THE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER
By Charles Dudley Warner
Our theme for the hour is the American
Newspaper. It is a subject in which everybody
is interested, and about which it is not polite to
say that anybody is not well informed; for, although
there are scattered through the land many persons,
I am sorry to say, unable to pay for a newspaper,
I have never yet heard of anybody unable to edit one.
The topic has many points of view,
and invites various study and comment. In our
limited time we must select one only. We have
heard a great deal about the power, the opportunity,
the duty, the “mission,” of the press.
The time has come for a more philosophical treatment
of it, for an inquiry into its relations to our complex
civilization, for some ethical account of it as one
of the developments of our day, and for some discussion
of the effect it is producing, and likely to produce,
on the education of the people. Has the time
come, or is it near at hand, when we can point to
a person who is alert, superficial, ready and shallow,
self-confident and half-informed, and say, “There
is a product of the American newspaper”?
The newspaper is not a willful creation, nor an isolated
phenomenon, but the legitimate outcome of our age,
as much as our system of popular education. And
I trust that some competent observer will make, perhaps
for this association, a philosophical study of it.
My task here is a much humbler one. I have thought
that it may not be unprofitable to treat the newspaper
from a practical and even somewhat mechanical point
of view.
The newspaper is a private enterprise.
Its object is to make money for its owner. Whatever
motive may be given out for starting a newspaper,
expectation of profit by it is the real one, whether
the newspaper is religious, political, scientific,
or literary. The exceptional cases of newspapers
devoted to ideas or “causes” without regard
to profit are so few as not to affect the rule.
Commonly, the cause, the sect, the party, the trade,
the delusion, the idea, gets its newspaper, its organ,
its advocate, only when some individual thinks he
can see a pecuniary return in establishing it.
This motive is not lower than that
which leads people into any other occupation or profession.
To make a living, and to have a career, is the original
incentive in all cases. Even in purely philanthropical
enterprises the driving-wheel that keeps them in motion
for any length of time is the salary paid the working
members. So powerful is this incentive that sometimes
the wheel will continue to turn round when there is
no grist to grind. It sometimes happens that the
friction of the philanthropic machinery is so great
that but very little power is transmitted to the object
for which the machinery was made. I knew a devoted
agent of the American Colonization Society, who, for
several years, collected in Connecticut just enough,
for the cause, to buy his clothes, and pay his board
at a good hotel.
It is scarcely necessary to say, except
to prevent a possible misapprehension, that the editor
who has no high ideals, no intention of benefiting
his fellow-men by his newspaper, and uses it unscrupulously
as a means of money-making only, sinks to the level
of the physician and the lawyer who have no higher
conception of their callings than that they offer
opportunities for getting money by appeals to credulity,
and by assisting in evasions of the law.
If the excellence of a newspaper is
not always measured by its profitableness, it is generally
true that, if it does not pay its owner, it is valueless
to the public. Not all newspapers which make money
are good, for some succeed by catering to the lowest
tastes of respectable people, and to the prejudice,
ignorance, and passion of the lowest class; but, as
a rule, the successful journal pecuniarily is the best
journal. The reasons for this are on the surface.
The impecunious newspaper cannot give its readers
promptly the news, nor able discussion of the news,
and, still worse, it cannot be independent. The
political journal that relies for support upon drippings
of party favor or patronage, the general newspaper
that finds it necessary to existence to manipulate
stock reports, the religious weekly that draws precarious
support from puffing doubtful enterprises, the literary
paper that depends upon the approval of publishers,
are poor affairs, and, in the long run or short run,
come to grief. Some newspapers do succeed by
sensationalism, as some preachers do; by a kind of
quackery, as some doctors do; by trimming and shifting
to any momentary popular prejudice, as some politicians
do; by becoming the paid advocate of a personal ambition
or a corporate enterprise, as some lawyers do:
but the newspaper only becomes a real power when it
is able, on the basis of pecuniary independence, to
free itself from all such entanglements. An editor
who stands with hat in hand has the respect accorded
to any other beggar.
The recognition of the fact that the
newspaper is a private and purely business enterprise
will help to define the mutual relations of the editor
and the public. His claim upon the public is exactly
that of any manufacturer or dealer. It is that
of the man who makes cloth, or the grocer who opens
a shop neither has a right to complain if
the public does not buy of him. If the buyer
does not like a cloth half shoddy, or coffee half-chicory,
he will go elsewhere. If the subscriber does not
like one newspaper, he takes another, or none.
The appeal for newspaper support on the ground that
such a journal ought to be sustained by an enlightened
community, or on any other ground than that it is a
good article that people want, or would
want if they knew its value, is purely
childish in this age of the world. If any person
wants to start a periodical devoted to decorated teapots,
with the noble view of inducing the people to live
up to his idea of a teapot, very good; but he has no
right to complain if he fails.
On the other hand, the public has
no rights in the newspaper except what it pays for;
even the “old subscriber” has none, except
to drop the paper if it ceases to please him.
The notion that the subscriber has a right to interfere
in the conduct of the paper, or the reader to direct
its opinions, is based on a misconception of what
the newspaper is. The claim of the public to
have its communications printed in the paper is equally
baseless. Whether they shall be printed or not
rests in the discretion of the editor, having reference
to his own private interest, and to his apprehension
of the public good. Nor is he bound to give any
reason for his refusal. It is purely in his discretion
whether he will admit a reply to any thing that has
appeared in his columns. No one has a right to
demand it. Courtesy and policy may grant it; but
the right to it does not exist. If any one is
injured, he may seek his remedy at law; and I should
like to see the law of libel such and so administered
that any person injured by a libel in the newspaper,
as well as by slander out of it, could be sure of
prompt redress. While the subscribes acquires
no right to dictate to the newspaper, we can imagine
an extreme case when he should have his money back
which had been paid in advance, if the newspaper totally
changed its character. If he had contracted with
a dealer to supply him with hard coal during the winter,
he might have a remedy if the dealer delivered only
charcoal in the coldest weather; and so if he paid
for a Roman Catholic journal which suddenly became
an organ of the spiritists.
The advertiser acquires no more rights
in the newspaper than the subscriber. He is entitled
to use the space for which he pays by the insertion
of such material as is approved by the editor.
He gains no interest in any other part of the paper,
and has no more claim to any space in the editorial
columns, than any other one of the public. To
give him such space would be unbusiness-like, and
the extension of a preference which would be unjust
to the rest of the public. Nothing more quickly
destroys the character of a journal, begets distrust
of it, and so reduces its value, than the well-founded
suspicion that its editorial columns are the property
of advertisers. Even a religious journal will,
after a while, be injured by this.
Yet it must be confessed that here
is one of the greatest difficulties of modern journalism.
The newspaper must be cheap. It is, considering
the immense cost to produce it, the cheapest product
ever offered to man. Most newspapers cost more
than they sell for; they could not live by subscriptions;
for any profits, they certainly depend upon advertisements.
The advertisements depend upon the circulation; the
circulation is likely to dwindle if too much space
is occupied by advertisements, or if it is evident
that the paper belongs to its favored advertisers.
The counting-room desires to conciliate the advertisers;
the editor looks to making a paper satisfactory to
his readers. Between this see-saw of the necessary
subscriber and the necessary advertiser, a good many
newspapers go down. This difficulty would be measurably
removed by the admission of the truth that the newspaper
is a strictly business enterprise, depending for success
upon a ‘quid pro quo’ between all parties
connected with it, and upon integrity in its management.
Akin to the false notion that the
newspaper is a sort of open channel that the public
may use as it chooses, is the conception of it as a
charitable institution. The newspaper, which is
the property of a private person as much as a drug-shop
is, is expected to perform for nothing services which
would be asked of no other private person. There
is scarcely a charitable enterprise to which it is
not asked to contribute of its space, which is money,
ten times more than other persons in the community,
who are ten times as able as the owner of the newspaper,
contribute. The journal is considered “mean”
if it will not surrender its columns freely to notices
and announcements of this sort. If a manager
has a new hen-coop or a new singer he wishes to introduce
to the public, he comes to the newspaper, expecting
to have his enterprise extolled for nothing, and probably
never thinks that it would be just as proper for him
to go to one of the regular advertisers in the paper
and ask him to give up his space. Anything, from
a church picnic to a brass-band concert for the benefit
of the widow of the triangles, asks the newspaper to
contribute. The party in politics, whose principles
the editor advocates, has no doubt of its rightful
claim upon him, not only upon the editorial columns,
but upon the whole newspaper. It asks without
hesitation that the newspaper should take up its valuable
space by printing hundreds and often thousands of
dollars’ worth of political announcements in
the course of a protracted campaign, when it never
would think of getting its halls, its speakers, and
its brass bands, free of expense. Churches, as
well as parties, expect this sort of charity.
I have known rich churches, to whose members it was
a convenience to have their Sunday and other services
announced, withdraw the announcements when the editor
declined any longer to contribute a weekly fifty-cents’
worth of space. No private persons contribute
so much to charity, in proportion to ability, as the
newspaper. Perhaps it will get credit for this
in the next world: it certainly never does in
this.
The chief function of the newspaper
is to collect and print the news. Upon the kind
of news that should be gathered and published, we shall
remark farther on. The second function is to elucidate
the news, and comment on it, and show its relations.
A third function is to furnish reading-matter to the
general public.
Nothing is so difficult for the manager
as to know what news is: the instinct for it
is a sort of sixth sense. To discern out of the
mass of materials collected not only what is most
likely to interest the public, but what phase and
aspect of it will attract most attention, and the
relative importance of it; to tell the day before or
at midnight what the world will be talking about in
the morning, and what it will want the fullest details
of, and to meet that want in advance, requires
a peculiar talent. There is always some topic
on which the public wants instant information.
It is easy enough when the news is developed, and
everybody is discussing it, for the editor to fall
in; but the success of the news printed depends upon
a pre-apprehension of all this. Some papers,
which nevertheless print all the news, are always a
day behind, do not appreciate the popular drift till
it has gone to something else, and err as much by
clinging to a subject after it is dead as by not taking
it up before it was fairly born. The public craves
eagerly for only one thing at a time, and soon wearies
of that; and it is to the newspaper’s profit
to seize the exact point of a debate, the thrilling
moment of an accident, the pith of an important discourse;
to throw itself into it as if life depended on it,
and for the hour to flood the popular curiosity with
it as an engine deluges a fire.
Scarcely less important than promptly
seizing and printing the news is the attractive arrangement
of it, its effective presentation to the eye.
Two papers may have exactly the same important intelligence,
identically the same despatches: the one will
be called bright, attractive, “newsy”;
the other, dull and stupid.
We have said nothing yet about that,
which, to most people, is the most important aspect
of the newspaper, the editor’s responsibility
to the public for its contents. It is sufficient
briefly to say here, that it is exactly the responsibility
of every other person in society, the full
responsibility of his opportunity. He has voluntarily
taken a position in which he can do a great deal of
good or a great deal of evil, and he, should be held
and judged by his opportunity: it is greater than
that of the preacher, the teacher, the congressman,
the physician. He occupies the loftiest pulpit;
he is in his teacher’s desk seven days in the
week; his voice can be heard farther than that of
the most lusty fog-horn politician; and often, I am
sorry to say, his columns outshine the shelves of
the druggist in display of proprietary medicines.
Nothing else ever invented has the public attention
as the newspaper has, or is an influence so constant
and universal. It is this large opportunity that
has given the impression that the newspaper is a public
rather than a private enterprise.
It was a nebulous but suggestive remark
that the newspaper occupies the borderland between
literature and common sense. Literature it certainly
is not, and in the popular apprehension it seems often
too erratic and variable to be credited with the balance-wheel
of sense; but it must have something of the charm
of the one, and the steadiness and sagacity of the
other, or it will fail to please. The model editor,
I believe, has yet to appear. Notwithstanding
the traditional reputation of certain editors in the
past, they could not be called great editors by our
standards; for the elements of modern journalism did
not exist in their time. The old newspaper was
a broadside of stale news, with a moral essay attached.
Perhaps Benjamin Franklin, with our facilities, would
have been very near the ideal editor. There was
nothing he did not wish to know; and no one excelled
him in the ability to communicate what he found out
to the average mind. He came as near as anybody
ever did to marrying common sense to literature:
he had it in him to make it sufficient for journalistic
purposes. He was what somebody said Carlyle was,
and what the American editor ought to be, a
vernacular man.
The assertion has been made recently,
publicly, and with evidence adduced, that the American
newspaper is the best in the world. It is like
the assertion that the American government is the best
in the world; no doubt it is, for the American people.
Judged by broad standards, it may
safely be admitted that the American newspaper is
susceptible of some improvement, and that it has something
to learn from the journals of other nations. We
shall be better employed in correcting its weaknesses
than in complacently contemplating its excellences.
Let us examine it in its three departments
already named, its news, editorials, and
miscellaneous reading-matter.
In particularity and comprehensiveness
of news-collecting, it may be admitted that the American
newspapers for a time led the world. I mean in
the picking-up of local intelligence, and the use of
the telegraph to make it general. And with this
arose the odd notion that news is made important by
the mere fact of its rapid transmission over the wire.
The English journals followed, speedily overtook,
and some of the wealthier ones perhaps surpassed,
the American in the use of the telegraph, and in the
presentation of some sorts of local news; not of casualties,
and small city and neighborhood events, and social
gossip (until very recently), but certainly in the
business of the law courts, and the crimes and mishaps
that come within police and legal supervision.
The leading papers of the German press, though strong
in correspondence and in discussion of affairs, are
far less comprehensive in their news than the American
or the English. The French journals, we are accustomed
to say, are not newspapers at all. And this is
true as we use the word. Until recently, nothing
has been of importance to the Frenchman except himself;
and what happened outside of France, not directly affecting
his glory, his profit, or his pleasure, did not interest
him: hence, one could nowhere so securely intrench
himself against the news of the world as behind the
barricade of the Paris journals. But let us not
make a mistake in this matter. We may have more
to learn from the Paris journals than from any others.
If they do not give what we call news local
news, events, casualties, the happenings of the day, they
do give ideas, opinions; they do discuss politics,
the social drift; they give the intellectual ferment
of Paris; they supply the material that Paris likes
to talk over, the badinage of the boulevard, the wit
of the salon, the sensation of the stage, the new
movement in literature and in politics. This
may be important, or it may be trivial: it is
commonly more interesting than much of that which
we call news.
Our very facility and enterprise in
news-gathering have overwhelmed our newspapers, and
it may be remarked that editorial discrimination has
not kept pace with the facilities. We are overpowered
with a mass of undigested intelligence, collected
for the mast part without regard to value. The
force of the newspaper is expended in extending these
facilities, with little regard to discriminating selection.
The burden is already too heavy for the newspaper,
and wearisome to the public.
The publication of the news is the
most important function of the paper. How is
it gathered? We must confess that it is gathered
very much by chance. A drag-net is thrown out,
and whatever comes is taken. An examination into
the process of collecting shows what sort of news we
are likely to get, and that nine-tenths of that printed
is collected without much intelligence exercised in
selection. The alliance of the associated press
with the telegraph company is a fruitful source of
news of an inferior quality. Of course, it is
for the interest of the telegraph company to swell
the volume to be transmitted. It is impossible
for the associated press to have an agent in every
place to which the telegraph penetrates: therefore
the telegraphic operators often act as its purveyors.
It is for their interest to send something; and their
judgment of what is important is not only biased,
but is formed by purely local standards. Our
news, therefore, is largely set in motion by telegraphic
operators, by agents trained to regard only the accidental,
the startling, the abnormal, as news; it is picked
up by sharp prowlers about town, whose pay depends
upon finding something, who are looking for something
spicy and sensational, or which may be dressed up and
exaggerated to satisfy an appetite for novelty and
high flavor, and who regard casualties as the chief
news. Our newspapers every day are loaded with
accidents, casualties, and crimes concerning people
of whom we never heard before and never shall hear
again, the reading of which is of no earthly use to
any human being.
What is news? What is it that
an intelligent public should care to hear of and talk
about? Run your eye down the columns of your journal.
There was a drunken squabble last night in a New York
groggery; there is a petty but carefully elaborated
village scandal about a foolish girl; a woman accidentally
dropped her baby out of a fourth-story window in Maine;
in Connecticut, a wife, by mistake, got into the same
railway train with another woman’s husband;
a child fell into a well in New Jersey; there is a
column about a peripatetic horse-race, which exhibits,
like a circus, from city to city; a laborer in a remote
town in Pennsylvania had a sunstroke; there is an
edifying dying speech of a murderer, the love-letter
of a suicide, the set-to of a couple of congressmen;
and there are columns about a gigantic war of half
a dozen politicians over the appointment of a sugar-gauger.
Granted that this pabulum is desired by the reader,
why not save the expense of transmission by having
several columns of it stereotyped, to be reproduced
at proper intervals? With the date changed, it
would always, have its original value, and perfectly
satisfy the demand, if a demand exists, for this sort
of news.
This is not, as you see, a description
of your journal: it is a description of only
one portion of it. It is a complex and wonderful
creation. Every morning it is a mirror of the
world, more or less distorted and imperfect, but such
a mirror as it never had held up to it before.
But consider how much space is taken up with mere trivialities
and vulgarities under the name of news. And this
evil is likely to continue and increase until news-gatherers
learn that more important than the reports of accidents
and casualties is the intelligence of opinions and
thoughts, the moral and intellectual movements of modern
life. A horrible assassination in India is instantly
telegraphed; but the progress of such a vast movement
as that of the Wahabee revival in Islam, which may
change the destiny of great provinces, never gets itself
put upon the wires. We hear promptly of a landslide
in Switzerland, but only very slowly of a political
agitation that is changing the constitution of the
republic. It should be said, however, that the
daily newspaper is not alone responsible for this:
it is what the age and the community where it is published
make it. So far as I have observed, the majority
of the readers in America peruses eagerly three columns
about a mill between an English and a naturalized
American prize-fighter, but will only glance at a
column report of a debate in the English parliament
which involves a radical change in the whole policy
of England; and devours a page about the Chantilly
races, while it ignores a paragraph concerning the
suppression of the Jesuit schools.
Our newspapers are overwhelmed with
material that is of no importance. The obvious
remedy for this would be more intelligent direction
in the collection of news, and more careful sifting
and supervision of it when gathered. It becomes
every day more apparent to every manager that such
discrimination is more necessary. There is no
limit to the various intelligence and gossip that
our complex life offers no paper is big
enough to contain it; no reader has time enough to
read it. And the journal must cease to be a sort
of waste-basket at the end of a telegraph wire, into
which any reporter, telegraph operator, or gossip-monger
can dump whatever he pleases. We must get rid
of the superstition that value is given to an unimportant
“item” by sending it a thousand miles over
a wire.
Perhaps the most striking feature
of the American newspaper, especially of the country
weekly, is its enormous development of local and neighborhood
news. It is of recent date. Horace Greeley
used to advise the country editors to give small space
to the general news of the world, but to cultivate
assiduously the home field, to glean every possible
detail of private life in the circuit of the county,
and print it. The advice was shrewd for a metropolitan
editor, and it was not without its profit to the country
editor. It was founded on a deep knowledge of
human nature; namely, upon the fact that people read
most eagerly that which they already know, if it is
about themselves or their neighbors, if it is a report
of something they have been concerned in, a lecture
they have heard, a fair, or festival, or wedding,
or funeral, or barn-raising they have attended.
The result is column after column of short paragraphs
of gossip and trivialities, chips, chips, chips.
Mr. Sales is contemplating erecting a new counter
in his store; his rival opposite has a new sign; Miss
Bumps of Gath is visiting her cousin, Miss Smith of
Bozrah; the sheriff has painted his fence; Farmer
Brown has lost his cow; the eminent member from Neopolis
has put an ell on one end of his mansion, and a mortgage
on the other.
On the face of it nothing is so vapid
and profitless as column after column of this reading.
These “items” have very little interest,
except to those who already know the facts; but those
concerned like to see them in print, and take the
newspaper on that account. This sort of inanity
takes the place of reading-matter that might be of
benefit, and its effect must be to belittle and contract
the mind. But this is not the most serious objection
to the publication of these worthless details.
It cultivates self-consciousness in the community,
and love of notoriety; it develops vanity and self-importance,
and elevates the trivial in life above the essential.
And this brings me to speak of the
mania in this age, and especially in America, for
notoriety in social life as well as in politics.
The newspapers are the vehicle of it, sometimes the
occasion, but not the cause. The newspaper may
have fostered it has not created this
hunger for publicity. Almost everybody talks
about the violation of decency and the sanctity of
private life by the newspaper in the publication of
personalities and the gossip of society; and the very
people who make these strictures are often those who
regard the paper as without enterprise and dull, if
it does not report in detail their weddings, their
balls and parties, the distinguished persons present,
the dress of the ladies, the sumptuousness of the
entertainment, if it does not celebrate their church
services and festivities, their social meetings, their
new house, their distinguished arrivals at this or
that watering-place. I believe every newspaper
manager will bear me out in saying that there is a
constant pressure on him to print much more of such
private matter than his judgment and taste permit or
approve, and that the gossip which is brought to his
notice, with the hope that he will violate the sensitiveness
of social life by printing it, is far away larger
in amount than all that he publishes.
To return for a moment to the subject
of general news. The characteristic of our modern
civilization is sensitiveness, or, as the doctors say,
nervousness. Perhaps the philanthropist would
term it sympathy. No doubt an exciting cause
of it is the adaptation of electricity to the transmission
of facts and ideas. The telegraph, we say, has
put us in sympathy with all the world. And we
reckon this enlargement of nerve contact somehow a
gain. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand
wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening
or deadening them to these shocks; but nevertheless,
every person who reads is a focus for the excitements,
the ills, the troubles, of all the world. In addition
to his local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a
manner compelled to be a sharer in the universal uneasiness.
It might be worth while to inquire what effect this
exciting accumulation of the news of the world upon
an individual or a community has upon happiness and
upon character. Is the New England man any better
able to bear or deal with his extraordinary climate
by the daily knowledge of the weather all over the
globe? Is a man happier, or improved in character,
by the woful tale of a world’s distress and
apprehension that greets him every morning at breakfast?
Knowledge, we know, increases sorrow; but I suppose
the offset to that is, that strength only comes through
suffering. But this is a digression.
Not second in importance to any department
of the journal is the reporting; that is, the special
reporting as distinguished from the more general news-gathering.
I mean the reports of proceedings in Congress, in
conventions, assemblies, and conferences, public conversations,
lectures, sermons, investigations, law trials, and
occurrences of all sorts that rise into general importance.
These reports are the basis of our knowledge and opinions.
If they are false or exaggerated, we are ignorant
of what is taking place, and misled. It is of
infinitely more importance that they should be absolutely
trustworthy than that the editorial comments should
be sound and wise. If the reports on affairs can
be depended on, the public can form its own opinion,
and act intelligently. And; if the public has
a right to demand anything of a newspaper, it is that
its reports of what occurs shall be faithfully accurate,
unprejudiced, and colorless. They ought not, to
be editorials, or the vehicles of personal opinion
and feeling. The interpretation of, the facts
they give should be left to the editor and the public.
There should be a sharp line drawn between the report
and the editorial.
I am inclined to think that the reporting
department is the weakest in the American newspaper,
and that there is just ground for the admitted public
distrust of it. Too often, if a person would know
what has taken place in a given case, he must read
the reports in half a dozen journals, then strike
a general average of probabilities, allowing for the
personal equation, and then suspend his
judgment. Of course, there is much excellent
reporting, and there are many able men engaged in it
who reflect the highest honor upon their occupation.
And the press of no other country shows more occasional
brilliant feats in reporting than ours: these
are on occasions when the newspapers make special efforts.
Take the last two national party conventions.
The fullness, the accuracy, the vividness, with which
their proceedings were reported in the leading journals,
were marvelous triumphs of knowledge, skill, and expense.
The conventions were so photographed by hundreds of
pens, that the public outside saw them almost as distinctly
as the crowd in attendance. This result was attained
because the editors determined that it should be,
sent able men to report, and demanded the best work.
But take an opposite and a daily illustration of reporting,
that of the debates and proceedings in Congress.
I do not refer to the specials of various journals
which are good, bad, or indifferent, as the case may
be, and commonly colored by partisan considerations,
but the regular synopsis sent to the country at large.
Now, for some years it has been inadequate, frequently
unintelligible, often grossly misleading, failing wholly
to give the real spirit and meaning of the most important
discussions; and it is as dry as chips besides.
To be both stupid and inaccurate is the unpardonable
sin in journalism. Contrast these reports with
the lively and faithful pictures of the French Assembly
which are served to the Paris papers.
Before speaking of the reasons for
the public distrust in reports, it is proper to put
in one qualification. The public itself, and not
the newspapers, is the great factory of baseless rumors
and untruths. Although the newspaper unavoidably
gives currency to some of these, it is the great corrector
of popular rumors. Concerning any event, a hundred
different versions and conflicting accounts are instantly
set afloat. These would run on, and become settled
but unfounded beliefs, as private whispered scandals
do run, if the newspaper did not intervene. It
is the business of the newspaper, on every occurrence
of moment, to chase down the rumors, and to find out
the facts and print them, and set the public mind
at rest. The newspaper publishes them under a
sense of responsibility for its statements. It
is not by any means always correct; but I know that
it is the aim of most newspapers to discharge this
important public function faithfully. When this
country had few newspapers it was ten times more the
prey of false reports and delusions than it is now.
Reporting requires as high ability
as editorial writing; perhaps of a different kind,
though in the history of American journalism the best
reporters have often become the best editors.
Talent of this kind must be adequately paid; and it
happens that in America the reporting field is so
vast that few journals can afford to make the reporting
department correspond in ability to the editorial,
and I doubt if the importance of doing so is yet fully
realized. An intelligent and representative synopsis
of a lecture or other public performance is rare.
The ability to grasp a speaker’s meaning, or
to follow a long discourse, and reproduce either in
spirit, and fairly, in a short space, is not common.
When the public which has been present reads the inaccurate
report, it loses confidence in the newspaper.
Its confidence is again undermined
when it learns that an “interview” which
it has read with interest was manufactured; that the
report of the movements and sayings of a distinguished
stranger was a pure piece of ingenious invention;
that a thrilling adventure alongshore, or in a balloon,
or in a horse-car, was what is called a sensational
article, concocted by some brilliant genius, and spun
out by the yard according to his necessities.
These reports are entertaining, and often more readable
than anything else in the newspaper; and, if they were
put into a department with an appropriate heading,
the public would be less suspicious that all the news
in the journal was colored and heightened by a lively
imagination.
Intelligent and honest reporting of
whatever interests the public is the sound basis of
all journalism. And yet so careless have editors
been of all this that a reporter has been sent to
attend the sessions of a philological convention who
had not the least linguistic knowledge, having always
been employed on marine disasters. Another reporter,
who was assigned to inform the public of the results
of a difficult archeological investigation, frankly
confessed his inability to understand what was going
on; for his ordinary business, he said, was cattle.
A story is told of a metropolitan journal, which illustrates
another difficulty the public has in keeping up its
confidence in newspaper infallibility. It may
not be true for history, but answers for an illustration.
The annual November meteors were expected on a certain
night. The journal prepared an elaborate article,
several columns in length, on meteoric displays in
general, and on the display of that night in particular,
giving in detail the appearance of the heavens from
the metropolitan roofs in various parts of the city,
the shooting of the meteors amid the blazing constellations,
the size and times of flight of the fiery bodies;
in short, a most vivid and scientific account of the
lofty fireworks. Unfortunately the night was cloudy.
The article was in type and ready; but the clouds
would not break. The last moment for going to
press arrived: there was a probability that the
clouds would lift before daylight and the manager
took the risk. The article that appeared was
very interesting; but its scientific value was impaired
by the fact that the heavens were obscured the whole
night, and the meteors, if any arrived, were invisible.
The reasonable excuse of the editor would be that
he could not control the elements.
If the reporting department needs
strengthening and reduction to order in the American
journal, we may also query whether the department of
correspondence sustains the boast that the American,
newspaper is the best in the world. We have a
good deal of excellent correspondence, both foreign
and domestic; and our “specials” have won
distinction, at least for liveliness and enterprise.
I cannot dwell upon this feature; but I suggest a
comparison with the correspondence of some of the German,
and with that especially of the London journals, from
the various capitals of Europe, and from the occasional
seats of war. How surpassing able much of it
is!
How full of information, of philosophic
observation, of accurate knowledge! It appears
to be written by men of trained intellect and of experience, educated
men of the world, who, by reason of their position
and character, have access to the highest sources of
information.
The editorials of our journals seem
to me better than formerly, improved in tone, in courtesy,
in self-respect, though you may not have
to go far or search long for the provincial note and
the easy grace of the frontier, and they
are better written. This is because the newspaper
has become more profitable, and is able to pay for
talent, and has attracted to it educated young men.
There is a sort of editorial ability, of facility,
of force, that can only be acquired by practice and
in the newspaper office: no school can ever teach
it; but the young editor who has a broad basis of
general education, of information in history, political
economy, the classics, and polite literature, has an
immense advantage over the man who has merely practical
experience. For the editorial, if it is to hold
its place, must be more and more the product of information,
culture, and reflection, as well as of sagacity and
alertness. Ignorance of foreign affairs, and of
economic science, the American people have in times
past winked at; but they will not always wink at it.
It is the belief of some shrewd observers
that editorials, the long editorials, are not much
read, except by editors themselves. A cynic says
that, if you have a secret you are very anxious to
keep from the female portion of the population, the
safest place to put it is in an editorial. It
seems to me that editorials are not conned as attentively
as they once were; and I am sure they have not so
much influence as formerly. People are not so
easily or so visibly led; that is to say, the editorial
influence is not so dogmatic and direct. The editor
does not expect to form public opinion so much by
arguments and appeals as by the news he presents and
his manner of presenting it, by the iteration of an
idea until it becomes familiar, by the reading-matter
selected, and by the quotations of opinions as news,
and not professedly to influence the reader.
And this influence is all the more potent because it
is indirect, and not perceived-by the reader.
There is an editorial tradition it
might almost be termed a superstition which
I think will have to be abandoned. It is that
a certain space in the journal must be filled with
editorial, and that some of the editorials must be
long, without any reference to the news or the necessity
of comment on it, or the capacity of the editor at
the moment to fill the space with original matter
that is readable. There is the sacred space,
and it must be filled. The London journals are
perfect types of this custom. The result is often
a wearisome page of words and rhetoric. It may
be good rhetoric; but life is too short for so much
of it. The necessity of filling this space causes
the writer, instead of stating his idea in the shortest
compass in which it can be made perspicuous and telling,
to beat it out thin, and make it cover as much ground
as possible. This, also, is vanity. In the
economy of room, which our journals will more and
more be compelled to cultivate, I venture to say that
this tradition will be set aside. I think that
we may fairly claim a superiority in our journals
over the English dailies in our habit of making brief,
pointed editorial paragraphs. They are the life
of the editorial page. A cultivation of these
until they are as finished and pregnant as the paragraphs
of “The London Spectator” and “The
New-York Nation,” the printing of long editorials
only when the elucidation of a subject demands length,
and the use of the space thus saved for more interesting
reading, is probably the line of our editorial evolution.
To continue the comparison of our
journals as a class, with the English as a class,
ours are more lively, also more flippant, and less
restrained by a sense of responsibility or by the
laws of libel. We furnish, now and again, as
good editorial writing for its purpose; but it commonly
lacks the dignity, the thoroughness, the wide sweep
and knowledge, that characterizes the best English
discussion of political and social topics.
The third department of the newspaper
is that of miscellaneous reading-matter. Whether
this is the survival of the period when the paper
contained little else except “selections,”
and other printed matter was scarce, or whether it
is only the beginning of a development that shall
supply the public nearly all its literature, I do not
know. Far as our newspapers have already gone
in this direction, I am inclined to think that in
their evolution they must drop this adjunct, and print
simply the news of the day. Some of the leading
journals of the world already do this.
In America I am sure the papers are
printing too much miscellaneous reading. The
perusal of this smattering of everything, these scraps
of information and snatches of literature, this infinite
variety and medley, in which no subject is adequately
treated, is distracting and debilitating to the mind.
It prevents the reading of anything in full, and its
satisfactory assimilation. It is said that the
majority of Americans read nothing except the paper.
If they read that thoroughly, they have time for nothing
else. What is its reader to do when his journal
thrusts upon him every day the amount contained in
a fair-sized duodecimo volume, and on Sundays the
amount of two of them? Granted that this miscellaneous
hodge-podge is the cream of current literature, is
it profitable to the reader? Is it a means of
anything but superficial culture and fragmentary information?
Besides, it stimulates an unnatural appetite, a liking
for the striking, the brilliant, the sensational only;
for our selections from current literature are, usually
the “plums”; and plums are not a wholesome-diet
for anybody. A person accustomed to this finds
it difficult to sit down patiently to the mastery of
a book or a subject, to the study of history, the
perusal of extended biography, or to acquire that
intellectual development and strength which comes from
thorough reading and reflection.
The subject has another aspect.
Nobody chooses his own reading; and a whole community
perusing substantially the same material tends to a
mental uniformity. The editor has the more than
royal power of selecting the intellectual food of
a large public. It is a responsibility infinitely
greater than that of the compiler of schoolbooks, great
as that is. The taste of the editor, or of some
assistant who uses the scissors, is in a manner forced
upon thousands of people, who see little other printed
matter than that which he gives them. Suppose
his taste runs to murders and abnormal crimes, and
to the sensational in literature: what will be
the moral effect upon a community of reading this
year after year?
If this excess of daily miscellany
is deleterious to the public, I doubt if it will be,
in the long run, profitable to the newspaper, which
has a field broad enough in reporting and commenting
upon the movement of the world, without attempting
to absorb the whole reading field.
I should like to say a word, if time
permitted, upon the form of the journal, and about
advertisements. I look to see advertisements shorter,
printed with less display, and more numerous.
In addition to the use now made of the newspaper by
the classes called “advertisers,” I expect
it to become the handy medium of the entire public,
the means of ready communication in regard to all
wants and exchanges.
Several years ago, the attention of
the publishers of American newspapers was called to
the convenient form of certain daily journals in South
Germany, which were made up in small pages, the number
of which varied from day to day, according to the
pressure of news or of advertisements. The suggestion
as to form has been adopted bit many of our religious,
literary, and special weeklies, to the great convenience
of the readers, and I doubt not of the publishers
also. Nothing is more unwieldy than our big blanket-sheets:
they are awkward to handle, inconvenient to read,
unhandy to bind and preserve. It is difficult
to classify matter in them. In dull seasons they
are too large; in times of brisk advertising, and in
the sudden access of important news, they are too small.
To enlarge them for the occasion, resort is had to
a troublesome fly-sheet, or, if they are doubled,
there is more space to be filled than is needed.
It seems to me that the inevitable remedy is a newspaper
of small pages or forms, indefinite in number, that
can at any hour be increased or diminished according
to necessity, to be folded, stitched, and cut by machinery.
We have thus rapidly run over a prolific
field, touching only upon some of the relations of
the newspaper to our civilization, and omitting many
of the more important and grave. The truth is
that the development of the modern journal has been
so sudden and marvelous that its conductors find themselves
in possession of a machine that they scarcely know
how to manage or direct. The change in the newspaper
caused by the telegraph, the cable, and by a public
demand for news created by wars, by discoveries, and
by a new outburst of the spirit of doubt and inquiry,
is enormous. The public mind is confused about
it, and alternately overestimates and underestimates
the press, failing to see how integral and representative
a part it is of modern life.
“The power of the press,”
as something to be feared or admired, is a favorite
theme of dinner-table orators and clergymen. One
would think it was some compactly wielded energy,
like that of an organized religious order, with a
possible danger in it to the public welfare. Discrimination
is not made between the power of the printed word which
is limitless and the influence that a newspaper,
as such, exerts. The power of the press is in
its facility for making public opinions and events.
I should say it is a medium of force rather than force
itself. I confess that I am oftener impressed
with the powerlessness of the press than otherwise,
its slight influence in bringing about any reform,
or in inducing the public to do what is for its own
good and what it is disinclined to do. Talk about
the power of the press, say, in a legislature, when
once the members are suspicious that somebody is trying
to influence them, and see how the press will retire,
with what grace it can, before an invincible and virtuous
lobby. The fear of the combination of the press
for any improper purpose, or long for any proper purpose,
is chimerical. Whomever the newspapers agree
with, they do not agree with each other. The
public itself never takes so many conflicting views
of any topic or event as the ingenious rival journals
are certain to discover. It is impossible, in
their nature, for them to combine. I should as
soon expect agreement among doctors in their empirical
profession. And there is scarcely ever a cause,
or an opinion, or a man, that does not get somewhere
in the press a hearer and a defender. We will
drop the subject with one remark for the benefit of
whom it may concern. With all its faults, I believe
the moral tone of the American newspaper is higher,
as a rule, than that of the community in which it is
published.