THE JOURNALIST
I am dealing here with the English journalist, because in my opinion,
after the English sportsman and the English man of business, there is
nothing under the sun so wonderfully English and so fearfully foolish.
The elegant and austere writer who gave us _The Unspeakable Scot_ has
said much which he no doubt hoped would lead people to believe that
the British Press was entirely in the hands of Scotsmen, and that this
accounted at once for its dulness and its continual advertisement of
Scottish virtues. For my own part, I have no hesitation in asserting
that Mr. Crosland's view of the situation is quite a mistaken one.
In any case, it is obvious that, even if Fleet Street be, as Mr.
Crosland suggests, eaten up with louts from over the Border, the
English journalist is not yet wholly extinct, and somewhere in the land
the remnant of him stands valiantly to its guns. It is well known,
however, that, as a fact, the remnant very largely outnumbers its
hated rival, the proportion of Scots to the proportion of Englishmen
on the staffs of most newspapers being probably no higher than as one
is to three. So that for the stodginess and flat-footedness of the
English newspaper--the epithets are Mr. Crosland's own--the Englishman
is at least equally to blame with the Scot. Mr. Crosland's main
complaint against the newspaper press of his country is that it lacks
brilliance. So far as I am aware, it has never before been asserted
that the function of a newspaper is to be brilliant. News is news all
over the world. To write brilliantly of a dog-fight or of the suicide
of a defaulting clerk may be Mr. Crosland's ambition in life, but
most persons possessing such an ambition would transfer their finical
attentions from the field of journalism to that of belles-lettres. No
doubt, if Mr. Crosland had his way, the morning papers, in which the
soul of the average Englishman so delighteth, would be published from
the Bodley Head or at the Sign of the Unicorn, or haply at Mr. Grant
Richards's.
It is not my intention, however, to enter into a sort of ten nights'
discussion with Mr. Crosland. He has had his say and taken the whipping
he deserved. My business is with the English journalist; and while I
shall not descend to personalities in dealing with him, I hope to show
that his brilliance and liveliness and smartness, though much vaunted,
are neither a boon nor a blessing either to journalism as a force or
to society at large. I think that it may be fairly set down for a fact
that the fine flower and consummate expression of English journalism
is the halfpenny newspaper. At any rate, nobody would pretend to find
in the halfpenny newspaper the sententious dulness and flat-footedness
which are supposed to characterise the journalistic work of the Scot.
The smartness of the halfpenny press is indeed not even American.
There is but one epithet for it, and that is English. Broadly speaking,
its appeal is directly and exclusively to the bathotic. In England
the bathotic has always had the majority in its grip. The majority
notoriously has no mind. It is a thing of one emotion, an instrument
of one stop. On that stop--the bathotic stop--the English journalist
makes a point of playing. There has been a time in his history when he
believed in the educative possibilities and duties of his profession.
He long held with the Scot that the Press was a power, and that it was
becoming that it should glory in being a power for the betterment of
the race. After many shrewd searchings and commercial gropings, the
English journalist discovered that the way to fame and fortune lay in
the mastery of the bathotic stop. He learned to sing songs of Araby
in one squalid key every morning, and he has since been able to keep
a gig and out-circulate everything that considers itself possessed of
circulation. He has played, as one might say, old Harvey with the
_Daily Telegraph_. He has put the _Times_ to the shame of being a
journal that "nobody reads." More than all, he has said flatly to the
English people, "You are a rabbit-brained crowd, and here for your
delectation and your coppers is the worst that can be written for you."
When England comes to her day of reckoning, in the hour when she
shall see her own mischance and is fain to remember the names of her
destroyers, none of them will seem to her so flagrant and so to be
deprecated as the English journalist. "Behold," she will say, "the
monster who convinced me that it was beautiful to split infinitives;
that it was elegant to begin six paragraphs on one page with the
blessed statement, 'A dramatic scene was enacted in Mr. Thingamybob's
court yesterday'; that good books are to be worthily pronounced upon by
sub-editors in the intervals of waiting for the three o'clock winner;
and that, so far from being a reproach to one, the bathotic was the
only honourable and creditable attitude of mind."
If a man wish to perceive to what degraded passes the art of writing
may come and yet retain the qualities of intelligibility and apparent
reasonableness, let him peruse the morning papers and die the death.
The reek and offence of them smells to heaven. They are a sure
indication of the decadence of the English mind and of the cupidity
and unscrupulousness of the English journalist. There has been nothing
like them, nothing to compare with them, for cheapness and futility and
banality in the history of the world. They are more to be fearful of
than the pestilence, inasmuch as they spell intellectual debasement,
the corruption of the public taste, and the defilement of the public
spirit. Their very literal innocuousness condemns them. It is their
boast that they may be read in the family without a blush. Their
assumption of morality and puritanical straitlacedness is admirable.
Beneath it there lie a licentiousness of purpose, a disregard for
what is just, and a contempt for what is decent and of good report
which are calculated to make the angels weep. When one inquires into
the personnel of the staffs by which these papers are run, one is
confronted with exactly the kind of man one expects to meet. First
of all, he is English, and as shallow and flippant and irresponsible
as only an Englishman can be. The saving touch of seriousness does
not enter into his composition. He neither reads nor thinks. Beer,
billiards, and free lunches, free entry to the less edifying places of
amusement, a minimum of work and a maximum of pay, constitute his ideal
of the journalist's career, and he is always doing his best to live
up to it. Of responsibility to anybody save his immediate chief, who,
after all, is only himself at a little higher salary, he has not the
smallest notion. His duty is neither by himself nor by the public. All
that is expected of him is loyalty to his chief and to his paper, and
it is his pride and joy that this loyalty is invariably forthcoming.
Very occasionally one hears that, in consequence of a change in
the political policy of a newspaper, the editor of that paper has
considered it to be his duty to resign his editorship. Probably not
more than two such resignations have occurred in English journalism
during the past twenty years. In both instances the self-denying
editors have been held up by the English papers as sublime examples of
honour and martyrdom. That there is nothing extraordinary in sticking
to one's principles, even though it means loss of livelihood, does not
appear to have dawned upon the lively English mind. Of course, it will
be said that, if every member of the staff of a newspaper, down even
to the junior reporters, were allowed to have beliefs and principles,
and were not expected to write anything in antagonism to them, an
exceedingly remarkable kind of newspaper would result. Compromise, at
any rate on established matters, must be the rule of the journalist's
life. On the other hand, I incline to the opinion that the English
journalist is far too swift to acquiesce in doubtful procedure, and
that where the morals, good report, and high character of a paper are
concerned it is better to have a Scotch staff than an English one.
Nothing is more characteristic of the English journalist of to-day than
the circumstance that he is literally without opinions of his own.
He takes his opinions from his chiefs, just as his chiefs take their
opinions from their proprietors, or from the wire-pullers with whose
party the paper happens to be associated. In a sense it is impossible
that it should be otherwise. Yet you will find that in the main
Scottish journalists do have opinions of their own, and that somehow
they manage to be loyal to them. For weal or woe the Scot is immovable
and unchangeable as the granite of his own hills. You can never get him
to see that half-measures are either desirable or necessary. He will
not stretch his conscience nor palter with his soul for any man or any
man's money. The Englishman is all the other way--that is why he makes
such a nimble and even brilliant journalist.