Journalism and the Public

“The time may come when even men of the word, those who live in the present, who labour not for the future nor learn from the past, will recognise that man is a complex creature, and that material wealth satisfies only a moiety of his nature, and that material goods possessed in excess by one portion of a community, and lacking wholly to the other, mean a condition of disease ... that the railway train which brings the prostitute, the stock exchange, and the foes of the freedom of a people into the heart of its land had better, for humanity, have been the slowest ox-wagon crawling across the plains...that a submarine cable, used to whisper from land to land, and stir up the hearts of people against people, and to urge on the powerful against the weak, is the devil’s own tube, and has a connection direct with hell; that a daily paper not based on a determination to disseminate truth is a cup of poison sent round fresh every morning to debilitate the life of the people.”
–Olive Schreiner: Thoughts on South Africa

Any number of articles can be (and, in fact, have been) written on the newspaper press. This is, after all, the “Newspaper Age’, as I may call it, and newspapers naturally claim “first priority”, so to speak, in the matter of public interest. Without that public interest, of course, they would, in the military idiom, be deprived of the use of their principal life-line: they would not be able to function for a single day. The debt, however, is mutual. Without the newspapers the public, on its part, would be equally helpless: Forlorn to the point of feeling orphaned.

That explains why we are favoured with them on the Sabbath also: and that is, likewise, the justification for those evening editions, too, which the news-vendors about at us from every street corner when we are hurrying homewards from what Charles Lamb has described, in his inimitable fashion, as “the dull drudgery of a dealwood desk.” My point is that we have arrived at a stage in human evolution when, in their absence, we stand in danger of simply languishing, of simply declining into desuetude. They sustain us in moments of deepest gloom. They bid fair to be the surest safeguard against the twin maladies of “boredom” and “brown study” which flesh is heir to: and they quieten us when we are in a fractious mood, a malady most incident to the incredibly hectic pace at which we live.

It is not an uncommon experience that familiarity breeds contempt. We are so very much used to newspapers these days that we are only too prone to forget that there had been a period in the history of the world when this peculiar form of popular entertainment was, by the exigencies of circumstance, not available to the public. Indeed, we cannot conceive of such a period: the dyer’s hand, as the poet has it, being subdued to what it works in.

But, as our good luck would have it, in the course of what George Bernard Shaw had been pleased to call “Creative Evolution”, and what we, humbler folk, Abraham Lincoln’s “common men”, are content to term “Divine Dispensation”, newspapers burst upon a bewildered public,

“Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides,”

and, ever since, we have “fallen for” them, and have become well-nigh incapable of doing anything without them.

A Host of Associations

The phrase, “the newspaper press”, recalls to us a host of associations–not all of them uniformly pleasant. It is an institution in, and by, itself. “It is a mighty engine, Sir,” as Mr. Pott, of the Eatanswill Independent, boasted to Mr. Pickwick on an historic occasion. It wields enormous power: a Power that is steadily escalating with the passing of days.

A modicum of power, to be sure, had not been unknown to it even before. As a matter of fact, “power” and “press” would seem to be almost synonymous. In a sense, indeed, it would be true to say that a press that wields no sort of power is a contradiction in terms: a “terminological inexactitude”, nothing less!

The press, in general, as I have indicated above, wields no negligible power. Power, of a kind, is possessed even by our indigenous press. A newspaper is published in order to be read by one section of the community or another. From the instant that it issues out of the printing press it becomes, in a manner of speaking, public property. Every paper worth the name has a clientele of its own; and, among them, it wields undisputed sway. That, predictably, confers upon it a certain amount of influence that no draconian legislation whatever can hope entirely to eradicate.

So long as newspapers are permitted to be published–be it in the most attenuated form imaginable–no government on earth is capable of robbing them of an irreducible minimum of power and of prestige and of glory. All these, I need hardly stress, are inherent in the printed word. If, as we have been assured repeatedly by savants, the pen is far mightier than the sword, then it is indisputable that the printed word is mightier still. It goes forth as an unofficial plenipotentiary of the paper concerned to every hearth and home. There the message is first inculcated: and thence, in ever-widening circles, it is publicised.

Thus it transpires that even in a subject-country the power of the press is by no means to be despised: it is quite definitely there, “rough hew it” as the authorities may. My thesis is that the power of the press is infinite, not infinitesimal, notwithstanding at any given moment of the protean restrictions upon it of an excessively paternal government. This being granted, it is my purpose to point out that this enormous power is not wielded always for the good of the people, and has not been so wielded all the while.

A Sarcastic Commentary

It is a sarcastic commentary on human affairs that, when the press was still in its infancy, in its swaddling clothes, as it were, it had been a more potent instrument of public instruction than when it began to grow to its present bloated size and shape and status. Its very prosperity, in short, has been largely its undoing. The “old” journalism, paradoxical as it may sound, had much to its credit. It paraded fewer pounds, shillings, and pence, it is true, but it was a genuine force to be reckoned with in the education of public opinion. It moulded public opinion along infallibly correct lines: and, in that respect, its services were truly invaluable, even the established universities ranking only second to it.

The press had been the press then: and it thoroughly merited the celebrated title of the “Fourth Estate of the Realm.” The newspapers may not have been able to flaunt before the bewildering gaze of a gullible public their net sales of millions and to boast about the largest circulation in the whole solar system. But they knew what they were about and, within their strict limits, set about the task of enriching the common heritage in a manner worthy both of themselves and of that common heritage.

Then Lord Northcliffe (born as Mr. Alfred Harmsworth) came bouncing and bounding into the arena and threw what can only be described as a monkey-wrench into the works. Did not Cardinal Newman suggest, in one of his more inspired moments, that “where there is a Jerusalem, there is a Samaria close at hand”? He (Lord Northcliffe. I mean) was the serpent that entered this enchanting garden. Him it was that we must hold primarily responsible for inaugurating that fatal downward trend in newspapers which is still, unluckily for us, going on unabated, and for the reprehensible reorientation of their policies which is such a marked feature of modern newspapers.

The Syndicated Press

We have, nowadays, what has come to be known as the “syndicated press”. Previously, one person, or one group of persons, owned one newspaper. But that halcyon period is past. We have now a few business tycoons, a few “press barons”, who have parcelled out the kingdom of the newspaper press among themselves. They are the proud owners of a chain of newspapers: and, through this vast megaphone, contrive to blare forth their views to the multitudes that are their clientele. It is not surprising that they holdthose multitudes in the palms of their hands: that they can do with them what they choose and can make them dance to any crazy tune that may momentarily have caught their fancy.

One of the sources of the power of the “syndicated press”, as the late Mr. H. W. Massingham said in the paper he read to the Cooperative Congress at Nottingham at Whitsun, 1924, is that

“its vast resources are employed in so large a scale, its allied companies produce so much of the material it requires, and it can effect such large economies of management, as almost to drive the single newspaper to the wall. I was speaking to the director of a powerful and highly profitable group of illustrated newspapers. ‘I regard’, he said, ‘the day of the single daily paper is over. It costs far too much to produce and maintain’.”

It may be asked: is there no remedy? Massingham suggests that there is. He cites the famous example of the American Christian Science Monitor. It is produced, we are told,

“not for profit, but for the benefit and interest of its readers. With that object it gives no descriptions of death or crime or scandal. It simply leaves the destructive activities of men out of account, so as to have space to concentrate on the constructive ones.”

He has one more valuable suggestion to offer:

“One thing I would respectfully urge. If you keep your newspaper good, you do not want to make it too large. Avoid the nuisance and the unnecessary cost of the monster newspaper. Size is no good to value. These enormous papers give a great impression of space and variety and enterprise; in reality, they are little more than huge advertisement sheets. I often think that journalism in England was at its greatest when its form was the simplest and that the day of the pamphleteer was also the day of the truly great editor.” (My italics)

Wiser words than these have never been uttered by anyone, before or since. What he said deserves, as the late Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q” of revered memory) wrote of Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of University, “being bound by the young student of literature for a frontlet on his brow and a talisman on his writing wrist.

For “literature” we may substitute “journalism.”