Until now, the Newspaper Trusts have been more fortunate, partly because certain classes of advertisers have been induced to spend much more money, partly because of the economies effected by the wholesale discharge of staffs consequent on the so-called amalgamation of papers which have been bought only that they might be “killed”;[4] and in part because the results of acquiring share-holdings at fancy prices have yet to materialise.
[4] “The Yorkshire Evening Argus having been amalgamated with the Bradford Daily Telegraph, the Editor of the former paper (Mr. J. W. Masters) confidently recommends the members of his loyal and competent staff to all who need literary assistance, and would be glad to receive applications from editors and others having positions to offer.”—Advertisement in the Times, December 15, 1926.
This prosperity cannot be expected to last indefinitely. The newspaper brokers, that new class of financial intermediary which is playing so significant a part in the making of “deals” in public opinion, have done uncommonly well out of their buyings and sellings. They may still do well in the immediate future, but they have no concern with the ultimate prosperity of the industry. The future position of share-holders in the Press Trusts does not seem so assured as they imagine to-day. As profits decline, or fail to increase in accordance with expectations, the dictators will decree reductions in expenditure, beginning with the human material which has created their profits and their goodwill. The desire for economy, which is on the whole more likely to be attained by means of centralised administration than with a number of separate and individual undertakings, will obviously outweigh any arguments that might be brought forward in favour of “unscrambling” the Press Trusts, or splitting up the Combines into smaller undertakings. Furthermore, when the Trusts feel the pinch, or regard their profits as insufficiently bloated, the ambition to drive out what remains of the Independent Press will be accentuated, and yet more journals outside the Combines will be forced to surrender.
With the process of Trustification has come a complete change in the character of the Controllers of the Press. Men such as Delane of the Times were great editors, that is, great journalists, who stamped their impress on an age which still held to the belief that the editor was responsible for the editorial policy of his paper, and was something more than the mere paid servant of his proprietors, to be engaged and discharged as one “hires and fires” a scullery maid. Men such as Northcliffe (with all his faults a great man and one with a touch of that indefinable quality which we term genius) were possessed of creative ideas; they had vision and ideals; they saw in the newspaper something more than a mere instrument for money-making. If they made money it was not because it was their primary ambition to do so, or even because they particularly cared about money, but because their creations could not help attaining a considerable degree of material success.
To-day, with negligible exceptions which are unlikely to be perpetuated, editors are merely hired servants. A. C. P. Scott is an exception.[5] Another Delane is an impossibility. Another Northcliffe is unthinkable, since the new Dictators have fashioned the rôle of the Press, and their own rôle, after a diametrically opposite conception.
[5] Editor of the Manchester Guardian, and controller of its editorial policy.
In the stead of the Delanes and the Northcliffes, we have control by self-seeking millionaires with a megalomaniac itch for interference. A dozen years ago, the spectacle of a newspaper proprietor expressing on the front page of his principal organ his entire disagreement with the opinions of his dramatic critic on an entirely undistinguished play would have been incredible. Such an outrage on taste is symptomatic of the dictatorship by the new Overlords of the Press. Here we have yet another manifestation of the amateur’s conception of journalism. Anyone, thinks the modern proprietor, can be a dramatic critic, a musical critic, a literary critic, a Parliamentary correspondent, an editor, especially if his name be known to the public in a capacity entirely unrelated to journalism. If he be a peer or possess a courtesy title, then he is the beau ideal of journalism.[6]
[6] “Anyone can write leading articles,” the author was once solemnly assured by one of our best-known editors. He was neither endeavouring to be humorous nor to be cynical; he was merely expressing what the Conductors of the Press themselves think of the Press which they conduct.
Amateurishness and the love of interference also combine to give us the ponderous signed contributions with which newspaper proprietors regularly favour their own journals. Whether these articles are in every instance, or in any instance, actually written by their signatories, is a matter with which I have no immediate concern. But they are significant of the driving forces behind the modern Press Trust; they exemplify the rôle of the Press as an engine of propaganda, self-advancement, and self-advertisement, for its millionaire owners.
To quote Mr. St. John Ervine: