Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

With the decadence in all countries, certainly in America, of the journalist as a professional man in an honourable craft, there might conceivably have been a gain in objectivity, in the right sort of impersonality. Anonymity might have ensured a dispassionate fidelity to facts. But there has been no such gain. Responsibility has been transferred from the journalist to his employers, and he is on his mettle to please his employers, to cultivate whatever virtues are possible to journalism, accuracy, clearness of expression, zeal in searching out and interpreting facts, only in so far forth as his employers demand them, only as his livelihood and chances of promotion depend on them. The ordinary journalist, being an ordinary human being, must prefer to do honest work; for there is no pleasure in lying, though there is a temptation to fill space with unfounded or unverified statements. And if his manager orders him to find a story where there is no story, or to find a story of a certain kind where the facts lead to a story of another kind, he will not come back empty-handed lest he go away empty-handed on pay-day. Any one who has worked in a newspaper office knows that the older men are likely to be weary and cynical and that the younger men fall into two classes, those who are too stupid to be discontented with any aspect of their position except the size of their salaries, and those who hope either to rise to the better paid positions, or to “graduate,” as they put it, from daily journalism to other kinds of literary work.

The journalist, then, should be acquitted of most of the faults of journalism. Mr. Walter Lippmann says in his sane little book, “Liberty and the News”: “Resistance to the inertias of the profession, heresy to the institution, and willingness to be fired rather than write what you do not believe, these wait on nothing but personal courage.” That is a little like saying that the harlot can stop harlotry by refusing to ply her trade—which is indeed the attitude of some people in comfortable circumstances. I doubt if Mr. Lippmann would have written just as he did if he had ever had to depend for his dinner on pleasing a managing editor, if he had not been from very early in his brilliant career editor of a liberal endowed journal in which he is free to express his beliefs. Most newspaper men are poor and not brilliant. The correspondents whom Mr. Lippmann mentions as “eminences on a rather flat plateau” are nearly all men who have succeeded in other work than newspaper correspondence, and if not a newspaper in the world would hire them, most of them could afford to thumb their noses at the Ochses, Reids, and Harmsworths. Personal courage is surely a personal matter, and it can seldom be effective in correcting the abuses of an institution, especially when the institution can hire plenty of men of adequate if not equal ability to take the place of the man of stubborn integrity. I know one journalist who lost his position as managing editor of two wealthy newspapers, one in Boston, the other in New York, in the first instance because he refused to print a false and cowardly retraction dictated by a stockholder whom the editor-in-chief desired to serve, in the second instance because he refused to distort war news. But what good did his single-handed rebellion do, except to make a few friends proud of him? Did either newspaper lose even one mournful subscriber? Did the advertising department suffer? Far from it. Another man took his place, a man not necessarily less honest, but of more conformable temperament. The muddy waters of journalism did not show a ripple. Paradoxically, the journalist is the one man who can do little or nothing to improve journalism. Mr. Lippmann’s suggestion that our salvation lies “ultimately in the infusion of the news-structure by men with a new training and outlook,” is, as he knows, the expression of a vague hope, too remotely ultimate to have practical bearing on the actual situation. The man of training and outlook, especially of outlook, is the unhappiest man in the employ of a newspaper. His salvation, if not ours, lies in getting out of newspaper work and applying his ability and vision in some occupation which does not discourage precisely the merits which an honest institution should foster. This is not merely the opinion of a critical layman but represents accurately if not literally the advice given to me by a successful editor and writer of special articles. “In this game,” he said, “you lose your soul.”

The stories of individuals who have tried to be decent in newspaper work and have been fired might be valuable if they were collated and if the better journalists would unite to lay the foundation in fact of more such stories. But a profession, a trade, which has so little sense of its own interest that it does not even make an effective union (to be sure, the organization of newspaper writers met with some success, especially in Boston, but to-day the organization has practically disappeared) to keep its wages up can never be expected to unite in the impersonal interests of truth and intellectual dignity. The individual who charges against an enormous unshakable institution with the weapons of his personal experience is too easily disposed of as a sore-head and is likely to be laughed at even by his fellow-journalists who know that in the main he is right.

This has happened to Mr. Upton Sinclair. I have studied “The Brass Check” carefully for the selfish purpose of getting enough material so that the writing of this chapter should be nothing but a lazy man’s task of transcription, not to speak of the noble ethical purpose of reforming the newspaper by exposing its iniquities. I confess I am disappointed. “The Brass Check” is a mixture of autobiography, valuable in its way to those who admire Mr. Sinclair, as I do most sincerely, and of evidence which, though properly personal, ought to be handled in an objective manner. I am puzzled that a man of “training and outlook,” who has shown in at least one of his novels an excellent sense of construction, could throw together such a hodge-podge of valid testimony, utterly damning to his opponents, and naïve trivialities, assertions insecurely founded and not important if they were well founded. I am so sure that Mr. Sinclair is on the whole right that I am reluctant to criticize him adversely, to lend a shadow of encouragement to the real adversary, who is unscrupulous and securely entrenched. But as a journalist of “training and outlook” I lament that another journalist of vastly more ability, experience, and information should not have done better work in selecting and constructing his material. As a lawyer said to his client, “You are a saint and you are right, but a court-room is no place for a saint and you are a damn bad witness.” Mr. Sinclair’s evidence, however, is all there to be dug out by whoever has the will and the patience. If one-tenth of it is valid and nine-tenths of doubtful value, the one-tenth is sufficient to show the sinister forces behind the newspapers and to explain some of the reasons why the newspapers are untrustworthy, cowardly, and dishonest.

Though Mr. Sinclair tells some damaging stories about the sins of anonymous reporters and of the prostitution of writers like the late Elbert Hubbard, who had no excuse for being anything but honest and independent, yet Mr. Sinclair on the whole would agree with me that the chief responsibility for the evils of journalism does not rest upon the journalist. He tries to place it squarely where it belongs on the owners of the press and the owners of the owners. But it is difficult to determine how the weight of guilt is distributed, for the press is a monster with more than two legs.

Part of the responsibility rests upon the reader, if indeed the reader is to blame for being a gullible fool and for buying shoddy goods. Mr. Lippmann says: “There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled.” And Mr. Sinclair says: “The people want the news; the people clamour for the news.” Both these statements may be true. But where do the learned doctors find the symptoms? A few of us who have some special interest in the press, in publicity, in political problems, are disillusioned and resentful. Probably everybody has said or heard somebody else say: “That’s only a newspaper story,” or “You cannot believe everything you read.” But such mild scepticism shows no promise of swelling to an angry demand on the part of that vague aggregate, the People, for better, more honest newspapers, to such an angry demand as you can actually hear in any house you enter for cheaper clothes and lower taxes.

If we make a rough calculation of the number of papers sold and of the number of people in the main economic classes, it is evident that papers of large circulation must go by the million to the working-people. Well, is there any sign of growing wrath in the breasts of the honest toilers against the newspapers, against Mr. Hearst’s papers, which throw them sops of hypocritical sympathy, not to speak of papers which are openly unfair in handling labour news? Or consider the more prosperous classes. In the smoking-car of any suburban train bound for New York some morning after eight o’clock, look at the men about you, business men, the kind that work, or do something, in offices. They are reading the Times and the Tribune. There may be some growls about something in the day’s news, something that has happened on the stock-market, or a stupid throw to third base in yesterday’s game. But is there any murmur of discontent with the newspaper itself? I fail to find any evidence of widespread disgust with the newspaper as it is and a concomitant hunger for something better. The Reader, the Public is mute, if not inglorious, and accepts uncritically what the daily press provides. The reader has not much opportunity to choose the better from the worse. If he gives up one paper he must take another that is just as bad. He is between the devil and the deep sea, as when he casts his ballot for Democrat or Republican. And if he votes Socialist he gets the admirable New York Call, which is less a newspaper than a vehicle of propaganda. When one paper is slightly more honest and intelligent than its rivals, the difference is so slight that only those especially interested in the problems of the press are aware of it. For example, in discussing these problems with newspaper men, with critical readers of the press, persons for any reason intelligently interested in the problems, I have never found one who did not have a good word to say for the New York Globe. It is so appreciably more decent than the other New York papers that I can almost forgive it for thrusting Dr. Frank Crane under my nose when I am looking at the amusing pictures of Mr. Fontaine Fox—the newspaper vaudeville has to supply stunts for all juvenile tastes. Yet the Globe does not find a clamorous multitude willing to reward it for its superiority to its neighbours, which I grant is too slight for duffers to discern. The American reader of newspapers, that is, almost everybody, is a duffer, so far as the newspaper is concerned, uncritical, docile, only meekly incredulous. It may be that “the people” get as good newspapers as they wish and deserve, just as they are said to get as good government as they wish and deserve. Certainly if the readers of newspapers seem to demand nothing better, the manufacturers of newspapers have no inducement to give them anything better. But this does not get us any nearer a solution of the problem or do more than indicate that some vaguely indeterminate part of the responsibility for the evils of the newspapers must rest on the people who buy them.

From the buyer to the seller is the shortest step. The newspaper is a manufacturing concern producing goods to sell at a profit; it is also a department store, and it has some characteristics that suggest the variety show and the brothel. But the newspaper differs from all other commodities in that it does not live by what it receives from the consumer who buys it. Three cents multiplied a million times does not support a newspaper. The valuable part of a newspaper from the manufacturer’s point of view, and also to a great extent from the reader’s point of view, is the advertisements. The columns of “reading matter,” so called, are little more than bait to attract enough readers to make the paper worth while as a vehicle for advertisements. It is of no importance to the management whether a given column contain news from Washington or Moscow, true or false, or a scandal or a funny story, as long as it leads some thousands of human eyes to look at it and so to look at adjacent columns in which are set forth the merits of a safety razor or an automobile tire or a fifty-dollar suit of clothes at thirty-nine dollars and a half. There has to be a good variety and a certain balance of interest in the columns of reading matter to secure the attention of all kinds of people. This accounts for two things, the great development in the newspaper of pure, or impure, entertainment, of more or less clever features, at the expense of space that might be devoted to news, and also the tendency to accentuate narrative interest above all other kinds of interest. A reporter is never sent out by his chief to get information, but always, in the lingo of the office, to get a “story.” This is sound psychology. Everybody likes a story, and there are only a few souls in the world who yearn at breakfast for information. To attack the newspaper for being sensational is to forget that all the great stories of the world, from the amatory exploits of Helen of Troy and Cleopatra to the scandalous adventures of Mrs. Black, the banker’s wife, are sensational and should be so treated. The newspaper manager is indifferent to every quality in his news columns except their power to attract the reader and so secure circulation and so please the advertiser. And the advertiser has as his primary interest only that of bringing to the attention of a certain number of people the virtues of his suspenders, shoes, and soothing syrup.

But the advertiser has a secondary interest. The newspaper willy-nilly deals with ideas, such as they are. No idea inimical to the advertiser’s business or in general to the business system of which he is a dependent part must be allowed in the paper. Therefore all newspapers are controlled by the advertising department, that is, the counting-room. They are controlled negatively and positively. We are discussing general characteristics and have not space for detailed evidence. But one or two cases will suffice.

An example of the coercion of the newspaper by the advertiser was recently afforded by the Philadelphia press. The Gimbel Brothers, owners of a department store, were charged by United States Government officials with profiteering. The only Philadelphia paper that made anything of the story was the Press, which was owned by Mr. Wanamaker of the rival department store. The other papers ignored the story or put it in one edition and then withdrew it. If there is an elevator accident in a general office building, it is reported. If there is a similar accident in a department store, it is usually not reported. When the New York Times (April 25, 1921) prints a short account of the experience of four Wellesley college students who disguised their intellectual superiority and got jobs in department stores, the head-line tells us that they “Find They Can Live on Earnings,” though the matter under the head-line does not bear this out. Perhaps it does no harm to suppress, or fail to publish, news of accidents and to make out a good case for the living and working conditions of shop-girls. These are minor matters in the news of the world and their importance would appear only if they were accumulated in their tediously voluminous mass.