Part 2

Such comprehensive Trustification may either assume the shape of complete amalgamation of separate companies, or be effected by the process known as unification of interests, in which a common control is brought about by such means as the presence of the same men, or their nominees, on the boards of companies which retain their corporate entity but are animated by a common policy and administered to serve common interests. The result is in either instance the same.

The world has never known anything comparable. A handful of men, sitting over a luncheon table, can decree what the community is to think, what it is to be told, what it is not to be told. So we have reached the “Fordisation” of the intellect, which works through mass suggestion reinforced by damnable iteration. And this is mainly the work, not of men with missions, not of enthusiasts, or patriots, or men of culture, not even of journalists, but of men who have “gone into” the newspaper industry as they might have “gone into” the establishment of bacon-curing factories.

Does it require a prophet to forecast the colossal influence of the Dictators on the opinions, the conduct, and the ideals of the next generation?

For the process of Trustification cannot be arrested. Law and public opinion are alike powerless to stem it. No Anti-Trust legislation, as has been proved by America, is ever or can ever be of the smallest effect, since there are too many means of evading the spirit of the law while adhering to the letter. Interlocking directorates, ownership of shares carrying control over the entire undertaking, secret arrangements for pooling profits, are among the common methods adopted in order to set up a _de facto_ Trust when it may not be legal or politic to establish a Trust in name. Newspapers which succeed in maintaining a semblance of independent ownership and independent policy will thus be brought within the orbit of the Combines although they may nominally remain outside. The Trusts will become Super-Trusts, and the Press of the whole country may be dominated by two, three, or even one combine, with a single individual as Arch-Dictator.

The process is inevitable, even if only for the reason that the splitting up of a Trust that has once been formed entails reduction in profits. Northcliffe, who was above and beyond everything else a journalist, aimed merely at the supreme control of the journals created by his genius. The contemporary Dictators, who are not journalists, aim at dominion over the whole field of the Press. They have already gone most of the way towards attaining their ambition.

A special factor which has received very little consideration will operate in the near future towards the tightening of the stranglehold of the Press Combines. Trustification of the Newspaper Industry has recommended itself to financiers on the ground, _inter alia_, that it enables expenditure to be cut down. The history of nearly every industrial combine, excepting those affecting the Press, has since the armistice been one of profits that have failed to come up to the promoters’ estimates. In numerous instances, despite the considerable economies foreshadowed in the prospectus, earnings have been materially lower than those of the former separate undertakings now under one control. Indeed, the process of amalgamation or of acquiring controlling interests has during the past few years been in general disappointing to share-holders.

Until now, the Newspaper Trusts have been more fortunate, partly because certain classes of advertisers have been induced to spend much more money, partly because of the economies effected by the wholesale discharge of staffs consequent on the so-called amalgamation of papers which have been bought only that they might be “killed”;[4] and in part because the results of acquiring share-holdings at fancy prices have yet to materialise.

[4] “_The Yorkshire Evening Argus_ having been amalgamated with the _Bradford Daily Telegraph_, the Editor of the former paper (Mr. J. W. Masters) confidently recommends the members of his loyal and competent staff to all who need literary assistance, and would be glad to receive applications from editors and others having positions to offer.”――Advertisement in the _Times_, December 15, 1926.

This prosperity cannot be expected to last indefinitely. The newspaper brokers, that new class of financial intermediary which is playing so significant a part in the making of “deals” in public opinion, have done uncommonly well out of their buyings and sellings. They may still do well in the immediate future, but they have no concern with the ultimate prosperity of the industry. The future position of share-holders in the Press Trusts does not seem so assured as they imagine to-day. As profits decline, or fail to increase in accordance with expectations, the dictators will decree reductions in expenditure, beginning with the human material which has created their profits and their goodwill. The desire for economy, which is on the whole more likely to be attained by means of centralised administration than with a number of separate and individual undertakings, will obviously outweigh any arguments that might be brought forward in favour of “unscrambling” the Press Trusts, or splitting up the Combines into smaller undertakings. Furthermore, when the Trusts feel the pinch, or regard their profits as insufficiently bloated, the ambition to drive out what remains of the Independent Press will be accentuated, and yet more journals outside the Combines will be forced to surrender.

With the process of Trustification has come a complete change in the character of the Controllers of the Press. Men such as Delane of the _Times_ were great editors, that is, great journalists, who stamped their impress on an age which still held to the belief that the editor was responsible for the editorial policy of his paper, and was something more than the mere paid servant of his proprietors, to be engaged and discharged as one “hires and fires” a scullery maid. Men such as Northcliffe (with all his faults a great man and one with a touch of that indefinable quality which we term genius) were possessed of creative ideas; they had vision and ideals; they saw in the newspaper something more than a mere instrument for money-making. If they made money it was not because it was their primary ambition to do so, or even because they particularly cared about money, but because their creations could not help attaining a considerable degree of material success.

To-day, with negligible exceptions which are unlikely to be perpetuated, editors are merely hired servants. A. C. P. Scott is an exception.[5] Another Delane is an impossibility. Another Northcliffe is unthinkable, since the new Dictators have fashioned the rôle of the Press, and their own rôle, after a diametrically opposite conception.

[5] Editor of the _Manchester Guardian_, and controller of its editorial policy.

In the stead of the Delanes and the Northcliffes, we have control by self-seeking millionaires with a megalomaniac itch for interference. A dozen years ago, the spectacle of a newspaper proprietor expressing on the front page of his principal organ his entire disagreement with the opinions of his dramatic critic on an entirely undistinguished play would have been incredible. Such an outrage on taste is symptomatic of the dictatorship by the new Overlords of the Press. Here we have yet another manifestation of the amateur’s conception of journalism. Anyone, thinks the modern proprietor, can be a dramatic critic, a musical critic, a literary critic, a Parliamentary correspondent, an editor, especially if his name be known to the public in a capacity entirely unrelated to journalism. If he be a peer or possess a courtesy title, then he is the beau ideal of journalism.[6]

[6] “Anyone can write leading articles,” the author was once solemnly assured by one of our best-known editors. He was neither endeavouring to be humorous nor to be cynical; he was merely expressing what the Conductors of the Press themselves think of the Press which they conduct.

Amateurishness and the love of interference also combine to give us the ponderous signed contributions with which newspaper proprietors regularly favour their own journals. Whether these articles are in every instance, or in any instance, actually written by their signatories, is a matter with which I have no immediate concern. But they are significant of the driving forces behind the modern Press Trust; they exemplify the rôle of the Press as an engine of propaganda, self-advancement, and self-advertisement, for its millionaire owners.

To quote Mr. St. John Ervine:

“We know there are certain demented millionaires who own newspapers and will write for them; and when one of these men writes an article, the staff hides its head and goes about the rest of the week explaining it away. We (the journalists) are the paper. We are the goodwill of the paper, and when they sell a paper they sell what we have made. When they sell what we have made and say ‘We don’t want you any more,’ we should be regarded as the first charge on the price of that paper. We have known proprietors who have ruined papers. Such a man should be in gaol for ruining a good business.... Editors used to put the proprietors of newspapers in their place, and there is no reason why it should not be done again.”

Mr. Ervine, it may be added, made these remarks at a meeting convened by the Institute of Journalists on December 11, 1926, under the chairmanship of Sir Robert Bruce, editor of the _Glasgow Herald_. His remarks were, of course, boycotted by the leading organs of the Press Trust.

IV

_The Mannerisms of Stentor_

A problem for the consideration of the Dictators of the Press is that of reconciling the up-to-date nature of the modern newspaper in most respects with its extraordinary conservatism in others, an inconsistency that affords genuine amusement to the student of contemporary life and manners. The Press is still old-fashioned enough to regard Woman (with a very large “W”) as a remarkable creature that has only just been discovered. Her slightest and most inconsequential doings are regarded as of the most compelling interest. “Women Present at Football Match” declaim the headlines, and the game is immediately vested with a special and romantic atmosphere.[7]

[7] I do not dilate on this theme, since it has so admirably been expounded by Rose Macaulay, who is human enough to rebel against her sex being treated by the Press as though it were almost human.

Again, we have progressed beyond the “Book of Snobs,” but “public schoolboy,” “old Etonian,” “wife of Ex-M.P.,” and “Colonel” are still imagined by sub-editors to be invested in the reader’s mind with an aura denied to the mass of human beings. As for members of the nobility, let an amiable and undistinguished peer die of heart failure in his eightieth year, or collide in his motor car with a taxi-cab, and the news is conveyed to a bored public by means of special contents bills. For the public is bored, when it is not disgusted, by these endeavours to make the world safe for Snobocracy. Yet a journalist who attempted to point out that both social values and news values had altered since the days of the Great Exhibition, and, in particular, since the Great War, would be told that he did not know his business and that he was most certainly a Bolshevik.

Again, while proprietors and editors long ago realised the implication of Northcliffe’s discovery that Woman was a creature of sufficient intelligence and curiosity to read a newspaper (even if only for the advertisements of drapers), they still regard her in the light of an intellectual crétin so far as concerns the provision of reading matter. If any critic consider this statement too severe, let him――or her――concentrate exclusively for the next two days on the fashion and “Society” columns and the “Woman’s Pages” of the Popular Press.

Moreover, the editorial conception of women is that they are without exception possessed of inexhaustible means, leisure, and ability to make holiday at expensive resorts all the year round and to attend all the costliest “functions” as a matter of course. No other explanation of the fatuous drivel offered up for the special delectation of female readers offers itself to the reasoning mind.

Do you think I have been unfair? Then read this characteristic paragraph from an evening paper, headed “Earnest Young Women”:

“It must not be thought that the American girl merely dances her way through life. Not at all. She must have variety, therefore she dabbles lightly in art, literature, politics, or philanthropy. She has days for visiting hospitals or other institutions or she makes political speeches as Miss Barbara Sands, grand-daughter of Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, has been doing recently, and as Sarah Murray Butler does all the time, or she even takes up business in her odd moments, like Elinor Dorrance, who at eighteen has decided to know all about the famous Campbell soups company of which her father is head and which she will inherit.”

This is not parody. It is the real thing, complete with snobbishness, clichés, naïveté, and the conviction that it doesn’t in the least matter how you write or what you write about so long as you are writing for other women. And it is published in a paper whose owners lay stress on the fact that it caters especially for intelligent and cultured womanhood.

“The famous Campbell soups company.” “Famous” is the sub-editor’s favourite word,[8] applied by him with unwearying zeal to all men and women who have ever got themselves in the public eye――unless they are really famous――applied even to furniture polishes, blends of whisky, and popular cigarettes. The sub-editor, that romantic soul, also assumes that the normal behaviour of the notorious or the merely well-known is flamboyant, so that when they manage their affairs without limelight they are “quietly married,” or they “leave quietly” for their honeymoon. The one thing the Press will in no circumstances permit them to do is to die quietly.

[8] “Amazing,” “mystery,” “thrilling,” and “dramatic” are also hot favourites in the Stock Phrase Stakes.

Is it not time that the pages of the Press were one quarter so up-to-date as the machinery which prints them? and that “journalese” should cease to be a synonym for the vapid, the crude, the provincial, and the semi-illiterate?

Impartiality being even rarer than commonsense, no one would be foolish enough to demand from a newspaper either complete lack of bias, or the presentation with equal prominence of both sides of a controversial case. Such impartiality would be contrary to human nature. But natural prejudice does not necessarily involve the deliberate distortion of news.

News can be, and is, habitually manipulated both by distortion and suppression. The first procedure is, on the whole, less objectionable, since a little knowledge on the part of a reader will often enable him to realise that a case is being overstated. Moreover, he may allow for the known political complexion of a journal. Suppression assumes two shapes, partial and complete. The latter, which is the more unusual, comes into play when a newspaper does not find it convenient or politic to give publicity to events or ideas, but this reticence does not necessarily spring from sinister or interested motives. Indeed, it may simply be because the news editor, who lives in a curious world of his own, often remote from the contacts of the outer world, and who is avid only of stereotyped sensations, fails to recognise news when it is thrust under his nose. In such instances, a rival may possibly recognise “news value.” Or again, he may not.

This partial suppression, of which the Socialist newspapers are quite as guilty as the so-called “Capitalist Press” denounced by them for the practice, is one of the deadliest weapons in the armoury of journalism. Let it be clearly understood that we are concerned here not so much with a matter of unfairness or injustice to an individual or a section of the community, as with injustice to the community as a whole, which is deliberately and systematically deprived of knowledge of all the facts necessary to form a judgment regarding the issues at stake in a question which may affect the national well-being.

For instance, it is impossible for the average newspaper reader to form a detached opinion of the rights and wrongs of a coal strike. The miners’ wages are alternatively exaggerated and minimised; exceptionally high earnings in the coal fields are paraded as typical of the average for the industry as a whole; or the earnings of coal hewers are represented at much below the real level on the strength of figures including the wages of boys and surface workers. All these facts are readily available and accessible in any modern newspaper office. But only a selection of them is published by any one paper.

Again, to take an example of complete suppression, the curtain may never be lifted by the Press on a political or other scandal of which the exposure is emphatically in the public interest. Such a boycott may be just as much due to the belief that the subject has no news value as to any ulterior reasons. But the injury to the community is the same in either event. Newspaper readers are not concerned with the motives animating editors and proprietors; they _are_ concerned with the results of those motives.

V

_The Newspaper of To-Morrow_

The professional will not, of course, be entirely eliminated from journalism. Despite their love of the amateur, newspaper proprietors realise that his place is not among the reporters, the news editors, the sub-editors, the financial editors, or the “art editors”――whose concern lies not with art, but with news photographs. As to editors, that is another matter. The rôle of editor tends more and more to become that of conduit pipe between staff and proprietary, whose views and policy he is called on to expound and further. So that the amateur will add the editorial chair to his Press conquests. Indeed, he has already made a beginning.

One figures the popular “dailies” of the next decade, with their signed articles by film stars, politicians, jockeys, footballers, tennis players, and racing motorists. One visualises their Women’s Page, Beauty Hints, and Guide to the Fashions, ostensibly conducted by popular actresses whose time is already fully occupied in meeting the conflicting claims of the Stage and of “Society.” One foresees the daily sermon by the proprietor’s pet divine, and the daily health article by the medical man who regards the stylo as more lucrative than the scalpel. One foresees also an immense increase in the number of photographs and other pictures, aided by the development of telephotography, television, and air transport. The motorist, the golfer, the collector of antique furniture, the amateur gardener, the investor, will find more space devoted to their special interests. There may even be room for an increase in the amount of space (if not of the quality) devoted to book reviews, although this forecast is admittedly optimistic. (What the public is supposed to want is not literary criticism, but “gossip” about the personal habits, the clothes, the recreations, the holidays, and the monetary earnings of authors.)

The leading articles will remain, partly through conservatism, and in part because of their utility for purposes of propaganda and “uplift.” The serial story will improve in quality, since that is one of the logical sequences of the passion for well-known names. More and larger prizes will be awarded for guessing contests and other competitions. The scope of newspaper insurance will be extended, although this function may ultimately be curtailed or even cease when the process of Trustification has gone so far that individual journals will no longer be under the necessity of trying to abstract each others’ readers. The pictures and stories for the nursery (and what the nursery really thinks of some of these efforts for its entertainment would surprise their purveyors) will be raised to the dignity of a whole page, complete with editor, the latter probably the wife of an ex-Cabinet Minister. The Sabbath will be kept holy by an increase in the space devoted to autobiographies of contemporary criminals and the retelling of old crimes. In short, the Newspaper will have travelled a stage further on the road to supplant the book, to supplement the playhouse.

It is pertinent at this point to refer to one of the seeming paradoxes of the modern Press, the diminution of its influence as its circulation and wealth have increased. Strictly speaking, the process has rather been one of a shifting of the centre of influence. When circulations were small, readers belonged to the influential classes. A leading article in the _Times_ could cause the Cabinet to reflect, could influence European chancelleries, could even exercise a definite effect on projected legislation. In much the same way as the importance of the individual voter has diminished with every broadening of the basis of the franchise, so has the nature of the old influence of the Press on public affairs declined with growth in circulations.

“Government by newspaper” has been denounced by politicians when the views expressed by a journal have not happened to coincide with theirs, but hitherto it is the endeavour rather than the realisation which has been criticised. A newspaper can and does influence the Cabinet in relatively unimportant matters, such as the propriety of commercial advertising by post-mark; it no longer succeeds in swaying the Administration in the matter of a first-class legislative measure, or in inducing it to sanction a reform or a change desired by the majority of electors; despite almost unanimous newspaper criticism of the retention of certain war-time regulations, such as those governing the hours during which it is licit to sell chocolate or cigarettes, the Home Secretary is still able to say that he is so far unaware of any widespread public demand for a relaxation of these restrictions.[9]

[9] Since this has been written, a committee has been set up to inquire into the regulations in question.

But against the decline in the direct political influence of the Press there has to be set the growth of its influence over the community. The expansion both of circulations and of the field of interests catered for by the newspaper, already touched on in these pages, has helped immensely to develop the “newspaper habit.” It is a matter of elementary psychology that the average man and woman cannot help being influenced by the day-to-day exposition of political and other questions in the columns of their newspapers. Let any journal adopt the consistent policy of blackening the leaders of Soviet Russia or belauding Mussolini, and the infamy of the Bolsheviks or the disinterestedness and greatness of the Italian dictator becomes a creed to hundreds of thousands. Let the whole Press unite in the same shout, and that is the tendency under its present controllers, and the result is mass suggestion of a nature and intensity which causes the Press to mould the public opinion of whole nations. So that although an individual newspaper or a combination of newspapers may be powerless directly to affect the policy of a Cabinet, it is daily operating to sway the minds of the people and thus, indirectly, to sway Governments through the ultimate effect of mass suggestion in action during the period of a general election or a political crisis.

And this is the work of a handful of men who――it is no reproach to them――are temperamentally unfitted for the enormous responsibilities which they have assumed so light-heartedly, so casually――as casually as though they were “cornering” chewing gum.