“Wasn’t there a shooting scrape over a woman in a big West-Side apartment?... Being kept by the chap that was shot, wasn’t she?... Oh, a bank clerk?... Well, that’s a pretty dull-looking seventh page. Why not lift this text of the new Suburban Railways Bill and spread the shooting across three columns? Get Sanderson to work out a diagram and do one of his filmy line drawings of the girl lying on the couch. And let’s be sure to get the word ‘Banker’ into the top head.”
Or he would deliver a practical lecture from a text picked out of what to a less keen-scented news-hound might have appeared an unpromising subject.
“Can’t we round out that disappearance story a little; the suburban woman who hasn’t been seen since she went to New York three days ago? Get Capron to fake up a picture of the home with the three children in it grouped around Bereaved Husband, and—here, how would something like this do for caption: ‘“Mamma, Mamma! Come Back!” Sob Tiny Tots.’ The human touch. Nothing like a bit of slush to catch the women. And we’ve been going a little shy on sentiment lately.”
The “human touch,” though it became an office joke, also took its place as an unwritten law. Severance’s calm and impersonal cynicism was transmuted into a genuine enthusiasm among the copy-readers. Headlining took on a new interest, whetted by the establishment of a weekly prize for the most attractive caption. Maximum of sensationalism was the invariable test.
Despite his growing distaste for the Severance cult, Banneker was honest enough to admit that the original stimulus dated from the day when he himself had injected his personality and ideas into the various departments of the daily. He had established the new policy; Severance had done no more than inform it with the heated imaginings and provocative pictorial quality inherent in a mind intensely if scornfully apprehensive of the unsatiated potential depravities of public taste. It was Banneker’s hand that had set the strings vibrating to a new tune; Severance had only raised the pitch, to the nth degree of sensationalism. And, in so far as the editorial page gave him a lead, the disciple was faithful to the principles and policies of his chief. The practice of the news columns was always informed by a patently defensible principle. It paeaned the virtues of the poor and lowly; it howled for the blood of the wicked and the oppressor; it was strident for morality, the sanctity of the home, chastity, thrift, sobriety, the People, religion, American supremacy. As a corollary of these pious standards it invariably took sides against wealth and power, sentimentalized every woman who found her way into the public prints, whether she had perpetrated a murder or endowed a hospital, simpered and slavered over any “heart-interest story” of childhood (“blue-eyed tot stuff” was the technical office term), and licked reprehensive but gustful lips over divorce, adultery, and the sexual complications. It peeped through keyholes of print at the sanctified doings of Society and snarled while it groveled. All the shibboleths of a journalism which respected neither itself, its purpose, nor its readers echoed from every page. And this was the reflex of the work and thought of Errol Banneker, who intimately respected himself, and his profession as expressed in himself. There is much of the paradoxical in journalism—as, indeed, in the life which it distortedly mirrors.
Every other newspaper in town caught the contagion; became by insensible degrees more sensational and pornographic. The Patriot had started a rag-time pace (based on the same fundamental instinct which the rhythm of rag-time expresses, if the psychologists are correct) and the rest must, perforce, adopt it. Such as lagged in this Harlot’s Progress suffered a loss of circulation, journalism’s most condign penalty. For there are certain appetites which, once stimulated, must be appeased. Otherwise business wanes!
Out of conscious nothing, as represented by the now moribund News, there was provoked one evening a large, round, middle-aged, smiling, bespectacled apparition who named himself as Rudy Sheffer and invited himself to a job. Marrineal had sent him to Severance, and Severance, ever tactful, had brought him to Banneker. Russell Edmonds being called in, the three sat in judgment upon the Big Idea which Mr. Sheffer had brought with him and which was:
“Give ’em a laugh.”
“The potentialities of humor as a circulation agency,” opined Severance in his smoothest academic voice, “have never been properly exploited.”
“A laugh on every page where there ain’t a thrill,” pursued Sheffer confidently.