THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE NEWSPAPER
I. THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
The newspaper has a history; but it has, likewise, a natural history.
The press, as it exists, is not, as our moralists sometimes seem to
assume, the wilful product of any little group of living men. On the
contrary, it is the outcome of a historic process in which many
individuals participated without foreseeing what the ultimate product of
their labors was to be.
The newspaper, like the modern city, is not wholly a rational product.
No one sought to make it just what it is. In spite of all the efforts of
individual men and generations of men to control it and to make it
something after their own heart, it has continued to grow and change in
its own incalculable ways.
The type of newspaper that exists is the type that has survived under
the conditions of modern life. The men who may be said to have made the
modern newspaper—James Gordon Bennett, Charles A. Dana, Joseph Pulitzer,
and William Randolph Hearst—are the men who discovered the kind of paper
that men and women would read and had the courage to publish it.
The natural history of the press is the history of this surviving
species. It is an account of the conditions under which the existing
newspaper has grown up and taken form.
A newspaper is not merely printed. It is circulated and read. Otherwise
it is not a newspaper. The struggle for existence, in the case of the
newspaper, has been a struggle for circulation. The newspaper that is
not read ceases to be an influence in the community. The power of the
press may be roughly measured by the number of people who read it.
The growth of great cities has enormously increased the size of the
reading public. Reading, which was a luxury in the country, has become a
necessity in the city. In the urban environment literacy is almost as
much a necessity as speech itself. That is one reason there are so many
foreign-language newspapers.
Mark Villchur, editor of the _Russkoye Slovo_, New York City, asked his
readers how many of them had read newspapers in the old country. He
found that out of 312 correspondents only 16 had regularly read
newspapers in Russia; 10 others from time to time read newspapers in the
Volast, the village administration center, and 12 were subscribers to
weekly magazines. In America all of them were subscribers or readers of
Russian newspapers.
This is interesting because the immigrant has had, first and last, a
profound influence on the character of our native newspapers. How to
bring the immigrant and his descendants into the circle of newspaper
readers has been one of the problems of modern journalism.
The immigrant who has, perhaps, acquired the newspaper habit from
reading a foreign-language newspaper is eventually attracted to the
native American newspapers. They are for him a window looking out into
the larger world outside the narrow circle of the immigrant community in
which he has been compelled to live. The newspapers have discovered that
even men who can perhaps read no more than the headlines in the daily
press will buy a Sunday paper to look at the pictures.
It is said that the most successful of the Hearst papers, the _New York
Evening Journal_, gains a new body of subscribers every six years.
Apparently it gets its readers mainly from immigrants. They graduate
into Mr. Hearst’s papers from the foreign-language press, and when the
sensationalism of these papers begins to pall, they acquire a taste for
some of the soberer journals. At any rate, Mr. Hearst has been a great
Americanizer.
In their efforts to make the newspaper readable to the least-instructed
reader, to find in the daily news material that would thrill the crudest
intelligence, publishers have made one important discovery. They have
found that the difference between the high-brow and the low-brow, which
once seemed so profound, is largely a difference in vocabularies. In
short, if the press can make itself intelligible to the common man, it
will have even less difficulty in being understood by the intellectual.
The character of present-day newspapers has been profoundly influenced
by this fact.
II. THE FIRST NEWSPAPERS
What is a newspaper? Many answers have been given. It is the tribune of
the people; it is the fourth estate; the Palladium of our civil
liberties, etc.
On the other hand, this same newspaper has been characterized as the
great sophist. What the popular teachers did for Athens in the period of
Socrates and Plato the press has done in modern times for the common
man.
The modern newspaper has been accused of being a business enterprise.
“Yes,” say the newspaper men “and the commodity it sells is news.” It is
the truth shop. (The editor is the philosopher turned merchant.) By
making information about our common life accessible to every individual
at less than the price of a telephone call we are to regain, it is
urged—even in the complicated life of what Graham Wallas calls the
“Great Society”—some sort of working democracy.
The advertising manager’s notion is again something different. For him
the newspaper is a medium for creating advertising values. The business
of the editor is to provide the envelope which incloses the space which
the advertising man sells. Eventually the newspaper may be conceived as
a sort of common carrier, like the railway or the post office.
The newspaper, according to the author of the _Brass Check_, is a crime.
The brass check is a symbol of prostitution. “The brass check is found
in your pay envelope every week—you who write and print and distribute
our newspapers and magazines. The brass check is the price of your
shame—you who take the fair body of truth and sell it in the market
place, who betray the virgin hopes of mankind into the loathsome brothel
of big business.”
This is the conception of a moralist and a socialist—Upton Sinclair.
Evidently the newspaper is an institution that is not yet fully
understood. What it is, or seems to be, for any one of us at any time is
determined by our differing points of view. As a matter of fact, we do
not know much about the newspaper. It has never been studied.
One reason we know so little about the newspaper is that as it exists
today it is a very recent manifestation. Besides, in the course of its
relatively brief history, it has gone through a remarkable series of
transfigurations. The press today is, however, all that it was and
something more. To understand it we must see in its historic
perspective.
The first newspapers were written or printed letters; news-letters they
were called. In the seventeenth century English country gentlemen used
to employ correspondents to write them once a week from London the
gossip of the court and of the town.
The first newspaper in America, at least the first newspaper that lasted
beyond its first issue, was the _Boston News-Letter_. It was published
by the postmaster. The village post-office has always been a public
forum, where all the affairs of the nation and the community were
discussed. It was to be expected that there, in close proximity to the
sources of intelligence, if anywhere, a newspaper would spring up. For a
long time the position of postmaster and the vocation of editor were
regarded as inseparable.
The first newspapers were simply devices for organizing gossip, and
that, to a greater or less extent, they have remained. Horace Greeley’s
advice to a friend who was about to start a country paper is as good
today as it was then.
Begin with a clear conception that the subject of deepest interest to
an average human being is himself; next to that, he is most concerned
about his neighbors. Asia and the Tongo Islands stand a long way after
these in his regard. It does seem to me that most country journals are
oblivious as to these vital truths. If you will, so soon as may be,
secure a wide awake, judicious correspondent in each village and
township of your county, some young lawyer, doctor, clerk in a store,
or assistant in a post office who will promptly send you whatever of
moment occurs in his vicinity, and will make up at least half your
journal of local matter thus collected, nobody in the county can long
do without it. Do not let a new church be organized, or new members be
added to one already existing, a farm be sold, a new house be raised,
a mill be set in motion, a store be opened, nor anything of interest
to a dozen families occur, without having the fact duly though briefly
chronicled in your columns. If a farmer cuts a big tree, or grows a
mammoth beet, or harvests a bounteous yield of wheat or corn, set
forth the fact as concisely and unexceptionally as possible.
What Greeley advises friend Fletcher to do with his country paper the
city editor of every newspaper, as far as it humanly is possible, is
still trying to do. It is not practicable, in a city of 3,000,000 and
more, to mention everybody’s name. For that reason attention is focused
upon a few prominent figures. In a city where everything happens every
day, it is not possible to record every petty incident, every variation
from the routine of the city life. It is possible, however, to select
certain particularly picturesque or romantic incidents and treat them
symbolically, for their human interest rather than their individual and
personal significance. In this way news ceases to be wholly personal and
assumes the form of art. It ceases to be the record of the doings of
individual men and women and becomes an impersonal account of manners
and life.
The motive, conscious or unconscious, of the writers and of the press in
all this is to reproduce, as far as possible, in the city the conditions
of life in the village. In the village everyone knew everyone else.
Everyone called everyone by his first name. The village was democratic.
We are a nation of villagers. Our institutions are fundamentally village
institutions. In the village, gossip and public opinion were the main
sources of social control.
“I would rather live,” said Thomas Jefferson, “in a country with
newspapers and without a government than in a country with a government
and without newspapers.”
If public opinion is to continue to govern in the future as it has in
the past, if we propose to maintain a democracy as Jefferson conceived
it, the newspaper must continue to tell us about ourselves. We must
somehow learn to know our community and its affairs in the same intimate
way in which we knew them in the country villages. The newspaper must
continue to be the printed diary of the home community. Marriages and
divorce, crime and politics, must continue to make up the main body of
our news. Local news is the very stuff that democracy is made of.
But that, according to Walter Lippmann, is just the difficulty. “As
social truth is organized today”, so he says, “the press is not
constituted to furnish from one edition to the next the amount of
knowledge which the democratic theory of public opinion demands.... When
we expect it to supply such a body of truth, we employ a misleading
standard of judgment. We misunderstand the limited nature of news, the
illimitable complexity of society; we overestimate our own endurance,
public spirit, and all-round competence. We suppose an appetite for
uninteresting truths which is not discovered by any honest analysis of
our own tastes.... Unconsciously the theory sets up the single reader as
theoretically incompetent, and puts upon the press the burden of
accomplishing whatever representative government, industrial
organization, and diplomacy have failed to accomplish. Acting upon
everybody for thirty minutes in twenty-four hours, the press is asked to
create a mystical force called ‘public opinion’ that will take up the
slack in public institutions.”[55]
It is evident that a newspaper cannot do for a community of 1,000,000
inhabitants what the village did spontaneously for itself through the
medium of gossip and personal contact. Nevertheless the efforts of the
newspaper to achieve this impossible result are an interesting chapter
in the history of politics as well as of the press.
III. THE PARTY PAPERS
The first newspapers, the news-letters, were not party papers. Political
journals began to supersede the news-letters at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. The news with which the reading public was most
concerned at that time was the reports of the debates in Parliament.
Even before the rise of the party press certain prying and curious
individuals had made a business of visiting the Strangers’ Gallery
during the sessions of the House of Commons in order to write up from
memory, or from notes taken down surreptitiously, accounts of the
speeches and discussions during an important debate. At this time all
the deliberations of Parliament were secret, and it was not until 100
years later that the right of reporters to attend the sessions of the
House of Commons and record its proceedings was officially recognized.
In the meantime reporters were compelled to resort to all sorts of
subterfuges and indirect methods in order to get information. It is upon
this information, gathered in this way, that much of our present history
of English politics is based.
One of the most distinguished of these parliamentary reporters was
Samuel Johnson. One evening in 1770, it is reported, Johnson, with a
number of other celebrities, was taking dinner in London. Conversation
turned upon parliamentary oratory. Someone spoke of a famous speech
delivered in the House of Commons by the elder Pitt in 1741. Someone
else, amid the applause of the company, quoted a passage from this
speech as an illustration of an orator who had surpassed in feeling and
beauty of language the finest efforts of the orators of antiquity. Then
Johnson, who up to that point had taken no part in the discussion, spoke
up. “I wrote that speech,” he said, “in a garret in Exeter Street.”
The guests were struck with amazement. He was asked, “How could it have
been written by you, sir?”
“Sir,” said Johnson, “I wrote it in Exeter Street. I never was in the
gallery of the House of Commons but once. Cave had interest with the
doorkeepers; he and the persons employed under him got admittance; they
brought away the subjects of discussion, the names of the speakers, the
side they took, and the order in which they rose, together with notes of
the various arguments adduced in the course of the debate. The whole was
afterward communicated to me, and I composed the speeches in the form
they now have in the “Parliamentary Debates,” for the speeches of that
period are all printed from Cave’s magazine.”[56]
Someone undertook to praise Johnson’s impartiality, saying that in his
reports he seems to have dealt out reason and eloquence with an equal
hand to both political parties. “That is not quite true,” was Johnson’s
reply. “I saved appearances tolerably well; but I took care that the
Whig dogs should not have the best of it.”
This speech of William Pitt, composed by Johnson in Exeter Street, has
long held a place in school books and collections of oratory. It is the
famous speech in which Pitt answered the accusation of the “atrocious
crime of being a young man.”
Perhaps Pitt thought he delivered that speech. At any rate there is no
evidence that he repudiated it. I might add that Pitt, if he was the
first, was not the last statesman who is indebted to the reporters for
his reputation as an orator.
The significant thing about this incident is that it illustrates the
manner in which, under the influence of the parliamentary reporters,
something like a constitutional change was effected in the character of
parliamentary government. As soon as the parliamentary orators
discovered that they were addressing not only their fellow-members but,
indirectly, through the medium of the press, the people of England, the
whole character of parliamentary proceedings changed. Through the
newspapers the whole country was enabled to participate in the
discussions by which issues were framed and legislation was enacted.
Meanwhile, the newspapers themselves, under the influence of the very
discussions which they themselves instigated, had become party organs.
Whereupon the party press ceased to be a mere chronicle of small gossip
and came to be what we know as a “journal of opinion.” The editor,
meanwhile, no longer a mere newsmonger and humble recorder of events,
found himself the mouthpiece of a political party, playing a rôle in
politics.
During the long struggle for freedom of thought and speech in the
seventeenth century, popular discontent had found literary expression in
the pamphlet and broadside. The most notable of these pamphleteers was
John Milton, and the most famous of these pamphlets was Milton’s
_Areopagitica: A Defence of the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_,
published in 1646; “the noblest piece of English prose” it has been
called by Henry Morley.
When the newspaper became, in the early part of the eighteenth century,
a journal of opinion, it took over the function of the political
pamphlet. The opinion that had formerly found expression in a broadside
was now expressed in the form of editorial leading articles. The
editorial writer, who had inherited the mantle of the pamphleteer, now
assumed the rôle of a tribune of the people.
It was in this rôle, as the protagonist of the popular cause, that the
newspaper captured the imagination of our intelligentsia.
When we read in the political literature of a generation ago references
to “the power of the press,” it is the editor and the editorial, rather
than the reporter and the news, of which these writers are thinking.
Even now when we speak of the liberty of the press it is the liberty to
express an opinion, rather than the liberty to investigate and publish
the facts, which is meant. The activities of the reporter, upon which
any opinion that is relevant to existing conditions is likely to be
based, are more often regarded as an infringement of our personal rights
than an exercise of our political liberties.
The liberty of the press for which Milton wrote the _Areopagitica_ was
the liberty to express an opinion. “Give me the liberty,” he said, “to
know, to alter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all
liberties.”
Carlyle was thinking of the editorial writer and not of the reporter
when he wrote: “Great is journalism! Is not every able editor a ruler of
the world, being a persuader of it?”
The United States inherited its parliamentary government, its party
system, and its newspapers from England. The rôle which the political
journals played in English politics was re-enacted in America. The
American newspapers were a power with which the British government had
to reckon in the struggle of the colonies for independence. After the
British took possession of New York City, Ambrose Serle, who had
undertaken to publish the _New York Gazette_ in the interest of the
invaders, wrote as follows to Lord Dartmouth in regard to the
patriot-party press.
Among other engines which have raised the present commotion, next to
the indecent harangues of the preachers, none has had a more extensive
or stronger influence than the newspapers of the respective colonies.
One is astonished to see with what avidity they are sought after, and
how implicitly they are believed by the great bulk of the people.[57]
It was nearly a century later, in the person of Horace Greeley, editor
of the _New York Tribune_ during the anti-slavery struggle, that the
journal of opinion reached its highest expression in America. America
has had better newspaper men than Horace Greeley, although none,
perhaps, whose opinions exercised so wide an influence. “The _New York
Tribune_,” says Charles Francis Adams, “during those years was the
greatest educational factor, economically and morally, this country has
ever known.”
IV. THE INDEPENDENT PRESS
The power of the press, as represented by the older type of newspaper,
rested in the final analysis upon the ability of its editors to create a
party and lead it. The journal of opinion is, by its very nature,
predestined to become the organ of a party, or at any rate the
mouthpiece of a school.
So long as political activities were organized on the basis of village
life, the party system worked. In the village community, where life was
and still is relatively fixed and settled, custom and tradition provided
for most of the exigencies of daily life. In such a community, where
every deviation from the ordinary routine of life was a matter of
observation and comment and all the facts were known, the political
process was, at any rate, a comparatively simple matter. Under these
circumstances the work of the newspaper, as a gatherer and interpreter
of the news, was but an extension of the function which was otherwise
performed spontaneously by the community itself through the medium of
personal contact and gossip.
But as our cities expanded and life grew more complicated, it turned out
that political parties, in order to survive, must have a permanent
organization. Eventually party morale became a greater value than the
issues for the determination of which the parties are supposed to exist.
The effect upon the party press was to reduce it to the position of a
sort of house organ of the party organization. It no longer knew from
day to day just what its opinions were. The editor was no longer a free
agent. It was of this subjugated _Tribune_ that Walt Whitman was
thinking when he coined the phrase, “the kept editor.”
When, finally, the exigencies of party politics, under conditions of
life in great cities, developed the political machine, some of the more
independent newspapers revolted. This was the origin of the independent
press. It was one of the independent papers, the _New York Times_ of
that day, that first assailed and eventually overthrew, with the aid of
a cartoonist, Thomas Nast, the Tweed Ring, the first and most outrageous
of the political machines that party politics in this country has so far
produced. Presently there was a general breaking away, particularly by
the metropolitan, as distinguished from the country, papers, from the
domination of the parties. Party loyalty ceased to be a virtue.
Meanwhile a new political power had arisen and found expression in the
press. This power was embodied, not in the editorial and the editorial
writer, however, but in the news and the reporter. In spite of the fact
that the prestige of the press, up to this time, had rested on its rôle
of champion of popular causes, the older newspapers were not read by the
masses of the people.
The ordinary man is more interested in news than he is in political
doctrines or abstract ideas. H. L. Mencken has called attention to the
fact that the average man does not understand more than two-thirds of
what “comes from the lips of the average political orator or clergyman.”
The ordinary man, as the _Saturday Evening Post_ has discovered, thinks
in concrete images, anecdotes, pictures, and parables. He finds it
difficult and tiresome to read a long article unless it is dramatized
and takes the form of what newspapers call a “story.” “News story” and
“fiction story” are two forms of modern literature that are now so like
one another that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish them.
The _Saturday Evening Post_, for example, writes the news in the form of
fiction, while the daily press frequently writes fiction in the form of
news. When it is not possible to present ideas in the concrete, dramatic
form of a story, the ordinary reader likes them stated in a short
paragraph.
It is said that James E. Scripps, founder of the _Detroit News_, which
specializes in afternoon papers in secondary cities, built up his whole
string of papers upon the basis of the very simple psychological
principle that the ordinary man will read newspaper items in the inverse
ratio to their length. His method of measuring the efficiency of his
newspapers, therefore, was to count the number of items they contained.
The paper that had the largest number of items was the best paper. This
is just the reverse of Mr. Hearst’s methods; his papers have fewer items
than other papers.
The old-time journalist was inclined to have a contempt for news. News
was for him simply material upon which to base an editorial. If God let
things happen that were not in accordance with his conception of the
fitness of things, he simply suppressed them. He refused to take the
responsibility of letting his readers learn about things that he knew
ought not to have happened.
Manton Marble, who was editor of the _New York World_ before Joseph
Pulitzer took it and made it yellow, used to say there were not 18,000
people in New York City to whom a well-conducted newspaper could offer
to address itself. If the circulation of the paper went above that
figure he thought there must be something wrong with the paper. Before
Mr. Pulitzer took it over, the circulation had actually sunk to 10,000.
The old _New York World_ preserved the type of the old conservative
high-brow paper down to the eighties. By that time in the larger cities
the political independent newspapers had become the accepted type of
journal.
Long before the rise of what was later to be called the independent
press, there had appeared in New York two journals that were the
forerunners of the present-day newspapers. In 1883 Benjamin Day, with a
few associates, started a paper for “mechanics and the masses
generally.” The price of this paper was one cent, but the publishers
expected to make up by larger circulation and by advertising the loss
sustained by the lower price. At that time most of the other New York
papers were selling for six cents.
It was, however, the enterprise of James Gordon Bennett, the founder of
the _New York Herald_, who set the pace in the new form of journalism.
In fact, as Will Irwin says in the only adequate account that has ever
been written of the American newspaper, “James Gordon Bennett invented
news as we know it.” Bennett, like some others who have contributed most
to modern journalism, was a disillusioned man, and for that very reason,
perhaps, a ruthless and cynical one. “I renounce all so-called
principles,” he said in his announcement of the new enterprise. By
principles he meant, perhaps, editorial policies. His salutatory was at
the same time a valedictory. In announcing the purposes of the new
journalism he bade adieu to the aims and aspirations of the old.
Henceforth the editors were to be news gatherers and the newspaper
staked its future on its ability to gather, print, and circulate news.
What is news? There have been many answers. I think it was Charles A.
Dana who said, “News is anything that will make people talk.” This
definition suggests at any rate the aims of the new journalism. Its
purpose was to print anything that would make people talk and think, for
most people do not think until they begin to talk. Thought is after all
a sort of internal conversation.
A later version of the same definition is this: “News is anything that
makes the reader say, ‘Gee Whiz!’” This is the definition of Arthur
McEwen, one of the men who helped make the Hearst papers. It is at the
same time the definition of the latest and most successful type of
journal, the yellow press. Not all successful journals are, to be sure,
yellow. The _New York Times_, for example, is not. But the _New York
Times_ is not yet a type.
V. THE YELLOW PRESS
There seem to be, as Walter Lippmann has observed, two types of
newspaper readers. “Those who find their own lives interesting” and
“those who find their own lives dull, and wish to live a more thrilling
existence.” There are, correspondingly, two types of newspapers: papers
edited on the principle that readers are mainly interested in reading
about themselves, and papers edited upon the principle that their
readers, seeking some escape from the dull routine of their own lives,
are interested in anything which offers them what the psychoanalysts
call “a flight from reality.”
The provincial newspaper with its record of weddings, funerals, lodge
meetings, oyster suppers, and all the small patter of the small town
represents the first type. The metropolitan press, with its persistent
search in the drab episodes of city life for the romantic and the
picturesque, its dramatic accounts of vice and crime, and its unflagging
interest in the movements of personages of a more or less mythical high
society represents the latter type.
Up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, that is to say, up to
about 1880, most newspapers, even in our large cities, were conducted on
the theory that the best news a paper can print is a death notice or
marriage announcement.
Up to that time the newspapers had not yet begun to break into the
tenements, and most people who supported a newspaper lived in homes
rather than in apartments. The telephone had not yet come into popular
use; the automobile was unheard of; the city was still a mosaic of
little neighborhoods, like our foreign-language communities of the
present day, in which the city dweller still maintained something of the
provincialism of the small town.
Great changes, however, were impending. The independent press was
already driving some of the old-time newspapers to the wall. There were
more newspapers than either the public or the advertisers were willing
to support. It was at this time and under these circumstances that
newspaper men discovered that circulation could be greatly increased by
making literature out of the news. Charles A. Dana had already done this
in the _Sun_, but there still was a large section of the population for
whom the clever writing of Mr. Dana’s young men was caviar.
The yellow press grew up in an attempt to capture for the newspaper a
public whose only literature was the family story paper or the cheap
novel. The problem was to write the news in such a way that it would
appeal to the fundamental passions. The formula was: love and romance
for the women; sport and politics for the men.
The effect of the application of this formula was enormously to increase
the circulation of the newspapers, not only in the great cities, but all
over the country. These changes were brought about mainly under the
leadership of two men, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.
Pulitzer had discovered, while he was editor of the _St. Louis Post
Dispatch_, that the way to fight popular causes was not to advocate them
on the editorial page but to advertise them—write them up—in the news
columns. It was Pulitzer who invented muckraking. It was this kind of
journalism which enabled Pulitzer, within a period of six years, to
convert the old _New York World_, which was dying of inanition when he
took it, into the most talked about, if not the most widely circulated,
paper in New York City.
Meanwhile, out in San Francisco Mr. Hearst had succeeded in galvanizing
the old moribund _Examiner_ into new life, making it the most widely
read newspaper on the Pacific Coast.
It was under Mr. Hearst that the “sob sister” came into vogue. This is
her story, as Will Irwin told it in _Collier’s_, February 18, 1911:
Chamberlain (managing editor of the _Examiner_) conceived the idea
that the city hospital was badly managed. He picked a little slip of a
girl from among his cub reporters and assigned her to the
investigation. She invented her own method; she “fainted” on the
street, and was carried to the hospital for treatment. She turned out
a story “with a sob for the unfortunate in every line.” That was the
professional beginning of “Annie Laurie” or Winifred Black, and of a
departure in newspaper writing. For she came to have many imitators,
but none other could ever so well stir up the primitive emotions of
sympathy and pity; she was a “sob squad” all by herself. Indeed, in
the discovery of this sympathetic “woman writing,” Hearst broke
through the crust into the thing he was after.
With the experience that he had gained on the _Examiner_ in San
Francisco and with a large fortune that he had inherited from his
father, Hearst invaded New York in 1896. It was not until he reached New
York and started out to make the _New York Journal_ the most widely read
paper in the United States that yellow journalism reached the limit.
Pulitzer’s principal contribution to yellow journalism was muckraking,
Hearst’s was mainly “jazz.” The newspaper had been conducted up to this
time upon the theory that its business was to instruct. Hearst rejected
that conception. His appeal was frankly not to the intellect but to the
heart. The newspaper was for him first and last a form of entertainment.
It was about the time the yellow press was engaged in extending the
newspaper habit to the masses of people, including women and
immigrants—who up to this time did not read newspapers—that the
department store was beginning to attract attention.
The department store is, in a sense, a creation of the Sunday newspaper.
At any rate, without the advertising that the Sunday newspaper was able
to give it, the department store would hardly have gained the vogue it
has today. It is important in this connection that women read the Sunday
paper before they did the dailies. The women are buyers.
It was in the Sunday newspaper that the methods of yellow journalism
were first completely worked out. The men who are chiefly responsible
for them are Morrill Goddard and Arthur Brisbane. It was Goddard’s
ambition to make a paper that a man would buy even if he could not read
it. He went in for pictures, first in black and white and then in
colors. It was in the _Sunday World_ that the first seven-column cut was
printed. Then followed the comic section and all the other devices with
which we are familiar for compelling a dull-minded and reluctant public
to read.
After these methods had been worked out in the Sunday paper, they were
introduced into the daily. The final triumph of the yellow journal was
Brisbane’s “Heart-to-Heart Editorials”—a column of predigested
platitudes and moralizing, with half-page diagrams and illustrations to
re-enforce the text. Nowhere has Herbert Spencer’s maxim that the art of
writing is economy of attention been so completely realized.
Walter Lippmann, in his recent study of public opinion, calls attention
to the fact that no sociologist has ever written a book on news
gathering. It strikes him as very strange that an institution like the
press, from which we expect so much and get so little of what we expect,
should not have been the subject of a more disinterested study.
It is true that we have not studied the newspaper as the biologists have
studied, for example, the potato bug. But the same may be said of every
political institution, and the newspaper is a political institution
quite as much as Tammany Hall or the board of aldermen are political
institutions. We have grumbled about our political _institutions_,
sometimes we have sought by certain magical legislative devices to
exercise and expel the evil spirits that possessed them. On the whole we
have been inclined to regard them as sacred and to treat any fundamental
criticism of them as a sort of blasphemy. If things went wrong, it was
not the institutions, but the persons we elected to conduct them, and an
incorrigible human nature, who were at fault.
What then is the remedy for the existing condition of the newspapers?
There is no remedy. Humanly speaking, the present newspapers are about
as good as they can be. If the newspapers are to be improved, it will
come through the education of the people and the organization of
political information and intelligence. As Mr. Lippmann well says, “the
number of social phenomena which are now recorded is small, the
instruments of analysis are very crude, and the concepts often vague and
uncriticized.” We must improve our records and that is a serious task.
But first of all we must learn to look at political and social life
objectively and cease to think of it wholly in moral terms! In that case
we shall have less news, but better newspapers.
The real reason that the ordinary newspaper accounts of the incidents of
ordinary life are so sensational is because we know so little of human
life that we are not able to interpret the events of life when we read
them. It is safe to say that when anything shocks us, we do not
understand it.
ROBERT E. PARK