Commercialism and Journalism

by Hamilton Holt

Examples of the use of press agents for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes could be extended almost indefinitely. The Standard Oil Company, I understand, now issues all its manifestoes to the public through a trained press-representative; and the fight against Messrs. Gompers, Mitchell, and Morrison, in the Buck Stove controversy, was conducted with the aid of a press bureau, as one of the lawyers in the case informed me. Whenever such a question comes before the people as the choice between the Nicaragua and Panama routes for the interoceanic canal, a press bureau is usually an important factor in the campaign. The big navy craze and the Japan war cry can hardly be accounted for except on the theory that it has been for somebody's interest to agitate them through the press. Whenever the Naval appropriation bill comes before Congress, the Far-Eastern war-clouds threaten in thousands of newspaper sanctums, while all of us shudder at the danger of war, for the benefit of ordnance manufacturers, battleship builders, and every incipient "Fighting Bob" who hopes some day to command another American Armada on its gastronomic voyage around the world.

Fortunately none of our papers are subsidized by the government itself, as is so often the case with the semi-official organs of Europe. Nor are any of our papers directly in the pay of foreign governments, though the espousal of the infamous reactionary régime in Russia by some of them is at least open to suspicion. The danger of manufactured public opinion in this country comes not from governments. Even the political parties are losing the allegiance of the press. The days when the Republican organs told the people the worst Republican was better than the best Democrat, and the Democratic papers said the same about the Republicans, have happily passed, never to return again, though the spirit still lingers in the organs of the Socialist, Populist, and Prohibition parties. The growth of the great politically-independent press is one of the most hopeful signs of the times.

But we have only jumped out of the frying-pan of politics into the fire of commercialism, and the fight of the future will therefore be to extricate ourselves from the fetters of commercialism, just as we have already broken away from the bonds of party politics.

But the press agent has come to stay. Indeed, his business has now assumed such proportions that the profession of anti-press agent will doubtless soon come into existence. I know already of one gentleman in New York whose aid has been invoked when people want things kept out of the papers. On more than one occasion he has prevented good spicy bits of scandal from seeing the light; though in his case I can aver that it was his personal influence with the editors, rather than any improper lubricant, that kept the papers silent.

Now let me turn from the press agent to the advertiser as a twister of editorial opinion. Here let me say at once, and with all emphasis, that the vast majority of advertisements are not only honest but dependable. Leaving out of account a few stock phrases which deceive nobody, such as "the most for the money," "the cheapest in the market," etc., what is said about the goods to be sold is not in the least overdrawn. I have taken the pains to go over the advertising columns of the leading papers and periodicals of New York during the month of February, and, with the exception of a few medical, financial, and perhaps real-estate advertisements, I could find absolutely nothing that on the face of it seemed fraudulent, and very little that was misleading. The advertisers have at last come to realize that for the long run, whatever the rule may be for the short run, it does not pay to overstate the qualities of their merchandise. You can now order your purchases by mail from the advertising pages of any reputable publication about as safely as over the counter of a store. At all events the phenomenal growth of the mail-order houses and their sales through advertising, lend strength to this opinion. On the 15th of March, 1909, a single Chicago mail-order house sent to the Post Office six million catalogues, weighing four hundred and fifty tons, and all were to be distributed within a week.

Many periodicals now claim that they will not take advertisements that look fraudulent or even misleading. Some papers, like the London "Times," have a guaranteed list of advertisements which they have investigated and vouch for, though naturally the advertisers have to pay extra for the guarantee.

"The Sunday School Times" printed, several weeks ago, a long list of secular papers that were "going dry," as so many of our Southern states. The fact that our best periodicals no longer accept liquor advertisements is another one of the encouraging signs of the coming of the new journalism.

The vigorous fight that "The Ladies' Home Journal" and "Collier's" waged against the patent-medicine concerns is too fresh in the public memory to need recounting here. The two pictures printed cheek by jowl in "The Ladies' Home Journal,"—one, of the tombstone above the mortal remains of Lydia E. Pinkham, whose inscription showed that she had been dead since 1883, and the other an advertisement representing Lydia in 1905, sitting in her laboratory at Lynn, Massachusetts, engrossed in assuaging the sufferings of ailing womanhood,—these are eloquent of the type of fraud perpetrated through the press upon a gullible public.

Similarly, in the negro papers the favorite advertisements are those that claim to straighten kinky hair and bleach complexions—all fakes, of course. Perhaps the most fraudulent advertisements, however, are those which purpose to sell mines in Brazil, Mexico, Alaska, or wherever else the investor is unlikely to go. These offer their shares often as low as ten cents each, and guarantee fabulous profits. I have a college classmate who is extensively interested in Mexican mines, and he tells me that literally 99 per cent of all the mining companies that float their shares through advertisements are pure, or rather impure, swindles. I am not in the least surprised, for I know how many letters come to a financial editor from the dupes of these slick mine promoters, asking advice as to how they can get their money back.

The most demoralizing advertisements are those paid for by loan-sharks, clairvoyants, medical quacks, and the votaries of vice. The New York "Herald" has recently stopped printing its vicious personals. It also refuses fortune-tellers the hospitality of its columns, though it is not so squeamish in regard to loan-agencies and patent medicines. How many papers still publish the advertisement of Mrs. Laudanum's soothing syrup for babies? When you remember that the proprietary medicine concerns have been accustomed to spend forty million dollars a year, which is distributed among the papers of the land, you can see that it requires considerable financial independence for a publisher to forego a taste of their patronage.