Corruption in professional life may be held to involve virtually all of our social leadership outside of business and politics. Apart from the specific services rendered by the various professions their principal practitioners are instinctively looked up to by the community for guidance. In a broad sense all professional men are teachers. Corruption in the professions is thus equivalent to the defilement of the sources of public instruction. Yet precisely on this ground very sweeping and bitter accusations are made. Law, journalism, and the higher education are more frequently attacked, but medicine, philanthropy, and theology also come in for criticism. To cite specific instances:—editors are accused of wholesale misrepresentation and suppression of news in behalf of sinister interests; college professors, assumed to be subtly bribed by munificent endowments, are reproached as the crafty inventors of philosophic excuses for menacing public evils; lawyers are denounced as servile hirelings who “justify the wicked for reward” and who accept crooked corporation or political work without demur; ministers, philanthropic workers, and other leaders of thought are said to be purchased by large contributions, gifts of parks, playgrounds, hospitals, and so on.[41] There are many modern Micahs who go about saying of our people that “the heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money.”
Corruption of the sources of public instruction is manifestly replete with the potency of evil. If a nation’s “men of light and leading” fail in their function the case is hopeless indeed. Moreover the regulation of the various sources of public instruction is a task the complexity of which far excels that of any problem presented by the other forms of corruption. No insuperable technical difficulty is involved, for example, in prescribing the standard of pure milk, the proper safety devices for theatres, the best method of fencing dangerous machinery in mills, the adequate safeguarding of the interests of policy holders in life insurance companies. But who will tell us with authority exactly what is news and what isn’t; who will define explicitly the standard of orthodoxy for university instruction in economics and political science; who will provide ministers of the gospel with a social creed drawn up with the precision and free from the dogmatic differences of their theological creeds? It is not strange, therefore, that although there has been much vague talk of “tainted money,” proposals for the legal definition and regulation of its alleged pernicious consequences have been wanting. We already have extended and complicated legal systems of inspection and regulation of many of the material goods of life, while but little has been done or even concretely outlined in the direction of state supervision of ideal goods and services.
Great as are the technical difficulties in the way of the latter policy, the real reason for its lack of advocates would seem to lie in the partial efficiency of the various ancient and highly socialised codes of professional ethics. Competition in the economic world has not been similarly safeguarded from within. With the breakdown of the guild system and the sudden changes introduced by the industrial revolution business found itself upon an uncharted sea. Laisser faire, laisser aller seemed perfectly obvious in this spacious time of untouched world markets, but latterly distances have dwindled, density has increased, and collisions with social norms have become increasingly frequent. Too often and too easily competition has been pushed beyond the limits of social safety. In the economic struggle the “twentieth mean man” has been able to wield compulsory power over his nineteen decent competitors and to force them on pain of bankruptcy to adopt his own lower standards. The professional “mean men,” on the other hand, knew from the start that they were derogating from the ethics of their fellow practitioners, and in many cases were brought quickly to book for it. Here rather than in any differences of personal integrity must be found the reason for the higher moral reputation enjoyed by professional as compared with business men. It is impossible to believe that of the brothers of the family the black sheep always went into business and the good boys into medicine or the ministry. Finally we may expect the general immunity of the professions from state regulation to continue just so long as they develop progressively their own police systems. In this connection it is significant that that one of them which has been most frequently and severely accused of abetting corruption in economic and political fields, namely the law, is precisely the one which has shown the most concern recently in the reformation of its code of ethics.[42] Obviously such sanitary processes may be materially hastened by the pressure from without of a forceful and honest popular feeling in opposition to abuses which have grown up in professional practice.
The greatest immediate influence upon public opinion is exerted, of course, by journalism. The question of its corruption or corruptibility is, therefore, one of prime importance. Accusations against the press on this score are common enough, but few of them are so sweeping as the following attributed to the late John Swinton, formerly of the New York Sun and Tribune.[43] At a banquet of the New York Press Association in 1895, in response to a toast on “The Independent Press” he is reported to have said:
“There is no such thing in America as an independent press unless it is in the country towns. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dare express an honest opinion. If you express it, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 per week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should permit honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, like Othello, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of the New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and race for his daily bread; or for what is about the same thing, his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an ‘independent press.’ We are tools, and the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, all are the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
It is hardly probable that any one not himself accustomed to drafting headlines could have so far exaggerated a situation, even under post-prandial influences, as did the author of the above paragraph. Whatever may be the measure of the sinning of any newspaper, certainly no single sheet has ever been the corrupt apologist for all anti-social interests. A paper which at any one time should attempt to stand for unsanitary tenement houses, for child labour, for quack medicines, for “embalmed” beef, for “tainted money” colleges, for monopoly tactics in beating down small competitors, for life insurance frauds, for the spoils system, the stealing of elections, and franchise grabbing,—or for any considerable number of these,—would certainly lose its influence with extreme suddenness. Newspapers are of all kinds, of course. They differ even more in character than do individuals. As the focal points of every interest in a community the interests of a newspaper are much more diverse than those of the individual, and, as in the case of the individual, these interests are shot through and through with the noble and the base. Few people who are unfamiliar with the practical making of newspapers realise what a constant and bitter struggle is being waged in many cases to keep them free from selfish and dishonest influences. In other instances, of course, the partial triumph of the counting-room is palpable. Advertising columns still carry, although with much less frequency than formerly, the insertions of get-rich-quick schemes, of bucket-shops, of salary-loan sharks, of quack doctors, quack medicines, and clairvoyants. Of course these are frankly presented as paid matter, and every reader of intelligence understands that they are inspired by the directly selfish motives of the advertiser. When one thinks of the poor, the ignorant, and the sick, who are exploited through such agencies, however, the despicable character of the abuse is manifest. In some papers, also, the reader finds abundant evidence of the activities of press and publicity bureaus working in the interest of certain forms of business. Morally this abuse is much worse than the foregoing, for it throws off the form of advertising and clothes itself as news or editorial opinion.
Large advertisers, particularly since the development of daily full page announcements by department stores, also insist at times, and not always ineffectually, upon exerting influence over news and editorial columns. A pitch of absurdity seldom realised in this connection was exemplified by the silence or approval with which the press of one of our largest cities, a single paper honourably excepted, treated the clearly mistaken philanthropy of a certain wealthy merchant who had established many distributing stations for sterilised, rather than Pasteurised milk. The paralysing effect of box office influence upon sincere and vigorous dramatic criticism is another deplorable instance of the same sort.
Finally there are papers which, however free they may keep themselves from outside interests, nevertheless represent the immediate political or economic ambitions of their owners. It is easy to exaggerate this abuse not only with regard to its present extent absolutely considered, but also with reference to its contemporary development as compared with the press of the past. In its earlier periods journalism was almost universally the tool of party. During the civil war,—the epoch of great editorial personalities,—political ambitions constantly invaded the sanctum with the result that the gross unfairness and bitter partisanship engendered by the times were doubly and trebly emphasised in the columns of the press. The new journalism which began its career about 1875 not only prints more news but prints it more fairly than the old school. Of course most of our papers are still the recognised organs of some party, but they are far from being servile and characterless advocates of every party policy. Moreover there is a considerable number of politically independent papers, some of which are avowedly so, while others are really so although they may still wear lightly some party emblem. Fearless, continued criticism of public abuses is more and more coming to be recognised as good policy both for a paper and for the commonweal.
Unfortunately there is another side to this record of improvement and achievement. Perhaps the most important single difference between the old personal journalism and the journalism of to-day is the large capitalistic character of the latter. When the mechanical outfit of a city paper could be supplied with a comparatively small sum of money, the personality of the editor was all important, although, as we have seen, even this favouring economic condition did not by any means produce uncorrupted journalism. At the present time large capital is necessary not only to provide the equipment, but also to meet the heavy losses of the few inevitable lean years at the outset. In most cases the money is contributed by one man or by a comparatively small number of men whose other business interests are likely to be very harmonious if not already consolidated. In consequence there is a common, and withal very human, tendency on the part of the paper thus established and owned to deal favourably under all circumstances with the financial interest or group of interests back of it. This is the typical journalistic danger of the present period, just as the political bee in the editor’s bonnet was the typical evil of the old personal journalism. Legislation requiring newspapers to print the names of their principal owners, and to deposit full lists of stockholders in some state office of record where they could be made available to all comers, ought to limit considerably the possibility of capitalistic manipulation of the press. By revealing facts regarding financial control which at best can only be suspected at the present time, publicity of this character would enable readers to make the necessary allowances for any undue form of counting-room control which might manifest itself in the editorial or news columns of a given paper. In spite of this and other shortcomings, however, most observers agree that the American press as a whole is more independent to-day than ever before.