I
Newspaper manners and morals hardly fall into the category of minor manners and morals, which are supposed to be the especial care of the Easy Chair, but there are frequent texts upon which the preacher might dilate, and push a discourse upon the subject even to the fifteenthly. Indeed, in this hot time of an opening election campaign, the stress of the contest is so severe that the first condition of a good newspaper is sometimes frightfully maltreated. The first duty of a newspaper is to tell the news; to tell it fairly, honestly, and accurately, which are here only differing aspects of the same adverb. "Cooking the news" is the worst use to which cooking and news can be put. The old divine spoke truly, if with exceeding care, in saying, "It has been sometimes observed that men will lie." So it has been sometimes suspected that newspapers will cook the news.
A courteous interviewer called upon a gentleman to obtain his opinions, let us say, upon the smelt fishery. After the usual civilities upon such occasions, the interviewer remarked, with conscious pride: "The paper that I represent and you, sir, do not agree upon the great smelt question. But it is a newspaper. It prints the facts. It does not pervert them for its own purpose, and it finds its account in it. You may be sure that whatever you may say will be reproduced exactly as you say it. This is the news department. Meanwhile the editorial department will make such comments upon the news as it chooses." This was fair, and the interviewer kept his word. The opinions might be editorially ridiculed from the other smelt point of view, and they probably were so. But the reader of the paper could judge between the opinion and the comment.
Now an interview is no more news than much else that is printed in a paper, and it is no more pardonable to misrepresent other facts than to distort the opinions of the victim of an interview. Yet it has been possible at times to read in the newspapers of the same day accounts of the same proceedings of—of—let us say, as this is election time—of a political convention. The Banner informs us that the spirit was unmistakable, and the opinion most decided in favor of Jones. True, the convention voted, by nine hundred to four, for Smith, but there is no doubt that Jones is the name written on the popular heart. The Standard, on the other hand, proclaims that the popular heart is engraved all over with the inspiring name of Smith, and that it is impossible to find any trace of feeling for Jones, except, possibly, in the case of one delegate, who is probably an idiot or a lunatic. This is gravely served up as news, and the papers pay for it. They even hire men to write this, and pay them for it. How Ude and Carême would have disdained this kind of cookery! It is questionable whether hanging is not a better use to put a man to than cooking news. Sir Henry Wotton defined an ambassador as an honest man sent to lie abroad for the commonwealth. This kind of purveyor, however, does not lie for his country, but for a party or a person.
It is done with a purpose, the purpose of influencing other action. It is intended to swell the paean for Jones or for Smith, and to procure results under false pretences. Procuring goods under false pretences is a crime, but everybody is supposed to read the newspapers at his own risk. Has the reader yet to learn that newspapers are very human? A paper, for instance, takes a position upon the Jones or Smith question. It decides, upon all the information it can obtain, and by its own deliberate judgment, that Jones is the coming man, or ("it has been observed that men will sometimes lie") it has illicit reasons for the success of Smith. Having thus taken its course, it cooks all the news upon the Smith and Jones controversy, in order that by encouraging the Jonesites or the Smithians, according to the color that it wears, it may promote the success of the side upon which its opinion has been staked. It is a ludicrous and desperate game, but it is certainly not the honest collection and diffusion of news. It is a losing game also, because, whatever the sympathies of the reader, he does not care to be foolishly deceived about the situation. If he is told day after day that Smith is immensely ahead and has a clear field, he is terribly shaken by the shock of learning at the final moment that he has been cheated from the beginning, and that poor Smith is dead upon the field of dishonor.
Everybody is willing to undertake everybody else's business, and an Easy Chair naturally supposes, therefore, that it could show the able editor a plan of securing and retaining a large audience. The plan would be that described by the urbane reporter as the plan of his own paper. It is nothing else than truth-telling in the news column, and the peremptory punishment of all criminals who cook the news, and "write up" the situation, not as it is, but as the paper wishes it to be. This is more than an affair of the private wishes or preferences of the paper. To cook the news is a public wrong, and a violation of the moral contract which the newspaper makes with the public to supply the news, and to use every reasonable effort to obtain it, not to manufacture it, either in the office or by correspondence.
(July, 1880)