Part 1

STENTOR

“The new spirit in the Press, which aims, not at influencing statesmen by giving them an instructed and enlightened public opinion, but at making them subservient to a power which will exalt them or hound them out of office, according to whether they will or will not accept its dictates and its terms.”

“The insolent pretensions of newspaper owners to reduce Downing Street to the position of an annexe of Fleet Street.”

――_Certain People of Importance_, by A. G. GARDINER.

The freedom of the Press is the freedom of public opinion, that’s the beginning and the end of it. Can you pretend that public opinion is free, when more than half the leading journals are the voice of one man? There is a danger to the freedom of the Press, Janion; and that danger is you. You are simply a trust crushing out or buying up all opposition, till you control the market――till you can sit in your office and say, “What I think to-day, England will think to-morrow.”

――_The Earth_, by J. B. FAGAN.

STENTOR

OR

THE PRESS OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

BY DAVID OCKHAM

“The abstract and brief chronicle of the time.”

[Illustration]

E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC. : NEW YORK

STENTOR, COPYRIGHT, 1928 BY E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED :: PRINTED IN U.S.A.

First Edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE I THE BIRTH OF STENTOR 9 II THE NATURE OF STENTOR 13 III THE DICTATORS 25 IV THE MANNERISMS OF STENTOR 40 V THE NEWSPAPER OF TO-MORROW 48 VI POISON GAS OR FRESH AIR 59 APPENDIX 66

STENTOR

I

_The Birth of Stentor_

It is some eight thousand years ago that Man, having already set himself apart from the brute creation by walking on two legs and creating the art of speech, paved the way to the “best seller” by the invention of writing.

The nomad settled in the village. From the village there grew the city. Empires rose, fell, and crumbled into decay. Plato, Homer, Aristotle, Dante, da Vinci, Shakespeare enlarged the boundaries of intellect and of emotion. America was rediscovered. Moveable types were introduced to Europe. And the newspaper, via the printed book and the pamphlet, sprang from the loins of Gutenberg. Grub Street gave place to Fleet Street, and the Carmelites to Carmelite House. Compulsory schooling for the masses produced a new social phenomenon in the shape of whole nations among whom the illiterate was the exception, and Demos roared voraciously for newsprint. And the halfpenny “daily” created a demand for the forest products of Newfoundland.

So may our grandchildren condense their Outline of History.

Historically considered, the Newspaper is an upstart, although its germs existed in the Roman Empire in the shape of _Acta Diurna_ and _Acta Publica_, Government publications which contained registers of births and deaths, and particulars of the corn supply and of payments into the Treasury. The _Acta_ even embodied so modern a feature as the Court Circular.

Journalism found no incitement during the Dark and Middle Ages, and the use of moveable types at first stimulated the production of books rather than that of periodicals. By the latter half of the fifteenth century, rudimentary journals were, however, making their more or less regular appearance in Germany, Austria, and Italy, and embedded in Continental archives is to be found at least one copy of a contemporary account of Columbus’ voyages to America recorded while his journeyings still represented the latest news.

The sixteenth century saw the _Gazzetta_, an Italian production in manuscript, to be read on payment of a _gazzetta_, a small coin of the period, which eventually gave its name as a synonym for newspapers and other publications. None of these Continental attempts to assuage the thirst for news seems, however, to have embodied the seeds of permanence, and the idea of a Newspaper in the modern sense, that is, of a publication issued at regular intervals and characterised by continuity in administration and policy, is largely English. The first regular English newspaper was the _Weekly News from Italy, Germany, etc._, founded in 1622, and nineteen years later an English paper secured a “scoop” by publishing a report of a Parliamentary debate for the first time on record. In 1709, London had its first daily under the title of the _Daily Courant_; the _Morning Post_ dates back to 1772; and the _Times_, originally established as the _Daily Universal Register_, followed in 1785.

It is almost impossible to assign a definite historical date for the inception of the newspaper as a regular institution created to satisfy a public demand, since so many of the journalistic pioneers were both of a fugitive and ephemeral nature, whilst others were pamphlets rather than news bulletins. But if we strike a mean between the _Daily Courant_ and the _Morning Post_, we may say that the newspaper has enjoyed some two centuries of vigorous life. It has thus witnessed the birth of the Industrial Age and of its offspring, Mechanical Transport, has seen the formation of the United States of America, the peopling of Canada and Australia, the fall of most European thrones, the development of great communities in South America, the birth of flying, and the shifting of the centre of gravity of political power from the semi-instructed few to the uninstructed many. If Stentor has lost his head a trifle at the contemplation of such an unparalleled record of human activity, and of a period pregnant with such almost unimaginable possibilities for good and evil, who shall wonder?

II

_The Nature of Stentor_

What is a newspaper? Ask any editor or proprietor, and he will tell you that its primary function is the dissemination of news, and its secondary, but none the less immensely important, task is that of commenting on the happenings of to-day or forecasting those of to-morrow, with the object of educating the community and guiding public opinion. So we are frequently informed, in rotund periods, by noble lords who respond to the toast of The Press at public feastings.

What, actually, is a newspaper? To begin with, it contains advertisements, mainly of women’s dress, soaps, face creams and powders, chocolate, beer, whisky, tobacco, and motor cars. Democracy’s needs.

Then there is a page of pictures, gathered at great expense from the ends of the earth, often transmitted by aeroplane, and providing a feast of new hats and evening wraps from Paris, railway accidents, shipwrecks, upturned tramcars and motor lorries that have fallen into ditches, the more or less recognisable portraits of men and women performing at the Divorce Courts or for some other reason temporarily in the public eye, photographs of film actresses, and pictures of the diversions of the Rich at the races, on the moors, on the Lido, and on the Riviera. Democracy’s peep-show.

After these hors d’œuvres come the leading articles, letters to the editor, “nature notes” straight from Fleet Street, an instalment of a serial story depicting a life such as was never lived on land or sea, pictures which are believed to amuse the children, and “leader page articles” largely contributed (or at least signed) by doctors, divines, the wives of ex-Cabinet Ministers, Russian Princesses, actresses, and――occasionally――journalists.

There are also articles in which women are instructed how to dress, cook, arrange a luncheon table, plan schemes of interior decoration, pack their trunks for a holiday, economise in the household, and retain the affection of their husbands.

The residue is news.

But not all of it.

For much of this residue is news only in a specialised and restricted sense. City notes, produce market notes, the movements of shipping, and golf, bridge, gardening, or motoring notes do not appeal to every reader. Nor, for that matter, does literary criticism, or the critiques of plays, films, concerts, and picture exhibitions.

But the residue of the residue is news. And that includes “gossip” by ladies and gentlemen apparently on terms of the utmost intimacy with Royalty and the nobility and gentry, the deaths of centenarians, the bright sayings of witnesses at police courts, the witty sayings of judges, the wise sayings of magistrates, and the futile sayings of coroners.

Add a crossword puzzle, and you have a newspaper. Democracy’s Mentor.

New inventions and institutions achieve popularity in accordance with the readiness with which they lend themselves to vulgarisation. So it has been with wireless and the kinema, and so it is with the Press. Cynics may say that every country has the newspapers it deserves, but that begs the question. The mass of the public undoubtedly likes its newspapers well enough (without having any very great respect for them) but it also likes novels and film plays entirely devoid of artistic value, just as it likes third-rate music and fourth-rate pictures. The real question is how far is popular taste natural, and how far has it been debauched by those who aim at giving the public what it wants, or what it is supposed to want. A brewer who succeeds in inducing his customers to acquire a taste for doctored or synthetic beer may be entitled to say that he is giving them what they like. But he is not entitled to say that they are incapable of appreciating unadulterated malt and hops, or that they would really prefer the genuine article if they were allowed a free choice between the two.

When compulsory schooling led to an immense and sudden increase in the number of people able to read without difficulty, well-meaning enthusiasts rejoiced at the prospect of the artisan beguiling his leisure with Dante, Milton, Schopenhauer, Ruskin, Darwin, George Eliot, or the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Actually, these newcomers to the world of letters turned mostly to the penny novelette and the “bitty” weekly. They might have patronised something better if the pioneers of reading matter for the million had made the experiment of seeing whether there was a market for something better. But the experiment was not made. And it was on the basis of a culture largely represented by the “snippety” weekly, that the creators of newspapers for the million began to build about a generation ago.

Let it be conceded that their intentions were largely laudable. The appeal of the newspaper had previously been restricted to a degree almost incredible to contemporary men and women under thirty. The daily paper was the preserve of the well-to-do and the “comfortable classes”; the masses bought evening papers for racing tips and other sporting information, and on Sundays they were regaled with a ragôut of the murders, the robberies, the assaults, the divorces, and the more unsavoury police court cases of the week. Journals of international repute, such as the _Times_, the _Daily Telegraph_, the _Neue Freie Presse_, the _Journal des Débats_, sold fewer copies in a week than the popular organs now dispose of in a day.

The Harmsworths, the Pearsons, the Hearsts, were to change all that. In order to make the daily paper a necessity, or a habit, of the masses, it was essential to depart from the pomposity of the older journals, with their long and platitudinous leading articles about nothing in particular, their unattractive “make-up,” their bald presentation of news, the immense length of their police court reports, and their adherence to the theory that the fall of a Cabinet in Patagonia was of more interest to the reader than a murder on his doorstep. The motto of the new Press was Brightness, Brevity, Enterprise, and Cheapness. It introduced photographs. It presented its news more attractively. It catered for the interests of women. It printed the light, but informative, article on topics of the day, often written by a specialist. It quickened up the transmission both of the news and of the newspaper. It aimed, in short, at mirroring passing events for the multitude rather than providing reading matter to be digested at leisure by the banker, the lawyer, the country gentleman, and the politician. And it succeeded remarkably――up to a point.

But man cannot live by brightness alone. And brightness became a fetish. Insensibly, and on the whole probably unconsciously, at least at first, the newspaper made excessive sacrifices in the pursuit of its passion for the purely readable. It concentrated on the tabloid and the snippet. It plastered its pages with pictures, so that we have reached the stage at which if Dean Inge, Bernard Shaw, the ex-Kaiser, President Coolidge, Mr. Lloyd George, or Mr. Charles Chaplin be mentioned on six consecutive days of the week by the same paper, each mention will be accompanied by a photograph, usually the same photograph, the size of a postage stamp. Similarly, the obsession of the Press for “human interest stories” (a characteristic legitimate enough in itself) has been developed to the point at which the wives and mothers of condemned murderers are interviewed directly after the verdict with a request for their comments on the justice of the sentence, while respectable householders are despatched with cameras to photograph the tears of miners’ widows after a colliery accident.

“Human interest” with a vengeance. But the worst feature of this vulgarisation of the popular Press is the resulting vulgarisation of the public. News editors would not instruct their reporters to interview divorcées, husbands whose wives have just been killed in motor accidents, or bereaved mothers, unless journalistic insistence as the “personal touch” had so greatly succeeded in banning decent reticence. The law does not punish such outrages on public taste, although it punishes many offences of far smaller detriment to the community.

Side by side with vulgarisation is persistent falsification of values. The Press promotes mass hysteria, as is shown by the excesses accompanying the visits of American film stars to England or of European queens to the United States. It consistently denounces the very evils, or imaginary evils for whose creation it is itself so largely responsible, finding, for instance, good “copy” both in detailed descriptions of a play alleged to be lewd, and in criticisms of the same play by clergymen who have not seen it. And it is driving privacy from the world by its discovery of the new creed that if the pen be mightier than the sword, the camera is mightier than either.

Insistence on the personal note has also brought in its train a Mumbo-Jumbo belief in the virtue of names. It is assumed that the public will attach more importance to an article signed with a name with which it is familiar than by an unsigned contribution, and although this theory is based on a certain element of fact, it is in practice overworked to the point of nausea. The reader will no doubt attach special importance to an article under the signature of Arnold Bennett, or H. G. Wells, especially if it deal with a subject with which the writer is particularly identified. He will also be more impressed by an article on tennis by Suzanne Lenglen than by an equally good but anonymous contribution. But is he equally impressed by the fact that a column of platitudes on motherhood, the contemporary young woman, or the decay of church-going, is signed by a, no doubt, estimable lady, whose only claim to public distinction is that she is the wife of an ex-Lord Mayor or the bearer of an obscure Hungarian title? Editors and proprietors apparently think so, thus indicating their cynical estimate of the level of public intelligence.

Furthermore, this passion for names is responsible for the perpetration of the grossest frauds on the public. It is notorious in Fleet Street that articles alleged to be contributed by politicians, musical comedy actresses, film stars, and professional footballers are, in fact, often not written by the illustrious who are their reputed authors. Indeed, the illustrious are as like as not incapable of writing a page of grammatical English, as is also the case with the self-advertising commercial magnate, whose reputed views on economic questions or industrial co-operation, neatly typed and flanked by carefully touched-up photographs, descend on the desks of editors in the company of the pigeon-English letters of pushful publicity agents.

But this fraud on the public, and there is no other name for a species of false pretence which is growing so rapidly that it is developing into an open scandal, is, relatively, a minor affair. The real evil is that the controllers of the Press, themselves largely amateurs, are going out of their way to encourage the incursion of the amateur into what is a highly-skilled and highly-complex avocation. And that constitutes the real false pretence. It does not matter very much whether that popular film comedienne, Miss Ruby Vamp, is actually responsible or not for the article on “Should Curates Charleston?” extensively and expensively advertised by the “Daily Dope.” But it does matter if the public be led to believe that an article on foreign relations written to order by a hack journalist for the purpose of provoking a sensation or promoting the policy of a newspaper proprietor should purport to be, and should be accepted, as from the pen of an impartial diplomatic expert, who has, in fact, only lent his name in return for money or for purposes of self-advertisement.[1]

[1] In December last, the Lawn Tennis Association passed resolutions prohibiting a competitor in tournaments and matches from writing articles thereon for the Press “under his own name, initials, or recognisable pseudonym,” and also from allowing a player to permit his name to be “advertised as the author of any book or press article of which he is not the actual author.” This resolution was boycotted by a portion of the Combine Press, while one newspaper distorted the attitude of the Association as representing “interference with amateurs,” and “dictating to newspaper proprietors and editors.” Imperence.

III

_The Dictators_

Few people understand the economic, still less the social, significance of Trusts and Combines. The public is familiar enough with the amalgamation of a number of more or less competing concerns engaged in the same industry; it is not so familiar with the conception of a Trust which owns or controls undertakings of widely-differing nature, such as the modern Combine which aims at controlling an article during the whole cycle of operations from the winning of the raw material to the marketing of the finished product. Still less is it familiar with the process whereby control, which is far more important than ownership, can be acquired by putting up quite a small proportion of the total capital invested in a commercial undertaking.[2]

[2] A large proportion of the capital of modern joint-stock companies is provided by debenture-holders, who normally have no voting rights whatever, and by preference share-holders, who may vote at meetings only when their dividend has been in arrears for a prescribed period. Even ordinary share-holders may have no voting rights, and the entire control, including the appointment of directors, can be vested in the owners of a particular class of share representing less than a tenth of the company’s total capital.

It is as the result of control rather than actual ownership that the British Press has within the past few years largely come into the hands of some four or five men. The Independent Press has, in consequence, almost ceased to exist. There are still, of course, newspapers uncontrolled by Combines or Trusts, but these are in the main restricted alike as to circulation, influence, and the range of their geographical distribution. Moreover, independence of ownership does not necessarily mean independence of control by a political party in whose interests the paper is administered by its nominal owners.

The “Trustification” of the Press is an entirely logical development, and has been accepted by the public in much the same way as amalgamations in any other industry. But there is a vital difference between a Newspaper Trust and a Beef Trust. The Newspaper Trust controls and manipulates public opinion. Its workings are largely subterranean. It is guided on occasion by purely political considerations to an extent impossible in any other industry. It may exercise a decisive influence on the issue of war or peace. Obviously, the control of a nation’s Press by a handful of men is not to be regarded in the same light as the control of its chemical industry. A “deal” in newspapers embodies, ultimately, a “deal” in the means of manipulating public opinion.

In every industry, the appetite for amalgamation grows by what it feeds on. The tendency is for the immensely powerful and wealthy Newspaper Trusts to absorb more and more publications. Very often, a competing organ is bought only that it may be “killed,” as happened to London’s oldest evening paper, _The Globe_. Amalgamation is often only a euphemistic term for the disappearance of an old-established paper. The independent journals cannot withstand the tentacles of the Octopus. Either they are forced out of existence by sheer inability to stand up against their much wealthier rivals, or the owners are induced to sell by offers too tempting to refuse. In the latter instance, the matter has usually been decided on down to the last detail by the directors on both sides before the offer is submitted to the share-holders who are the nominal and legal owners of the property.

The Dictators of Public Opinion thus enlarge their realm. It may be asked why, granted that the disappearance of existing Independent Newspapers is inevitable, new Independent organs do not make their appearance. The answer is that few undertakings involve the risk of such great loss, coupled with so much uncertainty and the necessity of putting up so much working capital to provide for possible losses during the first two or three years of existence, as the launching of a great newspaper. Excluding a journal subsidised by Labour organisations, only one serious attempt has been made in England during the last twenty years to found a new morning paper of national scope. It failed, after its millionaire proprietor had tired of losing money on the venture. The last attempt to establish a new London evening paper failed on the score of finance, distribution alone (_i.e._, getting the paper into the hands of readers after it had been printed) costing a thousand pounds a week. London, which is the journalistic centre of the United Kingdom (the small size of the country making possible the “nation-wide” newspaper, with which there is nothing really comparable in the United States), has actually far fewer morning and evening papers than twenty years ago.

It has more Sunday papers. But that is one of the results of Trustification. By placing a Sunday paper under the same control as one or more morning and evening journals, overhead charges, which eat up money in the newspaper industry, are largely reduced. Administrative and mechanical costs are lowered. Each paper in the Combine can give free publicity to the rest. Distribution costs are shared. Against such conditions, the lone hand fights a losing battle, and economic factors operate as much against the creation of new Independent journals as they operate for the absorption of those still in existence.

Since the armistice, the process of Trustification has undergone a remarkable acceleration. It has also entered on a new and immensely significant phase, the unification of control of publications of the most widely differing nature, thus bringing illustrated weeklies, fashion papers, monthly magazines, technical and trade journals, children’s weeklies and monthlies, and directories and other works of reference under the same ownership as morning, evening, and Sunday Newspapers. The modern Combine will even control the manufacture of its paper, and the supply of raw material for the purpose.[3]

[3] See Appendix.