Part 129

Akin to the false notion that the newspaper is a sort of open channel that the public may use as it chooses, is the conception of it as a charitable institution. The newspaper, which is the property of a private person as much as a drug-shop is, is expected to perform for nothing services which would be asked of no other private person. There is scarcely a charitable enterprise to which it is not asked to contribute of its space, which is money, ten times more than other persons in the community, who are ten times as able as the owner of the newspaper, contribute. The journal is considered "mean" if it will not surrender its columns freely to notices and announcements of this sort. If a manager has a new hen-coop or a new singer he wishes to introduce to the public, he comes to the newspaper, expecting to have his enterprise extolled for nothing, and probably never thinks that it would be just as proper for him to go to one of the regular advertisers in the paper and ask him to give up his space. Anything, from a church picnic to a brass-band concert for the benefit of the widow of the triangles, asks the newspaper to contribute. The party in politics, whose principles the editor advocates, has no doubt of its rightful claim upon him, not only upon the editorial columns, but upon the whole newspaper. It asks without hesitation that the newspaper should take up its valuable space by printing hundreds and often thousands of dollars' worth of political announcements in the course of a protracted campaign, when it never would think of getting its halls, its speakers, and its brass bands, free of expense. Churches, as well as parties, expect this sort of charity. I have known rich churches, to whose members it was a convenience to have their Sunday and other services announced, withdraw the announcements when the editor declined any longer to contribute a weekly fifty-cents' worth of space. No private persons contribute so much to charity, in proportion to ability, as the newspaper. Perhaps it will get credit for this in the next world: it certainly never does in this.

The chief function of the newspaper is to collect and print the news. Upon the kind of news that should be gathered and published, we shall remark farther on. The second function is to elucidate the news, and comment on it, and show its relations. A third function is to furnish reading-matter to the general public.

Nothing is so difficult for the manager as to know what news is: the instinct for it is a sort of sixth sense. To discern out of the mass of materials collected not only what is most likely to interest the public, but what phase and aspect of it will attract most attention, and the relative importance of it; to tell the day before or at midnight what the world will be talking about in the morning, and what it will want the fullest details of, and to meet that want in advance,--requires a peculiar talent. There is always some topic on which the public wants instant information. It is easy enough when the news is developed, and everybody is discussing it, for the editor to fall in; but the success of the news printed depends upon a pre-apprehension of all this. Some papers, which nevertheless print all the news, are always a day behind, do not appreciate the popular drift till it has gone to something else, and err as much by clinging to a subject after it is dead as by not taking it up before it was fairly born. The public craves eagerly for only one thing at a time, and soon wearies of that; and it is to the newspaper's profit to seize the exact point of a debate, the thrilling moment of an accident, the pith of an important discourse; to throw itself into it as if life depended on it, and for the hour to flood the popular curiosity with it as an engine deluges a fire.

Scarcely less important than promptly seizing and printing the news is the attractive arrangement of it, its effective presentation to the eye. Two papers may have exactly the same important intelligence, identically the same despatches: the one will be called bright, attractive, "newsy"; the other, dull and stupid.

We have said nothing yet about that, which, to most people, is the most important aspect of the newspaper,--the editor's responsibility to the public for its contents. It is sufficient briefly to say here, that it is exactly the responsibility of every other person in society,--the full responsibility of his opportunity. He has voluntarily taken a position in which he can do a great deal of good or a great deal of evil, and he, should be held and judged by his opportunity: it is greater than that of the preacher, the teacher, the congressman, the physician. He occupies the loftiest pulpit; he is in his teacher's desk seven days in the week; his voice can be heard farther than that of the most lusty fog-horn politician; and often, I am sorry to say, his columns outshine the shelves of the druggist in display of proprietary medicines. Nothing else ever invented has the public attention as the newspaper has, or is an influence so constant and universal. It is this large opportunity that has given the impression that the newspaper is a public rather than a private enterprise.

It was a nebulous but suggestive remark that the newspaper occupies the borderland between literature and common sense. Literature it certainly is not, and in the popular apprehension it seems often too erratic and variable to be credited with the balance-wheel of sense; but it must have something of the charm of the one, and the steadiness and sagacity of the other, or it will fail to please. The model editor, I believe, has yet to appear. Notwithstanding the traditional reputation of certain editors in the past, they could not be called great editors by our standards; for the elements of modern journalism did not exist in their time. The old newspaper was a broadside of stale news, with a moral essay attached. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin, with our facilities, would have been very near the ideal editor. There was nothing he did not wish to know; and no one excelled him in the ability to communicate what he found out to the average mind. He came as near as anybody ever did to marrying common sense to literature: he had it in him to make it sufficient for journalistic purposes. He was what somebody said Carlyle was, and what the American editor ought to be,--a vernacular man.

The assertion has been made recently, publicly, and with evidence adduced, that the American newspaper is the best in the world. It is like the assertion that the American government is the best in the world; no doubt it is, for the American people.

Judged by broad standards, it may safely be admitted that the American newspaper is susceptible of some improvement, and that it has something to learn from the journals of other nations. We shall be better employed in correcting its weaknesses than in complacently contemplating its excellences.

Let us examine it in its three departments already named,--its news, editorials, and miscellaneous reading-matter.

In particularity and comprehensiveness of news-collecting, it may be admitted that the American newspapers for a time led the world. I mean in the picking-up of local intelligence, and the use of the telegraph to make it general. And with this arose the odd notion that news is made important by the mere fact of its rapid transmission over the wire. The English journals followed, speedily overtook, and some of the wealthier ones perhaps surpassed, the American in the use of the telegraph, and in the presentation of some sorts of local news; not of casualties, and small city and neighborhood events, and social gossip (until very recently), but certainly in the business of the law courts, and the crimes and mishaps that come within police and legal supervision. The leading papers of the German press, though strong in correspondence and in discussion of affairs, are far less comprehensive in their news than the American or the English. The French journals, we are accustomed to say, are not newspapers at all. And this is true as we use the word. Until recently, nothing has been of importance to the Frenchman except himself; and what happened outside of France, not directly affecting his glory, his profit, or his pleasure, did not interest him: hence, one could nowhere so securely intrench himself against the news of the world as behind the barricade of the Paris journals. But let us not make a mistake in this matter. We may have more to learn from the Paris journals than from any others. If they do not give what we call news--local news, events, casualties, the happenings of the day,--they do give ideas, opinions; they do discuss politics, the social drift; they give the intellectual ferment of Paris; they supply the material that Paris likes to talk over, the badinage of the boulevard, the wit of the salon, the sensation of the stage, the new movement in literature and in politics. This may be important, or it may be trivial: it is commonly more interesting than much of that which we call news.

Our very facility and enterprise in news-gathering have overwhelmed our newspapers, and it may be remarked that editorial discrimination has not kept pace with the facilities. We are overpowered with a mass of undigested intelligence, collected for the mast part without regard to value. The force of the newspaper is expended in extending these facilities, with little regard to discriminating selection. The burden is already too heavy for the newspaper, and wearisome to the public.

The publication of the news is the most important function of the paper. How is it gathered? We must confess that it is gathered very much by chance. A drag-net is thrown out, and whatever comes is taken. An examination into the process of collecting shows what sort of news we are likely to get, and that nine-tenths of that printed is collected without much intelligence exercised in selection. The alliance of the associated press with the telegraph company is a fruitful source of news of an inferior quality. Of course, it is for the interest of the telegraph company to swell the volume to be transmitted. It is impossible for the associated press to have an agent in every place to which the telegraph penetrates: therefore the telegraphic operators often act as its purveyors. It is for their interest to send something; and their judgment of what is important is not only biased, but is formed by purely local standards. Our news, therefore, is largely set in motion by telegraphic operators, by agents trained to regard only the accidental, the startling, the abnormal, as news; it is picked up by sharp prowlers about town, whose pay depends upon finding something, who are looking for something spicy and sensational, or which may be dressed up and exaggerated to satisfy an appetite for novelty and high flavor, and who regard casualties as the chief news. Our newspapers every day are loaded with accidents, casualties, and crimes concerning people of whom we never heard before and never shall hear again, the reading of which is of no earthly use to any human being.

What is news? What is it that an intelligent public should care to hear of and talk about? Run your eye down the columns of your journal. There was a drunken squabble last night in a New York groggery; there is a petty but carefully elaborated village scandal about a foolish girl; a woman accidentally dropped her baby out of a fourth-story window in Maine; in Connecticut, a wife, by mistake, got into the same railway train with another woman's husband; a child fell into a well in New Jersey; there is a column about a peripatetic horse-race, which exhibits, like a circus, from city to city; a laborer in a remote town in Pennsylvania had a sunstroke; there is an edifying dying speech of a murderer, the love-letter of a suicide, the set-to of a couple of congressmen; and there are columns about a gigantic war of half a dozen politicians over the appointment of a sugar-gauger. Granted that this pabulum is desired by the reader, why not save the expense of transmission by having several columns of it stereotyped, to be reproduced at proper intervals? With the date changed, it would always, have its original value, and perfectly satisfy the demand, if a demand exists, for this sort of news.

This is not, as you see, a description of your journal: it is a description of only one portion of it. It is a complex and wonderful creation. Every morning it is a mirror of the world, more or less distorted and imperfect, but such a mirror as it never had held up to it before. But consider how much space is taken up with mere trivialities and vulgarities under the name of news. And this evil is likely to continue and increase until news-gatherers learn that more important than the reports of accidents and casualties is the intelligence of opinions and thoughts, the moral and intellectual movements of modern life. A horrible assassination in India is instantly telegraphed; but the progress of such a vast movement as that of the Wahabee revival in Islam, which may change the destiny of great provinces, never gets itself put upon the wires. We hear promptly of a landslide in Switzerland, but only very slowly of a political agitation that is changing the constitution of the republic. It should be said, however, that the daily newspaper is not alone responsible for this: it is what the age and the community where it is published make it. So far as I have observed, the majority of the readers in America peruses eagerly three columns about a mill between an English and a naturalized American prize-fighter, but will only glance at a column report of a debate in the English parliament which involves a radical change in the whole policy of England; and devours a page about the Chantilly races, while it ignores a paragraph concerning the suppression of the Jesuit schools.

Our newspapers are overwhelmed with material that is of no importance. The obvious remedy for this would be more intelligent direction in the collection of news, and more careful sifting and supervision of it when gathered. It becomes every day more apparent to every manager that such discrimination is more necessary. There is no limit to the various intelligence and gossip that our complex life offers--no paper is big enough to contain it; no reader has time enough to read it. And the journal must cease to be a sort of waste-basket at the end of a telegraph wire, into which any reporter, telegraph operator, or gossip-monger can dump whatever he pleases. We must get rid of the superstition that value is given to an unimportant "item" by sending it a thousand miles over a wire.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the American newspaper, especially of the country weekly, is its enormous development of local and neighborhood news. It is of recent date. Horace Greeley used to advise the country editors to give small space to the general news of the world, but to cultivate assiduously the home field, to glean every possible detail of private life in the circuit of the county, and print it. The advice was shrewd for a metropolitan editor, and it was not without its profit to the country editor. It was founded on a deep knowledge of human nature; namely, upon the fact that people read most eagerly that which they already know, if it is about themselves or their neighbors, if it is a report of something they have been concerned in, a lecture they have heard, a fair, or festival, or wedding, or funeral, or barn-raising they have attended. The result is column after column of short paragraphs of gossip and trivialities, chips, chips, chips. Mr. Sales is contemplating erecting a new counter in his store; his rival opposite has a new sign; Miss Bumps of Gath is visiting her cousin, Miss Smith of Bozrah; the sheriff has painted his fence; Farmer Brown has lost his cow; the eminent member from Neopolis has put an ell on one end of his mansion, and a mortgage on the other.

On the face of it nothing is so vapid and profitless as column after column of this reading. These "items" have very little interest, except to those who already know the facts; but those concerned like to see them in print, and take the newspaper on that account. This sort of inanity takes the place of reading-matter that might be of benefit, and its effect must be to belittle and contract the mind. But this is not the most serious objection to the publication of these worthless details. It cultivates self-consciousness in the community, and love of notoriety; it develops vanity and self-importance, and elevates the trivial in life above the essential.

And this brings me to speak of the mania in this age, and especially in America, for notoriety in social life as well as in politics. The newspapers are the vehicle of it, sometimes the occasion, but not the cause. The newspaper may have fostered--it has not created--this hunger for publicity. Almost everybody talks about the violation of decency and the sanctity of private life by the newspaper in the publication of personalities and the gossip of society; and the very people who make these strictures are often those who regard the paper as without enterprise and dull, if it does not report in detail their weddings, their balls and parties, the distinguished persons present, the dress of the ladies, the sumptuousness of the entertainment, if it does not celebrate their church services and festivities, their social meetings, their new house, their distinguished arrivals at this or that watering-place. I believe every newspaper manager will bear me out in saying that there is a constant pressure on him to print much more of such private matter than his judgment and taste permit or approve, and that the gossip which is brought to his notice, with the hope that he will violate the sensitiveness of social life by printing it, is far away larger in amount than all that he publishes.

To return for a moment to the subject of general news. The characteristic of our modern civilization is sensitiveness, or, as the doctors say, nervousness. Perhaps the philanthropist would term it sympathy. No doubt an exciting cause of it is the adaptation of electricity to the transmission of facts and ideas. The telegraph, we say, has put us in sympathy with all the world. And we reckon this enlargement of nerve contact somehow a gain. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening or deadening them to these shocks; but nevertheless, every person who reads is a focus for the excitements, the ills, the troubles, of all the world. In addition to his local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a manner compelled to be a sharer in the universal uneasiness. It might be worth while to inquire what effect this exciting accumulation of the news of the world upon an individual or a community has upon happiness and upon character. Is the New England man any better able to bear or deal with his extraordinary climate by the daily knowledge of the weather all over the globe? Is a man happier, or improved in character, by the woful tale of a world's distress and apprehension that greets him every morning at breakfast? Knowledge, we know, increases sorrow; but I suppose the offset to that is, that strength only comes through suffering. But this is a digression.

Not second in importance to any department of the journal is the reporting; that is, the special reporting as distinguished from the more general news-gathering. I mean the reports of proceedings in Congress, in conventions, assemblies, and conferences, public conversations, lectures, sermons, investigations, law trials, and occurrences of all sorts that rise into general importance. These reports are the basis of our knowledge and opinions. If they are false or exaggerated, we are ignorant of what is taking place, and misled. It is of infinitely more importance that they should be absolutely trustworthy than that the editorial comments should be sound and wise. If the reports on affairs can be depended on, the public can form its own opinion, and act intelligently. And; if the public has a right to demand anything of a newspaper, it is that its reports of what occurs shall be faithfully accurate, unprejudiced, and colorless. They ought not, to be editorials, or the vehicles of personal opinion and feeling. The interpretation of, the facts they give should be left to the editor and the public. There should be a sharp line drawn between the report and the editorial.

I am inclined to think that the reporting department is the weakest in the American newspaper, and that there is just ground for the admitted public distrust of it. Too often, if a person would know what has taken place in a given case, he must read the reports in half a dozen journals, then strike a general average of probabilities, allowing for the personal equation, and then--suspend his judgment. Of course, there is much excellent reporting, and there are many able men engaged in it who reflect the highest honor upon their occupation. And the press of no other country shows more occasional brilliant feats in reporting than ours: these are on occasions when the newspapers make special efforts. Take the last two national party conventions. The fullness, the accuracy, the vividness, with which their proceedings were reported in the leading journals, were marvelous triumphs of knowledge, skill, and expense. The conventions were so photographed by hundreds of pens, that the public outside saw them almost as distinctly as the crowd in attendance. This result was attained because the editors determined that it should be, sent able men to report, and demanded the best work. But take an opposite and a daily illustration of reporting, that of the debates and proceedings in Congress. I do not refer to the specials of various journals which are good, bad, or indifferent, as the case may be, and commonly colored by partisan considerations, but the regular synopsis sent to the country at large. Now, for some years it has been inadequate, frequently unintelligible, often grossly misleading, failing wholly to give the real spirit and meaning of the most important discussions; and it is as dry as chips besides. To be both stupid and inaccurate is the unpardonable sin in journalism. Contrast these reports with the lively and faithful pictures of the French Assembly which are served to the Paris papers.