Volume 1, Number 1, of the first American newspaper was published in
Boston on September 25, 1690. It was called _Publick Occurrences_.
The second issue did not appear because the Governor and Council
suppressed it. They found that Benjamin Harris, the editor, had printed
“reflections of a very high nature.”[1] Even to-day some of his
reflections seem very high indeed. In his prospectus he had written:
“That something may be done toward the Curing, or at least the
Charming of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us,
wherefore nothing shall be entered, but what we have reason
to believe is true, repairing to the best fountains for our
Information. And when there appears any material mistake in
anything that is collected, it shall be corrected in the next.
Moreover, the Publisher of these Occurrences is willing to engage,
that whereas, there are many False Reports, maliciously made, and
spread among us, if any well-minded person will be at the pains
to trace any such false Report, so far as to find out and Convict
the First Raiser of it, he will in this Paper (unless just Advice
be given to the contrary) expose the Name of such Person, as A
malicious Raiser of a false Report. It is suppos’d that none will
dislike this Proposal, but such as intend to be guilty of so
villainous a Crime.”
Everywhere to-day men are conscious that somehow they must deal with
questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared
them to understand. Increasingly they know that they cannot understand
them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly
they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are
wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the
manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise. For in
an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in
journalism.
I do not agree with those who think that the sole cause is corruption.
There is plenty of corruption, to be sure, moneyed control, caste
pressure, financial and social bribery, ribbons, dinner parties, clubs,
petty politics. The speculators in Russian rubles who lied on the Paris
Bourse about the capture of Petrograd are not the only example of their
species. And yet corruption does not explain the condition of modern
journalism.
Mr. Franklin P. Adams wrote recently: “Now there is much
pettiness--and almost incredible stupidity and ignorance--in the
so-called free press; but it is the pettiness, etc., common to the
so-called human race--a pettiness found in musicians, steamfitters,
landlords, poets, and waiters. And when Miss Lowell [who had made the
usual aristocratic complaint] speaks of the incurable desire in all
American newspapers to make fun of everything in season and out, we
quarrel again. There is an incurable desire in American newspapers to
take things much more seriously than they deserve. Does Miss Lowell
read the ponderous news from Washington? Does she read the society
news? Does she, we wonder, read the newspapers?”
Mr. Adams does read them, and when he writes that the newspapers
take things much more seriously than they deserve, he has, as the
mayor’s wife remarked to the queen, said a mouthful. Since the war,
especially, editors have come to believe that their highest duty is not
to report but to instruct, not to print news but to save civilization,
not to publish what Benjamin Harris calls “the Circumstances of
Publique Affairs, both abroad and at home,” but to keep the nation on
the straight and narrow path. Like the Kings of England, they have
elected themselves Defenders of the Faith. “For five years,” says Mr.
Cobb of the _New York World_, “there has been no free play of public
opinion in the world. Confronted by the inexorable necessities of war,
governments conscripted public opinion.... They goose-stepped it. They
taught it to stand at attention and salute.... It sometimes seems that
after the armistice was signed, millions of Americans must have taken a
vow that they would never again do any thinking for themselves. They
were willing to die for their country, but not willing to think for
it.” That minority, which is proudly prepared to think for it, and not
only prepared, but cocksure that it alone knows how to think for it,
has adopted the theory that the public should know what is good for it.
The work of reporters has thus become confused with the work of
preachers, revivalists, prophets and agitators. The current theory of
American newspaperdom is that an abstraction like the truth and a grace
like fairness must be sacrificed whenever anyone thinks the necessities
of civilization require the sacrifice. To Archbishop Whately’s dictum
that it matters greatly whether you put truth in the first place or
the second, the candid expounder of modern journalism would reply that
he put truth second to what he conceived to be the national interest.
Judged simply by their product, men like Mr. Ochs or Viscount
Northcliffe believe that their respective nations will perish and
civilization decay unless their idea of what is patriotic is permitted
to temper the curiosity of their readers.
They believe that edification is more important than veracity. They
believe it profoundly, violently, relentlessly. They preen themselves
upon it. To patriotism, as they define it from day to day, all other
considerations must yield. That is their pride. And yet what is this
but one more among myriad examples of the doctrine that the end
justifies the means. A more insidiously misleading rule of conduct was,
I believe, never devised among men. It was a plausible rule as long as
men believed that an omniscient and benevolent Providence taught them
what end to seek. But now that men are critically aware of how their
purposes are special to their age, their locality, their interests, and
their limited knowledge, it is blazing arrogance to sacrifice hard-won
standards of credibility to some special purpose. It is nothing but
the doctrine that I want what I want when I want it. Its monuments are
the Inquisition and the invasion of Belgium. It is the reason given
for almost every act of unreason, the law invoked whenever lawlessness
justifies itself. At bottom it is nothing but the anarchical nature of
man imperiously hacking its way through.
Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited from
high places, the most immoral act the immorality of a government, so
the most destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propaganda by
those whose profession it is to report the news. The news columns are
common carriers. When those who control them arrogate to themselves
the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported
and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable. Public opinion is
blockaded. For when a people can no longer confidently repair ‘to
the best fountains for their information,’ then anyone’s guess and
anyone’s rumor, each man’s hope and each man’s whim becomes the basis
of government. All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged
is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news.
Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and
ultimate disaster, must come to any people which is denied an assured
access to the facts. No one can manage anything on pap. Neither can a
people.
Statesmen may devise policies; they will end in futility, as so
many have recently ended, if the propagandists and censors can put
a painted screen where there should be a window to the world. Few
episodes in recent history are more poignant than that of the British
Prime Minister, sitting at the breakfast table with that morning’s
paper before him protesting that he cannot do the sensible thing in
regard to Russia because a powerful newspaper proprietor has drugged
the public. That incident is a photograph of the supreme danger which
confronts popular government. All other dangers are contingent upon it,
for the news is the chief source of the opinion by which government
now proceeds. So long as there is interposed between the ordinary
citizen and the facts a news organization determining by entirely
private and unexamined standards, no matter how lofty, what he shall
know, and hence what he shall believe, no one will be able to say that
the substance of democratic government is secure. The theory of our
constitution, says Mr. Justice Holmes, is that truth is the only ground
upon which men’s wishes safely can be carried out.[2] In so far as
those who purvey the news make of their own beliefs a higher law than
truth, they are attacking the foundations of our constitutional system.
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and
shame the devil.
That I have few illusions as to the difficulty of truthful reporting
anyone can see who reads these pages. If truthfulness were simply a
matter of sincerity the future would be rather simple. But the modern
news problem is not solely a question of the newspaperman’s morals. It
is, as I have tried to show in what follows, the intricate result of
a civilization too extensive for any man’s personal observation. As
the problem is manifold, so must be the remedy. There is no panacea.
But however puzzling the matter may be, there are some things that
anyone may assert about it, and assert without fear of contradiction.
They are that there _is_ a problem of the news which is of absolutely
basic importance to the survival of popular government, and that the
importance of that problem is not vividly realized nor sufficiently
considered.
In a few generations it will seem ludicrous to historians that a people
professing government by the will of the people should have made no
serious effort to guarantee the news without which a governing opinion
cannot exist. “Is it possible,” they will ask, “that at the beginning
of the Twentieth Century nations calling themselves democracies were
content to act on what happened to drift across their doorsteps; that
apart from a few sporadic exposures and outcries they made no plans to
bring these common carriers under social control; that they provided
no genuine training schools for the men upon whose sagacity they were
dependent; above all that their political scientists went on year after
year writing and lecturing about government without producing one, one
single, significant study of the process of public opinion?” And then
they will recall the centuries in which the Church enjoyed immunity
from criticism, and perhaps they will insist that the news structure of
secular society was not seriously examined for analogous reasons.
When they search into the personal records they will find that among
journalists, as among the clergy, institutionalism had induced the
usual prudence. I have made no criticism in this book which is not the
shoptalk of reporters and editors. But only rarely do newspapermen take
the general public into their confidence. They will have to sooner or
later. It is not enough for them to struggle against great odds, as
many of them are doing, wearing out their souls to do a particular
assignment well. The philosophy of the work itself needs to be
discussed; the news about the news needs to be told. For the news about
the government of the news structure touches the center of all modern
government.
They need not be much concerned if leathery-minded individuals ask What
is Truth of all who plead for the effort of truth in modern journalism.
Jesting Pilate asked the same question, and he also would not stay
for an answer. No doubt an organon of news reporting must wait upon
the development of psychology and political science. But resistance
to the inertias of the profession, heresy to the institution, and the
willingness to be fired rather than write what you do not believe,
these wait on nothing but personal courage. And without the assistance
which they will bring from within the profession itself, democracy
through it will deal with the problem somehow, will deal with it badly.
The essays which follow are an attempt to describe the character of the
problem, and to indicate headings under which it may be found useful to
look for remedies.
Footnotes:
[1] “History of American Journalism,” James Melvin Lee, Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1917, p. 10.
[2] Supreme Court of the United States, No. 316, October term, 1919,
Jacob Abrams et al., Plaintiffs in Error vs. the United States.