_Omaha Bee_, takes issue with Mr. Ross upon the whole line of his
argument, which he subjects to the critical analysis of a practical
journalist. The muck-raking magazines, so extolled by Mr. Ross, are
shown by Mr. Rosewater to be the merest collection of already printed
newspaper material, the periodical writer having time to put them
together in more connected form. He also shows that the Chautauqua
circuits are but the emanations of newspaper advertising; and that, if
newspapers of one party make suppressions in the interest of their
party, the newspapers of the other are ready with the antidote.
Obviously, Mr. Ross is either a newspaper subaltern, or a college
professor. In either case he is, as Mr. Rosewater shows, a visionary.
In nothing does this betray itself so clearly as in the suggestion of
“an endowed newspaper,” which is Mr. Ross’s remedy for the evils he
enumerates.
“Because newspapers, as a rule, prefer construction to destruction,”
says Mr. Rosewater, “they are accused by Mr. Ross of malfeasance for
selfish purposes. True, a newspaper depends for its own prosperity upon
the prosperity of the community in which it is published. The newspaper
selfishly prefers business prosperity to business adversity. A panic is
largely psychological, and the newspapers can do much to aggravate or to
mitigate its severity. There is no question that to the willful efforts
of the newspapers as a body to allay public fear and to restore business
confidence is to be credited the short duration and comparative mildness
of the last financial cataclysm. Would an endowed newspaper have acted
differently? Most people would freely commend the newspapers for what
they did to start the wheels of industry again revolving, and this is
the first time I have seen them condemned for suppressing ‘important
news’ of business calamity and industrial distress in subservience to a
worship of advertising revenue.”
The truth of this can hardly be denied. Most fair-minded observers will
agree with Mr. Rosewater that “a few black sheep in the newspaper fold
do not make the whole flock black, nor do the combined imperfections of
all newspapers condemn them to failure”; and I cannot resist quoting
entire the admirable conclusion with which a recognized newspaper
authority disposes of a thoroughly theoretic newspaper critic.
“Personally,” says Mr. Rosewater, “I would like to see the experiment of
an endowed newspaper tried, because I am convinced comparison would only
redound to the advantage of the newspaper privately conducted as a
commercial undertaking. The newspaper most akin to the endowed newspaper
in this country is published in the interest of the Christian Science
Church. With it, ‘important news’ is news calculated to promote the
propaganda of the faith, and close inspection of its columns would
disclose news-suppression in every issue. On the other hand, a daily
newspaper, standing on its own bottom, must have readers to make its
advertising space valuable, and without a reasonable effort to cover all
the news and command public confidence, the standing and clientage of
the paper cannot be successfully maintained. The endowed paper pictured
to us as the ideal paper, run by a board of governors filled in turn by
representatives of the various uplift societies enumerated by Professor
Ross, would blow hot and would blow cold, would have no consistent
policy or principles, would be unable to alter the prevailing notion of
what constitutes important news, and would be from the outset busily
engaged in a work of news-suppression to suit the whims of the
particular hobby-riders who happened for the moment to be in dominating
control.”
In journalism, as in statesmanship, the doctrinaire is more confident
than the man of affairs. So, in war, the lieutenant is bolder in the
thought than the captain in the action. Often the newspaper subaltern,
distrusting his chief, calls that “mercenary” which is in reality
“discrimination.” It is a pity that there is not more of this latter in
our editorial practice.
IV
Disinterestedness, unselfish devotion to the public interest, is the
soul of true journalism as of true statesmanship; and this is as likely
to proceed from the counting-room as from the editorial room; only, the
business manager must be a journalist.
The journalism of Paris is personal, the journalism of London is
impersonal—that is to say, the one illustrates the self-exploiting,
individualized star-system, the other the more sedate and orderly, yet
not less responsible, commercial system; and it must be allowed that, in
both dignity and usefulness, the English is to be preferred to the
French journalism. It is true that English publishers are sometimes
elevated to the peerage. But this is nowise worse than French and
American editors becoming candidates for office. In either case, the
public and the press are losers in the matter of the service rendered,
because journalism and office are so antipathetic that their union must
be destructive to both.
The upright man of business, circumspect in his everyday behavior and
jealous of his commercial honor, needs only to be educated in the
newspaper business to bring to it the characteristic virtues which shine
and prosper in the more ambitious professional and business pursuits.
The successful man in the centres of activity is usually a worldly-wise
and prepossessing person. Other things being equal, success of the
higher order inclines to those qualities of head and heart, of breeding
and education and association, which go to the making of what we call a
gentleman. The element of charm, scarcely less than the elements of
energy, integrity, and penetration, is a prime ingredient. Add breadth
and foresight, and we have the greater result of fortune and fame.
All these essentials to preëminent manhood must be fulfilled by the
newspaper which aspires to preëminence. And there is no reason why this
may not spring from the business end, why they may not exist and
flourish there, exhaling their perfume into every department; in short,
why they may not tempt ambition. The newspapers, as Hamlet observes of
the players, are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. It were
indeed better to have a bad epitaph when you die than their ill report
while you live, even from those of the baser sort; how much more from a
press having the confidence and respect—and yet more than these, the
affection—of the community? Hence it is that special college training is
beginning to be thought of, and occasionally tried; and, while this is
subject to very serious disadvantage on the experimental side, its
ethical value may in the long run find some way to give it practical
application and to make it permanent as an arm of the newspaper service.
Assuredly, character is an asset, and nowhere does it pay surer and
larger dividends than in the newspaper business.
V
We are passing through a period of transition. The old system of
personal journalism having gone out, and the new system of counting-room
journalism having not quite reached a full realization of itself, the
editorial function seems to have fallen into a lean and slippered state,
the matters of tone and style honored rather in the breach than in the
observance. Too many ill-trained, uneducated lads have graduated out of
the city editor’s room by sheer force of audacity and enterprise into
the more important posts. Too often the counting-room takes no
supervision of the editorial room beyond the immediate selling value of
the paper the latter turns out. Things upstairs are left at loose ends.
There are examples of opportunities lost through absentee landlordism.
These conditions, however, are ephemeral. They will yield before the
progressive requirements of a process of popular evolution which is
steadily lifting the masses out of the slough of degeneracy and
ignorance. The dime novel has not the vogue it once had. Neither has the
party organ. Readers will not rest forever content under the impositions
of fake or colored news; of misleading headlines; of false alarums and
slovenly writing. Already they begin to discriminate, and more and
clearly they will learn to discriminate, between the meretricious and
the true.
The competition in sensationalism, to which we owe the yellow press, as
it is called, will become a competition in cleanliness and accuracy. The
counting-room, which is next to the people and carries the purse, will
see that decency pays, that good sense and good faith are good
investments, and it will look closer to the personal character and the
moral product of the editorial room, requiring better equipment and more
elevated standards. There will never again be a Greeley, or a Raymond,
or a Dana, playing the rôle of “star” and personally exploited by
everything appearing in journals which seemed to exist mainly to glorify
them. Each was in his way a man of superior attainments. Each thought
himself an unselfish servant of the public. Yet each had his
limitations—his ambitions and prejudices, his likes and dislikes,
intensified and amplified by the habit of personalism, often
unconscious. And, this personal element eliminated, why may not the
impersonal head of the coming newspaper—proud of his profession, and
satisfied with the results of its ministration—render a yet better
account to God and the people in unselfish devotion to the common
interest?
THE PROBLEM OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BY AN OBSERVER
I
The question of suppressed or tainted news has in recent years been
repeatedly agitated, and reformers of all brands have urged that the
majority of the newspapers of the country are business-tied—that they
are ruled according to the sordid ambition of the counting-house rather
than by the untrammeled play of the editorial intellect. Capitalism is
alleged to be playing ducks and drakes with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of
a free press.
The most important instance of criticism of this kind is afforded by
current attacks upon the Associated Press. The Associated Press, as
everybody knows, is the greatest news-gathering organization in the
world; it supplies with their daily general information more than half
the population of the United States. That it should be accused, in these
times of class controversy and misunderstanding, of being a “news
trust,” and of coloring its news in the interest of capital and
reaction, is therefore an excessively grave matter. Yet in the last six
months it has been accused of both those things. So persistent has been
the assertion of certain socialists that the Associated Press colors
industrial news in the interest of the employer, that its management has
sued them for libel. That it is a trust is the contention of one of its
rivals, the Sun News Bureau of New York, whose prayer for its
dissolution under the Sherman law, as a monopoly in restraint of trade,
is now before the Department of Justice in Washington.[5]
Footnote 5:
This charge made by the _New York Sun_, in February, 1914, was not
sustained in an opinion given by the Attorney General of the United
States on March 17, 1915.—ED.
To the writer, the main questions at issue, so far as the public is
concerned, seem to be as follows:—
1. Is the business of collecting and distributing news in bulk
essentially monopolistic? 2. If it is, and if it can not be
satisfactorily performed by an unlimited number of competitive agencies
(that is, individual newspapers), is the Associated Press in theory and
practice the best type of centralized organization for the purpose?
The first question presents little difficulty to the practical
journalist. A successful agency for the gathering of news must be
monopolistic. No newspaper is rich enough, the attention of no editor is
ubiquitous enough, to be able to collect at first hand a tithe of the
multitudinous items which a public of catholic curiosity expects to find
neatly arranged on its breakfast table. Take the large journals of New
York and Boston, with their columns of news from all parts of the United
States and the world. Their bills for telegrams and cablegrams alone
would be prohibitive of dividends, to say nothing of their bills for the
collection of the news. A public educated by a number of newspapers with
their powers of observation and instruction whetted to superlative
excellence by keen competition would no doubt be ideal; but a
journalistic Utopia of that kind is no more feasible than other Utopias.
Unlimited and unassisted competition between, say, six newspapers in the
same city or district would be about as feasible economically as
unlimited competition between six railway lines running from Boston to
New York. The need for a common service of foreign and national news
must therefore be admitted. To supply such a service, even in these days
of especially cheap telegraph and cable rates for press matter, requires
a great deal of money, and a press agency has a great deal of money to
spend only if it has also a large number of customers.
As the number of newspapers is limited, it is clear that the press
agency has strong claims to be recognized as a public service, and to be
classed with railways, telephones, telegraphs, waterworks, and many
other forms of corporate venture which even the wildest radical admits
cannot be subjected to the anarchy of unrestricted competition. Thus the
simple charge that the Associated Press is a monopoly cannot be held to
condemn it. But, to invert Mr. Roosevelt’s famous phrase, there are bad
trusts as well as good trusts. That the Associated Press is powerful
enough to be a bad trust if those who control it so desire must be
admitted offhand. It is a tremendously effective organization. Its
service is supplied to more than 850 of the leading newspapers, with a
total circulation of, probably, about 20,000,000 copies a day.
The Associated Press is the child of the first effort at coöperative
news-gathering ever made. Back in the forties of the last century,
before the Atlantic cable was laid, newspapers began to spend ruinous
sums in getting the earliest news from Europe. Those were the days in
which the first ship-news dispatch-boats were launched to meet vessels
as they entered New York harbor, and to race back with the news to their
respective offices. The competition grew to the extent even of sending
fast boats all the way to Europe, and soon became extravagant enough to
cause its collapse. Then seven New York newspapers organized a joint
service. This service, which was meant primarily to cover European news,
grew slowly to cover the United States. Newspapers in other cities were
taken into it on a reciprocal basis. The news of the Association was
supplied at that time in return for a certain sum, the newspapers
undertaking on their part to act as the local correspondents of the
Association. A reciprocal arrangement with Reuter’s, the great European
agency, followed, whereby it supplied the Associated Press with its
foreign service, and the Associated Press gave to Reuter’s the use of
its American service.
Even so, the Associated Press did not carry all before it. In the
seventies a number of Western newspapers formed the Western Associated
Press. A period of sharp competition followed, but in 1882 the two
associations signed a treaty of partnership for ten years. They were not
long in supreme control of the field, however. The Associated Press of
those days, like its successor to-day, was a close corporation in the
sense that its members could and did veto the inclusion of rivals. As
the West grew, new newspapers sprang up and were kept in the cold by
their established rivals. The result was the United Press, which soon
worked up an effective service. The Associated Press tried to cripple it
by a rule that no newspaper subscribing to its service should have
access to the news of the Associated Press; but in spite of the rule the
United Press waxed strong and might have become a really formidable
competitor had not the Associated Press been able to buy a controlling
share in it. A harmonious business agreement followed; but in accordance
with the business methods of those days the public was not apprized of
the agreement, and when, in 1892, its existence became known, there was
a row and a readjustment. The United Press absorbed the old Associated
Press of New York, and the Western Associated Press again became
independent. Reuter’s agency continued to supply both associations with
its European service.
But the ensuing period of competition did not last. Three years later,
the Western Associated Press achieved a monopolistic agreement with
Reuter’s, carried the war into the United Press territory,—the South and
the country east of the Alleghanies,—got a number of New York newspapers
to join it, and effected a national organization.
II
That national organization is, to all intents and purposes, the
Associated Press of to-day. The only really important change has been in
its transference as a company from the jurisdiction of Illinois to that
of New York. This change was accomplished in 1900, owing to an adverse
judgment of the Supreme Court of Illinois. To grasp the significance of
that judgment, and indeed the current agitation against the Associated
Press, it is necessary to sketch briefly its rules and methods.
The Associated Press is not a commercial company in the sense that it is
a dividend-hunting concern. Under the terms of its present charter, the
corporation “is not to make a profit or to make or declare dividends and
is not to engage in the selling of intelligence or traffic in the same.”
It is simply meant to be the common agent of a number of subscribing
newspapers, for the interchange of news which each collects in its own
district, and for the collection of news such as subscribers cannot
collect singlehanded: that is, foreign news and news concerning certain
classes of domestic happenings. Its board of directors consists of
journalists and publishers connected with subscribing newspapers, who
serve without payment. Its executive work is done by a salaried general
manager and his assistants. It is financed on a basis of weekly
assessments levied, according to their size and custom, upon newspapers
which are members. The sum thus collected comes to about $3,000,000 a
year. It is spent partly for the hire of special wires from the
telegraph companies, and partly for the maintenance of special
news-collecting staffs. The mileage of leased wires is immense,
amounting to about 22,000 miles by day and 28,000 miles by night. Nor
does the organization, as some of its critics seem to imagine, get any
special privileges from the telegraph companies. Such privileges
belonged to its early history, when business standards were lower than
they are now.
The Associated Press has at least one member in every city of any size
in the country. That in itself insures it a good news-service; but, as
indicated above, it has in all important centres a bureau of its own.
Important events, whether fixed, like national conventions, or
fortuitous, like strikes or floods or shipwrecks, it covers more
comprehensively than any single newspaper can do. Its foreign service is
ubiquitous. It no longer depends upon its arrangement with Reuter’s, and
other foreign news-agencies: early in the present century the
intelligence thus collected was found to lack the American point of
view, and an extensive foreign service was formed, with local
headquarters in London, Paris, and other European capitals, Peking,
Tokyo, Mexico, and Havana, and with scores of correspondents all over
the world.
Enough has been said to show that its efficiency and the manner of its
organization combine to give the Associated Press a distinct savor of
monopoly. As the Sun News Bureau and other rivals have found, it cannot
be effectively competed against. Too many of the richest and most
powerful newspapers belong to it.
Is it a harmful monopoly? Its critics, as explained above, are busy
proving that it is. They urge that, being a close corporation, it
stifles trade in the selling of news, and that it is not impartial.
The first argument is based upon the following facts. Membership in the
Associated Press is naturally valuable. An Associated Press franchise to
a newspaper in New York or Chicago is worth from $50,000 to $200,000.[6]
To share such a privilege is not in human or commercial nature. One of
the first rules of the organization is, therefore, that no new newspaper
can be admitted without the consent of members within competitive
radius. Naturally, that assent is seldom given. This “power of protest”
has not been kept without a struggle. The law-suit of 1900 was due to
it. The _Chicago Inter-Ocean_ was refused admission,[7] and went to law.
The case went to the Supreme Court of Illinois, which ruled that a press
agency like the Associated Press was in the nature of a public service
and as such ought to be open to everybody. To have yielded to the
judgment would have smashed the Associated Press, so it reorganized
under the laws of New York, with the moral satisfaction of knowing that
the courts of Missouri had upheld what the Illinois court had condemned.
Its new constitution, which is that of to-day, keeps in effect the right
of protest, the only difference being that a disappointed applicant for
membership gets the not very useful consolation of being able to appeal
to the association in the slender hope that four-fifths of the members
will vote for his admission.
Footnote 6:
In the appraisal of the estate of Joseph Pulitzer in 1914, the two
Associated Press franchises held by the _New York World_, one for the
morning and one for the evening edition, were valued at $240,000
each.—ED.
Footnote 7:
This is an error which is corrected in Mr. Stone’s reply, cf. p. 124.
The practical working of the rule has undoubtedly been monopolistic; not
so much because it has rendered the Associated Press a monopoly, but
because it has rendered it the mother, potential and sometimes actual,
of countless small monopolies. On account of the size of the United
States and the diverse interests of the various sections, there is in
our country no daily press with a national circulation. Newspapers
depend primarily upon their local constituencies. In each journalistic
geographic unit, if the expression may be allowed, one or more
newspapers possess the Associated Press franchise. Such newspapers have
in the excellent and comparatively cheap Associated Press service an
instrument for monopoly hardly less valuable than a rebate-giving
railway may be to a commercial corporation. It is also alleged by some
of its enemies that the Associated Press still at times enjoins its
members against taking simultaneously the service of its rival.
It is easy to argue that, because the Associated Press is a close
corporation, it cannot be a monopoly, and that those who are really
trying to make a “news trust” of it are they who insist that it ought to
be open to all comers; but in practice the argument is a good deal of a
quibble. The facts remain that, as shown above, an effective news-agency
has to be tremendously rich; that to be tremendously rich it has to have
prosperous constituents; and that the large majority of prosperous
newspapers of the country belong to the Associated Press. In the
writer’s opinion it would be virtually impossible, as things stand, for
any of the Associated Press’s rivals to become the Associated Press’s
equal, upon either a commercial or a coöperative basis.
III
The tremendous importance of the question of the fairness of the
Associated Press service is now apparent. If it is deliberately tainted,
as the socialists and radicals aver, there is virtually no free press in
the country. The question is a very delicate one. Enemies of the
Associated Press assert in brief that its stories about industrial
troubles are colored in the interest of the employer; that its political
news shows a similar bias in favor of the plutocratic party, whatever
that may be; that, in fact, it is used as a class organ. In the
Presidential campaign of 1912, Mr. Roosevelt’s followers insisted that
the doings of their candidates were blanketed. In the recent labor
troubles [1914] in West Virginia, Michigan, and Colorado, the friends of
labor have made the same complaint of one-sidedness in the interest of
the employer.