Again, to take an example of complete suppression, the curtain may never be lifted by the Press on a political or other scandal of which the exposure is emphatically in the public interest. Such a boycott may be just as much due to the belief that the subject has no news value as to any ulterior reasons. But the injury to the community is the same in either event. Newspaper readers are not concerned with the motives animating editors and proprietors; they are concerned with the results of those motives.
V
The Newspaper of To-Morrow
The professional will not, of course, be entirely eliminated from journalism. Despite their love of the amateur, newspaper proprietors realise that his place is not among the reporters, the news editors, the sub-editors, the financial editors, or the “art editors”—whose concern lies not with art, but with news photographs. As to editors, that is another matter. The rôle of editor tends more and more to become that of conduit pipe between staff and proprietary, whose views and policy he is called on to expound and further. So that the amateur will add the editorial chair to his Press conquests. Indeed, he has already made a beginning.
One figures the popular “dailies” of the next decade, with their signed articles by film stars, politicians, jockeys, footballers, tennis players, and racing motorists. One visualises their Women’s Page, Beauty Hints, and Guide to the Fashions, ostensibly conducted by popular actresses whose time is already fully occupied in meeting the conflicting claims of the Stage and of “Society.” One foresees the daily sermon by the proprietor’s pet divine, and the daily health article by the medical man who regards the stylo as more lucrative than the scalpel. One foresees also an immense increase in the number of photographs and other pictures, aided by the development of telephotography, television, and air transport. The motorist, the golfer, the collector of antique furniture, the amateur gardener, the investor, will find more space devoted to their special interests. There may even be room for an increase in the amount of space (if not of the quality) devoted to book reviews, although this forecast is admittedly optimistic. (What the public is supposed to want is not literary criticism, but “gossip” about the personal habits, the clothes, the recreations, the holidays, and the monetary earnings of authors.)
The leading articles will remain, partly through conservatism, and in part because of their utility for purposes of propaganda and “uplift.” The serial story will improve in quality, since that is one of the logical sequences of the passion for well-known names. More and larger prizes will be awarded for guessing contests and other competitions. The scope of newspaper insurance will be extended, although this function may ultimately be curtailed or even cease when the process of Trustification has gone so far that individual journals will no longer be under the necessity of trying to abstract each others’ readers. The pictures and stories for the nursery (and what the nursery really thinks of some of these efforts for its entertainment would surprise their purveyors) will be raised to the dignity of a whole page, complete with editor, the latter probably the wife of an ex-Cabinet Minister. The Sabbath will be kept holy by an increase in the space devoted to autobiographies of contemporary criminals and the retelling of old crimes. In short, the Newspaper will have travelled a stage further on the road to supplant the book, to supplement the playhouse.
It is pertinent at this point to refer to one of the seeming paradoxes of the modern Press, the diminution of its influence as its circulation and wealth have increased. Strictly speaking, the process has rather been one of a shifting of the centre of influence. When circulations were small, readers belonged to the influential classes. A leading article in the Times could cause the Cabinet to reflect, could influence European chancelleries, could even exercise a definite effect on projected legislation. In much the same way as the importance of the individual voter has diminished with every broadening of the basis of the franchise, so has the nature of the old influence of the Press on public affairs declined with growth in circulations.
“Government by newspaper” has been denounced by politicians when the views expressed by a journal have not happened to coincide with theirs, but hitherto it is the endeavour rather than the realisation which has been criticised. A newspaper can and does influence the Cabinet in relatively unimportant matters, such as the propriety of commercial advertising by post-mark; it no longer succeeds in swaying the Administration in the matter of a first-class legislative measure, or in inducing it to sanction a reform or a change desired by the majority of electors; despite almost unanimous newspaper criticism of the retention of certain war-time regulations, such as those governing the hours during which it is licit to sell chocolate or cigarettes, the Home Secretary is still able to say that he is so far unaware of any widespread public demand for a relaxation of these restrictions.[9]
[9] Since this has been written, a committee has been set up to inquire into the regulations in question.
But against the decline in the direct political influence of the Press there has to be set the growth of its influence over the community. The expansion both of circulations and of the field of interests catered for by the newspaper, already touched on in these pages, has helped immensely to develop the “newspaper habit.” It is a matter of elementary psychology that the average man and woman cannot help being influenced by the day-to-day exposition of political and other questions in the columns of their newspapers. Let any journal adopt the consistent policy of blackening the leaders of Soviet Russia or belauding Mussolini, and the infamy of the Bolsheviks or the disinterestedness and greatness of the Italian dictator becomes a creed to hundreds of thousands. Let the whole Press unite in the same shout, and that is the tendency under its present controllers, and the result is mass suggestion of a nature and intensity which causes the Press to mould the public opinion of whole nations. So that although an individual newspaper or a combination of newspapers may be powerless directly to affect the policy of a Cabinet, it is daily operating to sway the minds of the people and thus, indirectly, to sway Governments through the ultimate effect of mass suggestion in action during the period of a general election or a political crisis.