Add a crossword puzzle, and you have a newspaper. Democracy’s Mentor.
New inventions and institutions achieve popularity in accordance with the readiness with which they lend themselves to vulgarisation. So it has been with wireless and the kinema, and so it is with the Press. Cynics may say that every country has the newspapers it deserves, but that begs the question. The mass of the public undoubtedly likes its newspapers well enough (without having any very great respect for them) but it also likes novels and film plays entirely devoid of artistic value, just as it likes third-rate music and fourth-rate pictures. The real question is how far is popular taste natural, and how far has it been debauched by those who aim at giving the public what it wants, or what it is supposed to want. A brewer who succeeds in inducing his customers to acquire a taste for doctored or synthetic beer may be entitled to say that he is giving them what they like. But he is not entitled to say that they are incapable of appreciating unadulterated malt and hops, or that they would really prefer the genuine article if they were allowed a free choice between the two.
When compulsory schooling led to an immense and sudden increase in the number of people able to read without difficulty, well-meaning enthusiasts rejoiced at the prospect of the artisan beguiling his leisure with Dante, Milton, Schopenhauer, Ruskin, Darwin, George Eliot, or the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Actually, these newcomers to the world of letters turned mostly to the penny novelette and the “bitty” weekly. They might have patronised something better if the pioneers of reading matter for the million had made the experiment of seeing whether there was a market for something better. But the experiment was not made. And it was on the basis of a culture largely represented by the “snippety” weekly, that the creators of newspapers for the million began to build about a generation ago.
Let it be conceded that their intentions were largely laudable. The appeal of the newspaper had previously been restricted to a degree almost incredible to contemporary men and women under thirty. The daily paper was the preserve of the well-to-do and the “comfortable classes”; the masses bought evening papers for racing tips and other sporting information, and on Sundays they were regaled with a ragôut of the murders, the robberies, the assaults, the divorces, and the more unsavoury police court cases of the week. Journals of international repute, such as the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Neue Freie Presse, the Journal des Débats, sold fewer copies in a week than the popular organs now dispose of in a day.
The Harmsworths, the Pearsons, the Hearsts, were to change all that. In order to make the daily paper a necessity, or a habit, of the masses, it was essential to depart from the pomposity of the older journals, with their long and platitudinous leading articles about nothing in particular, their unattractive “make-up,” their bald presentation of news, the immense length of their police court reports, and their adherence to the theory that the fall of a Cabinet in Patagonia was of more interest to the reader than a murder on his doorstep. The motto of the new Press was Brightness, Brevity, Enterprise, and Cheapness. It introduced photographs. It presented its news more attractively. It catered for the interests of women. It printed the light, but informative, article on topics of the day, often written by a specialist. It quickened up the transmission both of the news and of the newspaper. It aimed, in short, at mirroring passing events for the multitude rather than providing reading matter to be digested at leisure by the banker, the lawyer, the country gentleman, and the politician. And it succeeded remarkably—up to a point.
But man cannot live by brightness alone. And brightness became a fetish. Insensibly, and on the whole probably unconsciously, at least at first, the newspaper made excessive sacrifices in the pursuit of its passion for the purely readable. It concentrated on the tabloid and the snippet. It plastered its pages with pictures, so that we have reached the stage at which if Dean Inge, Bernard Shaw, the ex-Kaiser, President Coolidge, Mr. Lloyd George, or Mr. Charles Chaplin be mentioned on six consecutive days of the week by the same paper, each mention will be accompanied by a photograph, usually the same photograph, the size of a postage stamp. Similarly, the obsession of the Press for “human interest stories” (a characteristic legitimate enough in itself) has been developed to the point at which the wives and mothers of condemned murderers are interviewed directly after the verdict with a request for their comments on the justice of the sentence, while respectable householders are despatched with cameras to photograph the tears of miners’ widows after a colliery accident.
“Human interest” with a vengeance. But the worst feature of this vulgarisation of the popular Press is the resulting vulgarisation of the public. News editors would not instruct their reporters to interview divorcées, husbands whose wives have just been killed in motor accidents, or bereaved mothers, unless journalistic insistence as the “personal touch” had so greatly succeeded in banning decent reticence. The law does not punish such outrages on public taste, although it punishes many offences of far smaller detriment to the community.
Side by side with vulgarisation is persistent falsification of values. The Press promotes mass hysteria, as is shown by the excesses accompanying the visits of American film stars to England or of European queens to the United States. It consistently denounces the very evils, or imaginary evils for whose creation it is itself so largely responsible, finding, for instance, good “copy” both in detailed descriptions of a play alleged to be lewd, and in criticisms of the same play by clergymen who have not seen it. And it is driving privacy from the world by its discovery of the new creed that if the pen be mightier than the sword, the camera is mightier than either.
Insistence on the personal note has also brought in its train a Mumbo-Jumbo belief in the virtue of names. It is assumed that the public will attach more importance to an article signed with a name with which it is familiar than by an unsigned contribution, and although this theory is based on a certain element of fact, it is in practice overworked to the point of nausea. The reader will no doubt attach special importance to an article under the signature of Arnold Bennett, or H. G. Wells, especially if it deal with a subject with which the writer is particularly identified. He will also be more impressed by an article on tennis by Suzanne Lenglen than by an equally good but anonymous contribution. But is he equally impressed by the fact that a column of platitudes on motherhood, the contemporary young woman, or the decay of church-going, is signed by a, no doubt, estimable lady, whose only claim to public distinction is that she is the wife of an ex-Lord Mayor or the bearer of an obscure Hungarian title? Editors and proprietors apparently think so, thus indicating their cynical estimate of the level of public intelligence.
Furthermore, this passion for names is responsible for the perpetration of the grossest frauds on the public. It is notorious in Fleet Street that articles alleged to be contributed by politicians, musical comedy actresses, film stars, and professional footballers are, in fact, often not written by the illustrious who are their reputed authors. Indeed, the illustrious are as like as not incapable of writing a page of grammatical English, as is also the case with the self-advertising commercial magnate, whose reputed views on economic questions or industrial co-operation, neatly typed and flanked by carefully touched-up photographs, descend on the desks of editors in the company of the pigeon-English letters of pushful publicity agents.