The Dictators of Public Opinion thus enlarge their realm. It may be asked why, granted that the disappearance of existing Independent Newspapers is inevitable, new Independent organs do not make their appearance. The answer is that few undertakings involve the risk of such great loss, coupled with so much uncertainty and the necessity of putting up so much working capital to provide for possible losses during the first two or three years of existence, as the launching of a great newspaper. Excluding a journal subsidised by Labour organisations, only one serious attempt has been made in England during the last twenty years to found a new morning paper of national scope. It failed, after its millionaire proprietor had tired of losing money on the venture. The last attempt to establish a new London evening paper failed on the score of finance, distribution alone (i.e., getting the paper into the hands of readers after it had been printed) costing a thousand pounds a week. London, which is the journalistic centre of the United Kingdom (the small size of the country making possible the “nation-wide” newspaper, with which there is nothing really comparable in the United States), has actually far fewer morning and evening papers than twenty years ago.
It has more Sunday papers. But that is one of the results of Trustification. By placing a Sunday paper under the same control as one or more morning and evening journals, overhead charges, which eat up money in the newspaper industry, are largely reduced. Administrative and mechanical costs are lowered. Each paper in the Combine can give free publicity to the rest. Distribution costs are shared. Against such conditions, the lone hand fights a losing battle, and economic factors operate as much against the creation of new Independent journals as they operate for the absorption of those still in existence.
Since the armistice, the process of Trustification has undergone a remarkable acceleration. It has also entered on a new and immensely significant phase, the unification of control of publications of the most widely differing nature, thus bringing illustrated weeklies, fashion papers, monthly magazines, technical and trade journals, children’s weeklies and monthlies, and directories and other works of reference under the same ownership as morning, evening, and Sunday Newspapers. The modern Combine will even control the manufacture of its paper, and the supply of raw material for the purpose.[3]
[3] See [Appendix].
Such comprehensive Trustification may either assume the shape of complete amalgamation of separate companies, or be effected by the process known as unification of interests, in which a common control is brought about by such means as the presence of the same men, or their nominees, on the boards of companies which retain their corporate entity but are animated by a common policy and administered to serve common interests. The result is in either instance the same.
The world has never known anything comparable. A handful of men, sitting over a luncheon table, can decree what the community is to think, what it is to be told, what it is not to be told. So we have reached the “Fordisation” of the intellect, which works through mass suggestion reinforced by damnable iteration. And this is mainly the work, not of men with missions, not of enthusiasts, or patriots, or men of culture, not even of journalists, but of men who have “gone into” the newspaper industry as they might have “gone into” the establishment of bacon-curing factories.
Does it require a prophet to forecast the colossal influence of the Dictators on the opinions, the conduct, and the ideals of the next generation?
For the process of Trustification cannot be arrested. Law and public opinion are alike powerless to stem it. No Anti-Trust legislation, as has been proved by America, is ever or can ever be of the smallest effect, since there are too many means of evading the spirit of the law while adhering to the letter. Interlocking directorates, ownership of shares carrying control over the entire undertaking, secret arrangements for pooling profits, are among the common methods adopted in order to set up a de facto Trust when it may not be legal or politic to establish a Trust in name. Newspapers which succeed in maintaining a semblance of independent ownership and independent policy will thus be brought within the orbit of the Combines although they may nominally remain outside. The Trusts will become Super-Trusts, and the Press of the whole country may be dominated by two, three, or even one combine, with a single individual as Arch-Dictator.
The process is inevitable, even if only for the reason that the splitting up of a Trust that has once been formed entails reduction in profits. Northcliffe, who was above and beyond everything else a journalist, aimed merely at the supreme control of the journals created by his genius. The contemporary Dictators, who are not journalists, aim at dominion over the whole field of the Press. They have already gone most of the way towards attaining their ambition.
A special factor which has received very little consideration will operate in the near future towards the tightening of the stranglehold of the Press Combines. Trustification of the Newspaper Industry has recommended itself to financiers on the ground, inter alia, that it enables expenditure to be cut down. The history of nearly every industrial combine, excepting those affecting the Press, has since the armistice been one of profits that have failed to come up to the promoters’ estimates. In numerous instances, despite the considerable economies foreshadowed in the prospectus, earnings have been materially lower than those of the former separate undertakings now under one control. Indeed, the process of amalgamation or of acquiring controlling interests has during the past few years been in general disappointing to share-holders.