Our Benevolent Feudalism

by William J. Ghent

IV

It may be doubted if our commissioned teachers exert so great an influence upon opinion as do our newspapers. “The newspaper to-day,” said Archbishop Ireland recently before the National Educational Association, “is preëminently the mentor of the people; it is read by all; it is believed by nearly all. Its influence is paramount; its responsibility is tremendous.” There is much truth in this dictum, though something of qualification is needed. The newspaper, though not “read by all,” nor “believed by nearly all,” is indeed more widely read than ever before. If the census is to be believed, the circulation per issue of all daily, tri-weekly, semi-weekly, and weekly publications has grown in the last ten years from 38,000,000 to 58,000,000 copies. This is certainly a tremendous showing; but it is doubtful if the newspapers exert the direct sway over men’s minds which was exerted in earlier years. The influence effected is due less to the formal expression of opinion than to the color habitually given by them to the news. The eager question, “What does old Greeley say?” which was once so often heard, was a tribute to the power of an individual in whose rectitude and wisdom many thousands put a rarely wavering faith. Many a lesser editor had also his reverent disciples, who believed as he taught and voted as he urged.

But in our day the direct appeal of the newspaper is more hesitatingly obeyed. Frequently it has happened, in municipal elections, that a candidate or candidates have been elected in the face of an almost solid opposition of the press. A newspaper may be patronized for this or that special feature by persons who pay no attention to its editorials, by others who read them merely to learn an opposing view of things, and by others still—a far larger class—who, reading between the lines, choose for themselves what to rely upon and what to doubt. All the larger cities, and perhaps most of the smaller, have instances of newspapers which, appealing to some special interest, secure a considerable number of readers antipathetic to the political views expressed. It happens that radicals often read conservative publications, and that conservatives sometimes look upon radical print. The faithful devotees of a certain mercurial New York newspaper probably read it as eagerly in 1884, when it supported General Butler for the Presidency, as in 1892, when it supported Mr. Cleveland, or in 1896, when it went over to Major McKinley. But reliance upon editorial opinions is a wavering faith. A wiser discrimination is employed, a more cynical scepticism is maintained. When the New York newspaper which boasts of printing all the fit news publishes in its editorial columns the dictum that “the oversupply of labor in the anthracite region is due to the great attractiveness of the wages and the conditions of work,” none but the willing are convinced; and so for all the misjudgments, ignorant or deliberate, that are daily put forth by newspapers of all classes there are scoffers and sceptics as well as credulous believers.

For the recognition has become general that the average newspaper is owned and operated as a commercial property. As Mr. Brooke Fisher, in a recent number of the Atlantic, writes, the days when the editor hired the publisher are gone; it is now the publisher who hires the editor, and the counting-room determines the policy. Advertising is the material mainstay, and the merchants and magnates who have largesse to distribute must be humored. “Publishers,” says the interesting census bulletin on “Printing and Publishing,” “are depending more on advertising and less on subscriptions and sales for financial return.” Whether it be the sensational “yellows,” or the less sensational but characterless “pinks,” or the staid and ponderous “grays” of the press, the same rule holds. Even the religious journals make a like appeal. “A superfluity of religious weeklies,” says the best-known publication of that class, giving itself a left-handed pat on the shoulder, “with no other basis for existence than sectional or partisan pride, will not be tolerated nor supported by the laity; nor will advertisers much longer fail to discriminate between religious journals that are progressive [meaning, for example, itself] and are reaching well-to-do and intelligent people, and those which are not.” Statements of enormous sales, of vast subscription lists, are published in glaring type, and the phrase “greatest circulation in the city,” or State, or nation, or world, is trumpeted to the ears of the buyers of advertising space. There is still an appeal to the giver of largesse even when a publication cannot honestly boast of great circulation; the argument is then one of a “select” patronage—of “fit audience, though few,” but inferentially of great purchasing power.

The pressure upon editorial policy of this deference to the advertiser is constant and effective, and the result is apparent to most readers. Even the more rampant of the “yellows,” which daily shriek against political and social injustice, are affected by it. As mournful a philosopher as Heraclitus might have found food for humor in the manœuvres of the metropolitan newspapers some six years ago during the agitation for the passage of the Andrews bill. This measure required seats for women workers in all mercantile establishments. Now it happened that the heads of the department stores were in nearly every instance violently opposed to the bill, and it also happened that the amount of advertising from the great stores cut a very pretty figure in the income of the average metropolitan newspaper. To complete the dilemma the bill won great favor from the public. How the masterful purveyors of news and opinions to the people managed to extricate themselves from the difficulty, would make too long a story in the telling. But that they triumphantly surmounted it, is a matter of history.

With the advertiser in so commanding a position, it is not needed that a newspaper shall be owned by a magnate in order that it shall faithfully reflect the special interests of “business.” Yet that seigniorial funds are back of many of our important newspapers is a fact which to a person of intelligence needs no proof. The census bulletin, revealing the characteristic optimism of the compilers of the Twelfth Census, will have it that individual ownership is still the rule. The proportion of individually owned and operated publications is given as 63.3 per cent, of partnership concerns as 19.7 per cent, and of corporate concerns as 17 per cent. “These figures indicate,” we are told, “the complete absence of the extended combinations and consolidations so frequently encountered in other industries.” Yet there are combinations, whether individually or jointly owned,—the Hearst newspapers in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, the Ochs newspapers of Chattanooga, New York, and Philadelphia, the Belo newspapers of Texas, and those of the Scripps-McRae concern in the middle West. Only this last summer public announcement was made of a projected combination—under the control of Mr. P. F. Collier, and with a capital of $1,000,000—of a large number of country newspapers in the State of New York. The project has for the time been given up, but others of a like nature may fairly be expected for the future. Moreover, some of the features of the industrial combinations—identity of product, for instance—are discoverable in the so-called coöperative newspapers, which make use of plate matter or “patent-insides.” More than half of all the periodicals of the country are in this class. Finally, the chief commodity of newspapers of all classes—the news—is a trust product, a commodity in which the Associated Press serves the function of gatherer of raw material and manufacturer, and the periodical the function of assorter and retailer.

But the census figures reveal little or nothing to the point. Seigniorial backing, when actually given, is not usually made visible in the form of investment in newspaper stock. It is not to the best interests of the purveyor of news and opinions that it should be; for the public, with a fine sense of its own independence of judgment, requires that seigniorial influence shall be less obviously shown. The odor of Standard oil, the fumes of American tobacco, have proved fatal to more than one newspaper enterprise, and even the taint of railroad support has been shown to be harmful. There is thus the greatest need of discretion in arranging the nominal ownership; and the result is, that in many cases it is easier to discover the actual ownership of a policy game than the actual ownership of a newspaper. The curious can but surmise and wonder. When a chaste and well-ordered daily publication gives to a particular magnate’s house-warming the space of a column and a half, while its rivals—even the “yellows,” which deal in that sort of thing—consider the event worth no more than a half-column; or when another magnate is persistently “boomed” for a high office, or when for another a franchise grant is skilfully proposed, one may put two and two together, and apply the natural inferences. Inferences, however, are not proof, and the conclusion must remain doubtful.

But whether through the influence of potential advertising or of secret ownership, the magnate, or the magnate class, exercises a large measure of control, and the matter which appears is that which, on the whole, is agreeable to seigniorial minds. The coal magnates may be criticised, but it is not so much on account of their refusal to grant concessions to their men as for their failure to operate in defiance of their men. So, too, the trusts come in for occasional rough handling; but it is the abstract trust that is at fault: the individual trust usually goes scathless. Certain of the “yellows” furnish some exception to the general rule, though here, too, the influence of the great advertiser is shown, and one may vainly read the columns of the most radical of the anti-monopoly dailies for a suggestion that the great department stores are other than abodes of comfort and joy for all the souls employed therein.

Such is the newspaper bias, and the product of the hired writer must conform. Whether editing news or writing opinions, he must recognize the divinity that hedges in the magnate class. It was a savage, and in some respects extravagant, picture of the function of the hired newspaper worker which a brilliant journalist, now deceased, gave to the world a few years ago:—

“There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in the country towns. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Other editors are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello’s, would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for about the same thing, his salary. We are the tools of vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the strings, and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

But though in certain respects extravagant, it has yet faithful and accurate touches which are recognizable by every undeluded person who earns his living in the employment of the daily press. Perhaps, indeed, there are not many of the undeluded; for the recoil upon themselves of the character of their tasks does not, to say the least, sharpen the edge of conscience, and the service of a few years is generally believed to be effective in indurating the finest sensibilities.

It is not, as has been said, so much through their editorial expressions as through their coloring of the news that the weeklies and dailies mould the opinions of the mass. A growing scepticism averts the former influence; but against the latter there is no prophylactic. News is assorted, pruned, improved, to accord with a predetermined policy. From an anti-imperialist publication one gets small notion of other happenings in the Philippines than devastations, rapes, battle, murder, and sudden death; and from an administration organ one may learn only of Peace piping her “languid note,” of the diffusion of education, and the progress of industry, varied only now and then by slight outbreaks from a few ladrones. In the far more important matter of the irrepressible class conflict here at home, like influences color the news; and as ninety-nine out of every one hundred periodicals support, in greater or less degree, the existing régime, the impress upon the public mind is overwhelming. Some of the “yellows” set up a bar to the universal pervasion of this influence; and the activities of the social reformers, through their weekly journals, their tracts, and their public discussions, somewhat affect it. But, on the whole, these effects are but a ripple on the deep and powerful stream that fertilizes the opinions of the public.