Of newspaper influence Arthur Brisbane has said:
There never was a corrupt official who could hear without dread the growling of a hundred thousand human voices outside his door. There does not live a corrupt official, however hardened, who hears without alarm the opinions of a million men voiced through a newspaper which they trust.
Thackeray’s famous paragraph with reference to newspaper activities is often quoted as illustrating the power of the press through her writers. Pendennis and Warrington are passing a brilliantly lighted newspaper building. Reporters were coming out or were dashing up in cabs, and Warrington says:
Look at that, Pen. There she is—the great engine, she never sleeps. She has ambassadors in every quarter of the world—her couriers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies and her envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets. They are ubiquitous. Yonder journal has an agent at this minute giving bribes in Madrid; and another inspecting the price of potatoes at Covent Garden. Look, here comes the foreign express galloping in. They will be able to give news to Downing street tomorrow; funds will rise or fall, fortunes be made or lost; Lord B will get up, and holding the paper in his hand and seeing the noble Marquis in his place, will make a great speech; and Mr. Doolan will be called away from his supper at the back kitchen; for he is sub-editor and sees the mail on the newspaper sheet before he goes to his own.
It may be said of present-day news column influence that never have the news columns been so free from personal feeling, so fair to foe. The public has never had greater confidence in them. Almost all editors are honest in desire to print both sides of an important controversy. They have come to know it is best policy. The speeches of rival partisans, their communications, their activities, have well-nigh as conspicuous places in the sheet as do the utterances of their own champions. This helps to aid unbiased conclusion.
Public questions never have had such elaborate publicity as in recent years, never have been so intelligently understood; and public sentiment has not hitherto been so active or so influential.
Indeed, the spirit of independent fairness has become so acute that not infrequently the small minority gets a prominence that it does not deserve, with resulting danger that its activities may be mistaken for genuine public sentiment.
This spirit of fairness does not exist of course in all publications, but almost all newspapers are honest in their news columns. The sheets that deliberately falsify become fewer every year. The influence of the news columns has increased vastly.
For individual power and influence Lord Northcliffe stood supreme among editors. His personal triumphs during the war were decisive and far reaching. He destroyed one British cabinet and built another. He forced the reorganization of departments. He compelled changes of military policy and action and he flabbergasted pretty nearly everybody who opposed. One of his distinguished opponents lamented that Northcliffe was the most powerful man in England’s affairs since Cromwell.
His editorial voice reached all kinds of people through the score or more of daily, weekly, and monthly publications owned or controlled by him all over the British empire. He owned the Times that for more than one hundred years had endeared itself to the British well-to-do and upper classes for its trustworthy news reports, its superior editorial comment and its fearless political criticism. He owned the Evening Mail that scattered a million copies daily among the common people. He talked every day to millions of people, who, while not thinking profoundly were willing to be led by intellectual excellence.