurp the field of affairs. As fiction has exhausted the
situations possible to imaginative writing, so has popular declamation
exhausted the resources of figurative speech; and just as the novel
seeks other expedients for arousing and holding the interest of its
readers, do speakers and publicists, abandoning the florid and
artificial, aim at the simple and the lucid, the terse and incisive, the
argument the main point, attained, as a rule, in the statement. To this
end the counting-room, with its close kinship to the actualities of the
world about it, has a definite advantage over the editorial room, as a
school of instruction. Nor is there any reason why the head of the
counting-room should not be as highly qualified to direct the editorial
policies as the financial policies of the newspaper of which, as the
agent of a corporation or an estate, he has become the executive; the
newspaper thus conducted assuming something of the character of the
banking institution and the railway company, being indeed in a sense a
common carrier. At least a greater show of stability and respectability,
if not a greater sense of responsibility, would be likely to follow such
an arrangement, since it would establish a more immediate relation with
the community than that embraced by the system which seems to have
passed away, a system which was not nearly so accessible, and was,
moreover, hedged about by a certain mystery that attaches itself to
midnight, to the flare of the footlights and the smell of printers’ ink.
I had written thus far and was about to pursue this line of thought with
some practical suggestion emanating from a wealth of observation and
reminiscence when, reading the _Atlantic Monthly_ for March, I
encountered the following passage from the very thoughtful paper of Mr.
Edward Alsworth Ross, entitled “The Suppression of Important News”:—
“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.”
There follow many examples of the “suppression” of “news.” Some of these
might be called “important.” Others are less so. Here enters a question
as to what is “news” and what is not; a question which gives rise to
frequent and sometimes considerable differences of opinion.
If the newspaper manager is to make no distinction between vaudeville
and journalism, between the selling of white paper disfigured by
printer’s ink and the selling of shoes, or sheet-music, comment would
seem superfluous. I venture to believe that such a manager would nowhere
be able long to hold his own against one of an ambition and intelligence
better suited to supplying the requirement of the public demand for a
vehicle of communication between itself and the world at large. Now and
then we see a very well-composed newspaper fail of success because of
its editorial character and tone. Now and then we see one succeed,
having no editorial character and tone. But the rule is otherwise. The
leading dailies everywhere stand for something. They are rarely without
aspiration. Because of the unequal capabilities of those who conduct
them, they have had their ups and downs: great journals, like the
_Chicago Times_, passing out of existence through the lack of an
adequate head; failing journals, like the _New York World_, saved from
shipwreck by the timely arrival of an adequate head.
My own observation leads me to believe that more is to be charged
against the levity and indifference of the average newspaper—perhaps I
should say its ignorance and indolence—than against the suppression of
important news. As a matter of fact, suppression does not suppress.
Conflicting interests attend to that. Mr. Ross relates that on the desk
of every editor and sub-editor of a newspaper run by a certain
capitalist, who was also a promoter, lay a list of sixteen corporations
in which the owner was interested. This was to remind them not to print
anything damaging to those particular concerns. In the office the
exempted subjects were jocularly referred to as “sacred cows.”
This case, familiar to all newspaper men, was an extreme one. The
newspaper proved a costly and ignominious failure. Its owner, who ran it
on the lines of an “amusement park,” landed first in a bankruptcy and
then in a criminal court, finally to round up in the penitentiary.
Before him, and in the same city, a fellow “journalist” had been given a
state-prison sentence. In another and adjacent city the editor and owner
of a famous and influential newspaper who had prostituted himself and
his calling escaped the stripes of a convict only through executive
clemency.
The disposition to publish everything, without regard to private feeling
or good neighborhood, may be carried to an excess quite as hurtful to
the community as the suppressions of which Mr. Ross tells us in his
interesting résumé. The newspaper which constitutes itself judge and
jury, which condemns in advance of conviction, which, reversing the
English rule of law, assumes the accused guilty instead of innocent,—the
newspaper, in short, which sets itself up as a public prosecutor,—is
likely to become a common scold and to arouse its readers out of all
proportion to any good achieved by publicity. As in other affairs of
life, the sense of decency imposes certain reserves, and also the sense
of charity.
The justest complaint which may be laid at the door of the modern
newspaper seems to me its invasion of the home, and the conversion of
its reporters into detectives. Pretending to be the defender of liberty,
it too often is the assailant of private right. Each daily issue should
indeed aim to be the history of yesterday, but it should be clean as
well as truthful; and as we seek in our usual walks and ways to avoid
that which is nasty and ghastly, so should we, in the narration of
scandal and crime, guard equally against exaggeration and pruriency, nor
be ashamed to suppress that which may be too vile to tell.