Or take the “Metropolitan,” which a few years ago announced itself as a Socialist magazine. We were all tremendously thrilled by the idea that the money of Harry Payne Whitney was to be used to bring about Social Justice in America; but then we saw the “Metropolitan” suppress its exposé of Rasputin at behest of the embassy of the late Tsar; now we see it turning over its editorial columns to Gen. Leonard Wood, to be used in a propaganda for universal military training! In this greatest crisis of history, the people’s cause is left without a single champion in our popular magazines. There are only the Socialist papers, and two or three radical weeklies of limited circulation; the rest is Barbarism.
In every newspaper-office in America the same struggle between the business-office and the news-department is going on all the time. The business of getting the news involves “hustle,” and young brains are constantly being brought in, and these young brains have to be taught the discipline of special privilege, and sometimes they never entirely submit. They have powerful arguments on their side. “You want circulation, don’t you? What’s the use of a paper without circulation? And how can you get circulation if you let the fellow around the corner have this ‘scoop’?” So the owner of the paper has to get busy and make a gentleman’s agreement with the other papers to suppress the news; and sometimes it turns out that the other fellow isn’t a gentleman, and there is a row, and the live young “hustlers” get their way for a while, and the public gets a bit of the news.
Various stages of this struggle are exemplified by different newspapers, or by the same newspaper at different times. You may see a staid old family organ—say the “New York Tribune,” owned by a rich capitalist, Whitelaw Reid, who publishes it as a side issue to gratify his vanity, taking his pay in the form of an ambassadorship. The circulation of such a paper will go steadily down. But then perhaps the old man will die, and his sons will take charge, and his sons won’t feel like paying out twenty or thirty thousand dollars a month, and will get a “live newspaper man” to “put life into” the paper; or perhaps they will sell out to people who have less money, and will be tempted to give the public a little of what it wants.
The fundamental thing that the public wants is, of course, enough to eat. Modern society is complex, and there are thousands of public issues clamoring for newspaper attention, but in the final analysis all these questions boil down to one question—why is the cost of living going up faster than wages and salaries? So the spectre of “radicalism” haunts every newspaper office. The young publisher who wants to make money, the “live newspaper man” who wants to make a reputation, find themselves at every hour tempted to attack some form of privilege and exploitation.
So come “crusades.” The kind of crusade which the newspaper undertakes will depend upon the character of circulation for which it is bidding. If the paper sells for three cents, and is read by bankers and elderly maiden aunts, the newspaper will print the sermons of some clergyman who is exposing the horrors of the red-light district, or it will call on the district attorney to begin prosecuting the loan-sharks who are robbing the poor, or it will start a free ice fund for babies in the tenements. Any cause will do, provided the victims are plunderers of a shady character—that is, small plunderers.
Or perhaps the newspaper is a popular organ. It sells at a low price to the common people. In that case it may go to extremes of radicalism; it may clamor for government ownership, and attack big public service corporations in a way that seems entirely independent and fearless. You say: “Surely this is honest journalism,” and you acquire the habit of reading that newspaper. But then gradually you see the campaign die down, the great cause forgotten. The plundering of the public goes right on, the only thing that has been changed is that you, who used to be a reader of the “World,” are now a reader of the “Journal”; and that is the change which the “Journal” had in mind from the outset. You will see the “Journal” tabulating the amount of advertising it publishes each week or each month, and boasting that it is greater than the “World” publishes; and maybe you feel proud about that, you like to be in the boat with the best fishermen—even though you are there as a fish.
Anyone who is familiar with the newspaper-world can think of a score of publications to which the above statement would apply. There exists a chain of one-cent evening papers scattered over the country, the Scripps papers, catering to working-class audiences. They were founded by a real radical and friend of the people, E. W. Scripps, and for a decade or two were the main resource of the workers in many localities. Now E. W. Scripps is a sick man, out of the game, and his eldest son, who runs the papers, is a young business man, interested in the business management of a great property; so in one city after another you see the Scripps papers “toned-down.” They espouse the cause of strikers no longer. The other day I was staggered to find them dragging out that shop-worn old bugaboo, the nationalization of women in Russia! In the Seattle strike the Scripps paper, the “Star,” “scabbed” on the strike, and its editorial attitude won it the name, the “Shooting Star.”
Or take the “New York World.” This paper was built up by one crusade after another; it was the people’s friend for a generation. Today it is a property worth several million dollars, living on its reputation. It still makes, of course, the old pretenses of “democracy,” but when it comes to a real issue, it is an organ of bitter and savage reaction, it is edited by the telegraph and railroad securities in which the Pulitzer fortune is invested. The “New York World’s” opinion of the “Plumb plan” is that of a Russian grand duke discussing Bolshevism.
Or the Hearst papers. They too have been made out of the pennies of the masses; they too have lured the masses by rainbows of many-colored hopes. They still ask for government ownership—when they happen to think of it; but they lie remorselessly about radicals, and exclude the word Socialism from their columns, except when some Socialist is sent to jail. They support Sinn Fein and twist the lion’s tail, because it brings in the Irish-Catholic pennies; but the one revolution in which their heart is really engaged is the one which is to make Hearst’s Mexican acres into American acres.