So long as a country paper can be issued without the expenditure of more than a few hundred dollars, so long as the man with ambition and money can satisfy his desire to “edit,” the country paper will be fruitful of jocose remarks by the city journalist. There will be columns of odd reprint from the backwoods of Arkansas, and queer combinations of grammar and egotism from the Egypt of Illinois. The exchange editor will find in his rural mail much food for humorous comment, but he will not find characterizing the country editor a lack of independence, or a lack of ability to look out for himself. The country editor is doing very well, and the trend of his business affairs is in the direction of better financial returns and wider influence. He is a greater power now than ever before in his history, and he will become more influential as the years go by. He will not be controlled by a syndicate, or modeled after a machine-made pattern, but will exert his individuality wherever he may be.
The country editor of to-day is coming into his own. He asks fewer favors and brings more into the store of common good. He does not ask eulogies nor does he resent fair criticisms; he is content to be judged by what he is and what he has accomplished. As the leader of the hosts must hold his place by the consent of his followers, so must the town’s spokesman prove his worth. Closest to the people, nearest to their home life, its hopes and its aspirations, the country editor is at the foundation of journalism. Here and there is a weak and inefficient example; but in the main he measures up to as high a standard as does any class of business men in the nation,—and it is as a business man that he prefers to be classed.
SENSATIONAL JOURNALISM AND THE LAW
BY GEORGE W. ALGER
I
So much has been said in recent years concerning the methods and policies of sensational journalism that a further word upon a topic so hackneyed would seem almost to require an explanation or an apology. Current criticism, however, for the most part, has been confined to only one of its many characteristics,—its bad taste and its vulgarizing influence on its readers by daily offenses against the actual, though as yet ideal, right of privacy, by its arrogant boastfulness, mawkish sentimentality, and a persistent and systematic distortion of values in events.
This, the most noticeable feature of yellow journalism, is indicative rather of its character than of its purpose. In considering, however, the present subject,—sensational journalism in its relation to the making, enforcing, and interpreting of law,—we enter a different field, that of the conscious policies and objects with and for which these papers are conducted. The main business of a newspaper as defined by journalists of the old school is the collection and publication of news of general interest coupled with editorial comment upon it. The old-time editor was a ruminative and critical observer of public events. This definition of the functions of a newspaper was long ago scornfully cast aside as absurdly antiquated and insufficient to include the myriad circulation-making enterprises of yellow journalism. These papers are not simply purveyors of news and comment, but have what, for lack of a better term, may be called constructive policies of their own. In the making of law, for example, not content with mere criticism of legislators and their measures, the new journalism conceives and exploits measures of its own, drafted by its own counsel, and introduced as legislative bills by statesmen to whom flattering press notices and the publication of an occasional blurred photograph are a sufficient reward. Not infrequently measures thus conceived and drafted are supported by specially prepared “monster petitions,” containing thousands of names, badly written and of doubtful authenticity, of supposed partisans, and by special trains filled with orators and a heterogeneous rabble described in the news columns as “committees of citizens,” who at critical periods are collected together and turned loose upon the assembled lawmakers as an impressive object lesson of the public interest fervidly aroused on behalf of the newspaper’s bill.
The ethics of persuasion is an interesting subject. It falls, however, outside the scope of this article. It is impossible to lay down any hard and fast rule by which to determine in all cases what form of newspaper influence is legitimate and what illegitimate. The most obvious characteristic of yellow journalism in its relation to lawmaking is that it prefers ordinarily to obtain its ends by the use of intimidation rather than by persuasion. The monster petition scheme just referred to is merely one illustrative expression of this preference. When a newspaper of this type is interested in having some official do some particular thing in some particular way, it spends little of its space or time in attempting to show the logical propriety or necessity for the action it desires. It seeks first and foremost to make the official see that the eyes of the people are on him, and that any action by him contrary to that which the newspaper assures him the people want would be fraught with serious personal consequences. The principal point with these papers is always “the people demand” (in large capitals) this or that, and the logic or reason of the demand is obscured or ignored. It is the headless Demos transformed into printer’s ink. If by any chance any official, so unfortunate as to have ideas of his own as to how his office should be conducted, proves obdurate to the demands of the printed voice of the people, he becomes the target for newspaper attacks, calculated to destroy any reputation he may previously have had for intelligence, sobriety of judgment, or public efficiency, his tormentor, so far as libel is concerned, keeping, however, as Fabian says, “on the windy side of the law.”
An amusing illustration of this kind of warfare occurred in New York some years ago, when for several weeks one of these newspapers published daily attacks upon the President of the Board of Police Commissioners, because he refused to follow the newspaper theories of the proper way of enforcing, or rather not enforcing, the Excise Law. The newspaper took the position that, while the powers of the Police Department were being largely turned to ferreting out saloon-keepers who were keeping open after hours or on Sundays, the detection of serious crimes was being neglected, and that a “carnival of crime,” to use the picturesque wording of its headlines, was being carried on in the city. Finally, in one of its issues the paper published a list of thirty distinct criminal offenses of the most serious character,—murder, felonious assault, burglary, grand larceny, and the like,—all alleged to have been committed within a week, in none of which, it asserted, had any criminal been captured or any stolen property recovered. Events which followed immediately upon this last publication showed that the newspaper had erred grievously in its estimate of this particular official under attack. A few days later the Police Commissioner, Mr. Roosevelt, published in the columns of all the other newspapers in New York the result of his own personal investigation of these thirty items of criminal news, showing conclusively that twenty-eight of them were canards pure and simple, and that in the remaining two police activity had brought about results of a most satisfactory kind. Following this statement of the facts was appended an adaptation of some fifteen or twenty lines from Macaulay’s merciless essay on Barrère,—perhaps the finest philippic against a notorious and inveterate liar which the English language affords,—so worded that they should apply, not only to the newspaper which published this spurious list of alleged crimes, but to the editor and proprietor personally. The carnival of crime ended at once.
It is, of course, impossible to determine accurately the extent of newspaper influence upon legislation and the conduct of public officials by these systematic attempts at bullying. Making all due allowance, however, there have been within recent years many significant illustrations of the influence of yellow journalism upon the shaping of public events. Mr. Creelman is quite right in saying, as he does in his interesting book, On the Great Highway, that the story of the Spanish war is incomplete which overlooks the part that yellow journalism had in bringing it on. He tells us that, some time prior to the commencement of hostilities, a well-known artist, who had been sent to Cuba as a representative of one of these papers and had there grown tired of inaction, telegraphed his chief that there was no prospect of war, and that he wished to come home. The reply he received was characteristic of the journalism he represented: “You furnish the pictures, we will furnish the war.” It is characteristic because the new journalism aims to direct rather than to influence, and seeks, to an extent never attempted or conceived by the journalism it endeavors so strenuously to supplant, to create public sentiment rather than to mould it, to make measures and find men.