NEWSPAPERS
THE influence of some newspapers on republican government is discernibly good; that of the enormous majority conspicuously bad. Conducted by rogues and dunces for dunces and rogues, these are faithful to nothing but the follies and vices of our system, strenuously opposing every intelligent attempt at their elimination. They fetter the feet of wisdom and stiffen the prejudices of the ignorant. They are sycophants to the mob, tyrants to the individual. They constitute a menace to organized society—a peril to government of any kind; and if ever in America Anarchy shall beg to introduce his dear friend Despotism we shall have to thank our vaunted “freedom of the press” as the controlling spirit of the turbulent time, and Lord of Misrule. We may then be grateful too that, like a meteor consumed by friction of the denser atmosphere which its speed compressed, its brightestblaze will be its last. The despot whose path to power it illumined will extinguish it with a dash of ink.
An elective judiciary is slow to enforce the law against men before whom its members come every few years in the character of suppliants for favor; and how abjectly these learned candidates can sue, how basely bid for a newspaper’s support, one must have been an editor to know. The press has grown into a tyranny to which the courts themselves are servile. To rule all classes and conditions of men with an iron authority the newspapers have only to learn a single trick, against the terrible power of which, when practised by others, they “continually do cry,” with apparently never a thought of the advantage it might be to themselves—the trick of combination. This lesson once learned, Liberty may bury her own remains, for assuredly none will perform that pious office for her with impunity. It has not come to that yet, but when by virtue of controlling a newspaper a man is permitted to print and circulate thousands of copies of a slander which neither he nor any man would dare to speak before his victim’sfriends a long step has been taken toward the goal of entire irresponsibility. George Augustus Sala said that from sea to sea America was woman’s kingdom, which she ruled with absolute sway. Yet in America the father does not protect his daughter, the son his mother, the brother his sister nor the husband his wife, except in the theatrical profession, by way of advertisement. The noblest and most virtuous lady in the land may be coarsely derided, her reputation stabbed, her face, figure or toilet made the subject of a scurrile jest, and no killing ensue, provided the offense be committed with such circumstances of dissemination and publicity as types alone can give it.
If the editor of a newspaper has any regard for his judgment; that is, if he has any judgment, he will not indulge in prophecy. The most conspicuous instances of the folly of predictions are those that occur in a political “campaign.” There is a venerable and hoary tradition among those ignorant persons who conduct party organs that the best and most effective way to make their party win is to assert and re-assert that itwill. This infantilenotion they act uponad nauseam, and doubtless lose by it a good many votes for their party that it would otherwise receive, by making the more credulous among their readers so sure of success that they do not think it worth while to vote. If you could convince an unborn babe that it was going to be born with a silver spoon in its mouth it would not exert itself to procure that spoon.
But making all due allowance for what the babes first above mentioned do from “policy,” it remains true that partisan editors—whose bump of common sense is countersunk till it would hold a hen’s egg—actually believe in the inevitable success of their ticket every time and once more. The election comes and a half of them are shown to their readers in the true character of persons whose judgment is not worth a pin on any matter under the sun. The mantle of the prophet having been raped away from the partisan editor’s shoulders, it is seen that motley is his only wear, and his readers—themselves of equal incapacity—feel for him ever thereafter the contempt which he made such sacrifices to deserve. Does it teach him anything? Something Solomon hath said on this point—something about a fool and a mortar.
The editor-person’s defense is somewhat as follows: “The income of my paper depends not alone upon the favor of its readers, but upon that of the party managers, and these latter certainly, if not the former, would withhold their patronage (keeping it in the campaign fund) if I did not ‘whoop her up.’ They believe in literary brass-banding and fireworking. They wish to hear ‘Hail to the Chief’ in every editorial line and in all the dispatches. If I exclude from my columns news that is not news, but the outgivings of partisan enthusiasm or the calculated falsehoods of partisan chicanery; if, in short, I refuse to sell dishonest goods, I lose my chance at the loaves and fishes and my paper is deposed from its proud position as an organ.”
As to all that I have nothing to say. If a man choose to defend the picking of others’ pockets by the plea that it fills his own, and that if he stop his pal will no longer divide with him, the only cogent reply that I know of is to call the police.
As to the “general reader,” who is not entirely a scoundrel nor altogether a fool, he requires no assurances of success to keep his courage up. In order to retain his favor it is unnecessary to seem no wiser than himself andto share with him the dirty last ditch of his broken hope every few years. The notion that an editor must “identify” himself with all the wild and fallacious hopes of his readers, with all their blind, brute prejudices and with the punishment of them, is a discreditable tradition of the newspaper business, having nothing in it. The traditions of every business are the creation of little, timid men whose half-success is achieved, not by their methods, but in spite of them, and because of the scarcity of men of brains. If these were plentiful there would be nothing left for the traditionaries to accomplish. The man of brains makes his success by the clarity of his understanding: by discerning beneath the traditions the principles, and, ignoring the former, applying the latter in his own way—which his competitors and successors fondly believe they can imitate by following his methods. In nothing has a great success, or rather a succession of great successes, been made except by cutting loose from the traditions and doing what the veteran experts gasp to observe.
Some years ago—as lately as the presidential contest between Cleveland and Blaine—itwas a cast-iron tradition of journalism that personal defamation was a necessary and effective aid to success. True, every newspaper deprecated it in a general way, and rose at it, shrieking when it hurt; but nearly all practised it and always had done so. Every political campaign was a disgraceful welter of detraction and calumniation. To snout out a candidate’s “personal record,” and if it was found clean befoul it—that was what the partisan editor regarded as his first and highest duty to his party. The besmirching of candidates was a tradition sacred and inviolable; it is now a dead practice, and we have probably seen the last campaign of mud-slinging. The thing might advantageously have been stopped at any time. The people did not demand it; they were as decent then as now. The case was that newspaper men did not know their business; and in respect of many other disreputable survivals they do not know it now. I could name a full dozen newspaper traditions now in full and strenuous vitality that are as needless and mischievous as the vilification of candidates. They will all die hard, but die they must, for the world will finally fall into the sun, which will consume them.
That the newspapers might with advantage to the community be made a deal cleaner is a proposition hardly open to question. In my judgment this could be done without loss to their owners, but that is an irrelevant consideration. It is not permitted to them to urge that a decenter course would ruin them, for the community is under no obligation to make publication of newspapers profitable. To the editorial argument, “I have to live,” the answer is, “Yes, but not in that way.” That plea is precisely as valid when made by the burglar. Every one who has not committed a capital crime has a right to live, but no one has a right to live by mischief.
Clean newspapers if enterprising, honest and clever do thrive; so what is really meant by “the right to live” is the right to live in luxury—the right to a great income, instead of a smaller one. There is no such right. If there were it would spare from condemnation the grocer who sells poisonous goods because there is a demand for them, the noctivagant Dago crying his rotten tamales, the quack doctor in pursuit of his patient’s health. There is no such right.
Charles Dudley Warner said, and it is repeated after him with tireless iteration, that nearly every publisher of a newspaper is making a better paper than he can afford to make. That is true, provided (1) that good newspapers are not so well supported as bad, and (2) that publishers cannot “afford” to be poor, or only moderately wealthy. Some of the best and greatest men in the world, including Jesus Christ, have thought they could afford to be poor. Poverty is not dear at the price that one pays for it; it is dirt-cheap. Any one can afford it, and many can not afford to be without it.
The right to publish newsbecauseit is news has no basis in law nor in morals; nor dare its most intrepid protagonist assert his claim in consistent practice. Every newspaper man learns almost daily of occurrences so lurid, of sins so “sensational,” of crimes so awful that they have immunity from print. The world is not only a good deal better but a good deal worse than it looks through any newspaper. An editor has constantly to “draw the line”; he can draw it where he pleases—nobody is compelling him to “go far” in publication of immorality. To assert a right to do so; to affirm other compulsion than curiosity—that is dishonest. It is dishonest to unload his responsibility upon the shoulders of even the sinners whose sins he relates. They break the laws of decency, but they do not compel him to. They do not force him to expose for sale narratives of their offenses; they prefer that he do not. He has no mandate to make the way of the transgressor hard: we have laws for that. He has only the mandate of his pocket; if in obeying it he damage or disgust or distress the best persons among whom he lives he can not plead the profit that he makes in gratification of the others. It is no way desirable that they be gratified.