The end of the article which I write is always cut off, and,
unfortunately, I belong to that lower class of animals in whom the tail
is important. It is not anybody’s fault but my own; it arises from the
fact that I take such a long time to get to the point. Somebody, the
other day, very reasonably complained of my being employed to write
prefaces. He was perfectly right, for I always write a preface to the
preface, and then I am stopped; also quite justifiably.
In my last article I said that I favoured three things—first, the legal
punishment of deliberately false information; secondly, a distinction,
in the matter of reported immorality, between those sins which any
healthy man can see in himself and those which he had better not see
anywhere; and thirdly, an absolute insistence in the great majority of
cases upon the signing of articles. It was at this point that I was cut
short, I will not say by the law of space, but rather by my own
lawlessness in the matter of space. In any case, there is something
more that ought to be said.
It would be an exaggeration to say that I hope some day to see an
anonymous article counted as dishonourable as an anonymous letter. For
some time to come, the idea of the leading article, expressing the
policy of the whole paper, must necessarily remain legitimate; at any
rate, we have all written such leading articles, and should never think
the worse of any one for writing one. But I should certainly say that
writing anonymously ought to have some definite excuse, such as that of
the leading article. Writing anonymously ought to be the exception;
writing a signed article ought to be the rule. And anonymity ought to
be not only an exception, but an accidental exception; a man ought
always to be ready to say what anonymous article he had written. The
journalistic habit of counting it something sacred to keep secret the
origin of an article is simply part of the conspiracy which seeks to
put us who are journalists in the position of a much worse sort of
Jesuits or Freemasons.
As has often been said, anonymity would be all very well if one could
for a moment imagine that it was established from good motives.
Suppose, for instance, that we were all quite certain that the men on
the _Thunderer_ newspaper were a band of brave young idealists who were
so eager to overthrow Socialism, Municipal and National, that they did
not care to which of them especially was given the glory of striking it
down. Unfortunately, however, we do not believe this. What we believe,
or, rather, what we know, is that the attack on Socialism in the
_Thunderer_ arises from a chaos of inconsistent and mostly evil
motives, any one of which would lose simply by being named. A
jerry-builder whose houses have been condemned writes anonymously and
becomes the _Thunderer_. A Socialist who has quarrelled with the other
Socialists writes anonymously, and he becomes the _Thunderer_. A
monopolist who has lost his monopoly, and a demagogue who has lost his
mob, can both write anonymously and become the same newspaper. It is
quite true that there is a young and beautiful fanaticism in which men
do not care to reveal their names. But there is a more elderly and a
much more common excitement in which men do not dare to reveal them.
Then there is another rule for making journalism honest on which I
should like to insist absolutely. I should like it to be a fixed thing
that the name of the proprietor as well as the editor should be printed
upon every paper. If the paper is owned by shareholders, let there be a
list of shareholders. If (as is far more common in this singularly
undemocratic age) it is owned by one man, let that one man’s name be
printed on the paper, if possible in large red letters. Then, if there
are any obvious interests being served, we shall know that they are
being served. My friends in Manchester are in a terrible state of
excitement about the power of brewers and the dangers of admitting them
to public office. But at least, if a man has controlled politics
through beer, people generally know it: the subject of beer is too
fascinating for any one to miss such personal peculiarities. But a man
may control politics through journalism, and no ordinary English
citizen know that he is controlling them at all. Again and again in the
lists of Birthday Honours you and I have seen some Mr. Robinson
suddenly elevated to the Peerage without any apparent reason. Even the
Society papers (which we read with avidity) could tell us nothing about
him except that he was a sportsman or a kind landlord, or interested in
the breeding of badgers. Now I should like the name of that Mr.
Robinson to be already familiar to the British public. I should like
them to know already the public services for which they have to thank
him. I should like them to have seen the name already on the outside of
that organ of public opinion called _Tootsie’s Tips_, or _The Boy
Blackmailer_, or _Nosey Knows_, that bright little financial paper
which did so much for the Empire and which so narrowly escaped a
criminal prosecution. If they had seen it thus, they would estimate
more truly and tenderly the full value of the statement in the Society
paper that he is a true gentleman and a sound Churchman.
Finally, it should be practically imposed by custom (it so happens that
it could not possibly be imposed by law) that letters of definite and
practical complaint should be necessarily inserted by any editor in any
paper. Editors have grown very much too lax in this respect. The old
editor used dimly to regard himself as an unofficial public servant for
the transmitting of public news. If he suppressed anything, he was
supposed to have some special reason for doing so; as that the material
was actually libellous or literally indecent. But the modern editor
regards himself far too much as a kind of original artist, who can
select and suppress facts with the arbitrary ease of a poet or a
caricaturist. He “makes up” the paper as man “makes up” a fairy tale,
he considers his newspaper solely as a work of art, meant to give
pleasure, not to give news. He puts in this one letter because he
thinks it clever. He puts in these three or four letters because he
thinks them silly. He suppresses this article because he thinks it
wrong. He suppresses this other and more dangerous article because he
thinks it right. The old idea that he is simply a mode of the
expression of the public, an “organ” of opinion, seems to have
entirely vanished from his mind. To-day the editor is not only the
organ, but the man who plays on the organ. For in all our modern
movements we move away from Democracy.
This is the whole danger of our time. There is a difference between the
oppression which has been too common in the past and the oppression
which seems only too probable in the future. Oppression in the past,
has commonly been an individual matter. The oppressors were as simple
as the oppressed, and as lonely. The aristocrat sometimes hated his
inferiors; he always hated his equals. The plutocrat was an
individualist. But in our time even the plutocrat has become a
Socialist. They have science and combination, and may easily inaugurate
a much greater tyranny than the world has ever seen.