Subsidies
Even before the War of Independence, the American press lived on subsidies. Our holier-than-thou “free” publishers love to point scornfully at the subsidies paid their “un-free” European rivals. These they call “bribes” to spread national propaganda. The American publisher can see the mote in his brother’s eye but not the beam in his own. For political parties, the government and private interests have at various times subsidized our papers—and still do. There is no secret about it. Any competent study of the business—The Daily Newspaper in America, by A. M. Lee, for instance—has the detailed story.
The United States government subsidizes the press by means of special mailing privileges. Postal rates for newspapers at newspapers. What price subsidy? In 1908, 64 per cent of all mail (by weight) was newspapers; it brought the Post Office but 4 per cent of its revenues. The press, for all its cries of rage at “government extravagance,” insists on continuance of this patronage. The welcomed “handout” costs taxpayers from $25,000,000 to $10,000,000 a year, it is estimated.
Second-class mailing privileges and the like are only a minor factor in the subsidy system. Preferential wire rates for news is the big thing. Billions of news-words transmitted each year ordinarily get their low rates from private companies owning the telephone, telegraph, wireless, radio, cable and other facilities. But all communications are matters of public franchise and the preferential rates were the result of State intervention.
The recently published Report From the Commission on Freedom of the Press further reveals how government directly intervenes by creating communications. During World War II the armed services tripled telecommunications mileage and fabulously multiplied capacity. Against a pre-war private cable-wireless capacity of 12,500,000 words a day, “the service networks have done as much as 50,000,000 words per day.” The new State-created communications include marvelous technological advances such as multiple-address newscasting, simultaneous broadcasting of several messages through the same microphone, and facsimile newscasting.
Where the State creates and controls communications, subsidizing them, is it not nonsense to speak of the press—the communications-based news industry—as independent of the State?
What Is News?
Still more deeply hidden is a curious twist in the character of news itself. What is news? A well-worn “gag” accurately describes the publishing industry’s concept. “If a man bites a dog, that’s news.” There is nothing unexpected, nothing unusual, nothing sensational about a dog biting a man; hence, that isn’t news. In short, an accurate picture of what is happening is not news. News is a name for unrelated, torn-from-context events or incidents of a sensational character.
Man-bites-dog may be a gag but it is no joke. It contains the link between the obvious faults of our press and their hidden disease. The techniques by which American newspapers turn events into profit are all an expression of the man-bites-dog idea. The compulsory use of the “lead” and headline (with the consequent development of the “headline mentality” decried by the late President Roosevelt), is merely the final expression of the technical process. The whole process consists in finding or creating sensations to exploit. The object being to sell papers, not to maintain just values, “news” is not that which informs but that which sells another newspaper to a badgered reader. Not only complicated international affairs but even “local” stories are distorted beyond recognition of the facts by these techniques. The “crime waves” cooked up out of quite average statistics from time to time are a sample (whatever further reactionary ends they may serve).
The preoccupation with selling papers against fierce competition leads to the American practice of an edition every thirty seconds. This mania for speed, plus the man-bites-dog news formula, works to corrupt and discourage the men who handle news. At length, even the boasted accuracy of the press about elementary facts becomes a myth and a fraud. “The reliability of news accounts is far below what it was years ago ... the reporter is trained to look for the bizarre as all-important ...” writes Oswald Garrison Villard in The Disappearing Daily. Anyone who has ever figured in a news story knows that the printed “facts” have little to do with reality!