The Party Flag Comes Down

I

IN the not-so-long-ago nineties a truculent weekly newspaper upheld the cause of Democracy in a Central Ohio county. ‘Right or wrong, the party!’ was its battle cry, and no one could remember a time when the party had been wrong.

Two or three times a year the pibroch was not sounded — a Democratic editor in an overwhelmingly Republican community is entitled to some surcease. These lapses made small difference in the office until the time came to make up the editorial page. Then it was necessary for the foreman of the composing room to make his rounds of the village saloons until he found his editor and could rouse him from his alcoholic gloom long enough to make him understand that all there was in hand for the place of honor beneath the masthead was a piece of reprint on ‘The Influence of Stewed Tomatoes on the Young.’ The routine of what ensued never varied: the glassy editorial eye would be fixed on the foreman, the unsteady editorial hand would fumble for pencil and paper and then would scrawl: —

‘The news first; let the people form their own opinions.’

Whereupon the Palladium would go to press with this declaration making its pica appeal for attention, all the countryside would know exactly what had happened, all the Democrats would wrap their fealty more closely about them, and all the Republicans would continue steadfast in their faith.

For reasons very different from this, of course, a steadily increasing number of newspapers in the United States to-day are running down their party flags. What is very much more significant, they are keeping them dowm. Since the war the increase has been not only steady but swift. There is every reason to expect that the process will continue, and that the pace will be accelerated. It is not of record that any newspaper has found the change other than to its advantage. Curiously, party leaders rarely have demurred; on the contrary, they frequently have urged defection from this oldest of journalistic practices. How strange a day it will be when this, of all nations, finds the partisan newspaper the exception and no longer the rule!

That day is coming, though. Fewer than one in four of the daily newspapers of the United States classify themselves as Republican, and fewer than one in five call themselves Democratic. Independent Republican papers make up only 11 per cent more, and Independent Democratic only 7 per cent more. Forty-one per cent are Independent — 778 of them, distributed among all the states but Delaware. They hold 52 per cent of the country’s total circulation of 39,425,615, and the figures indicate that they are growing more rapidly in circulation than in numbers even. In fourteen of the states Independent newspapers outnumber all the others by more than two to one, and in five they outnumber the others three to one.

Politics has had little to do with this change. Newspapers arc more interested in politics to-day than at any other time in their history, perhaps, but politics is becoming consistently more a matter of news than of opinion. It would be pleasant to say that the change has been a consequence of a finer vision on the part of the newspapers, but truth stands in the way of that. Quite as it was in the case of the Palladium, necessity has brought it about. That the necessity then was alcoholic and that now it is economic is the only real difference.

II

The factors in this present necessity are many and diverse. A consideration of their more important aspects appeared in the July 1930 Atlantic under the title, ‘ To-morrow’s Newspaper’: the steady decrease in the number of daily newspapers — for the past five years it has been at the rate of one every nineteen days; the even greater decrease in the number of owners — 450 papers, nearly 25 per cent of the whole number, are held by 150 ownerships; the steady growth of chains — every sixth paper in the United States is so owned; public participation in ownership— in the past three years fortyeight newspapers in thirty-six cities have issued, and sold, $130,000,000 of stocks and bonds, to which the Hearst Publications have recently added an offering of $40,000,000, par value, of 7 per cent preferred stock.

Economic compulsion has been behind these quite literally revolutionary changes. Circulation has reached the point of saturation, and advertising, already bearing two thirds the cost of production, has become more vital than ever as a source of income. Manufacturing costs have mounted until a variation of 15 per cent in the volume of advertising means the difference between profit and loss for most of the newspapers of the country. Faced by the discomfort, if not the peril, of such conditions, newspapers began to take stock of themselves. Realization came, to advertisers as well as to publishers, that competition could be both expensive and destructive — hence the spread of mergers. Realization came that important economies were to be found in centralized control — hence the chain and other forms of common ownership. Realization came that major successes were the more likely to be won by major organizations — hence the bringing in of outside capital.

It is not to be supposed from this that American newspapers are not financially successful as a whole. Their income is substantially more than a billion dollars a year, and their net earnings probably are nearer $150,000,000 than $100,000,000 a year. The new factor in their problem is that the ratio between gross and net earnings has become so much more narrow and more fixed. It is no longer merely desirable that a newspaper should make money; it must make money. In obedience to this necessity emphasis is being steadily shifted from every other function than the merchandising of news, with extensive side lines of entertainment, especially in the evening papers.

Nothing has gone more completely by the board than political partisanship in the old sense. It was in this tradition of partisanship that the American newspaper was born and nurtured. Its influence was transcendent for one hundred and twentyfive years. Under it the press attained its greatest achievements, and under it the press went to its greatest excesses. In the shadowed reaches of ‘practical’ politics it was put to a myriad uses, and not always in the innocence of the newspaper. An otherwise illustrious President of the United States turned it to his own ends by systematic, surreptitious subsidy over a long period. Only within the last twenty years has it ceased to be an almost inviolate rule that politics, partisan in the straitest sense of the word, shall be the first concern of the newspaper.

Not much freedom of choice was left the newspaper when it came to departing from the venerable tradition. Running a newspaper in the old partisan way was possible only when it could be done at a profit, unless subsidy, direct or indirect, made good the deficit. Subsidy, it may be said here, was never the factor it has been supposed to be. It was rarely permanent or even long continued; more and more, as the years passed, it came to be a measure of some especial emergency, and even at its sturdiest it was a frail bulwark. When rising costs of production, then, began their inroads upon profits, mortality was inevitable. The first to go were the newspapers whose chief purposes were political, because these were the weakest, having little to stay them but their partisanship and the support that came to them by reason of it. In many instances this weakness was, somewhat paradoxically, strength enough to hold papers in the limbo of merger, where at least their names might be saved from obliteration. A few were deemed worthy of continuance, but under new and stronger ownerships. The great majority, however, passed definitely by suspension or absorption. The cataclysmic year was 1926, when there was a net loss of fifty-two, an average of one a week. A net loss of ten more came in 1927, and in 1929, although there was a net gain of five in the total number, twenty ceased publication.

A strange condition exists now. This is a nation of immense devotion to newspaper reading; the circulation of daily newspapers is one third as great as the country’s population. Yet daily newspapers are published in only 1381 communities; that is, in fewer than one half the towns and cities of 2500 or more people. It is still more significant of the mortality of recent years that in only 400 of these 1381 communities is there more than one newspaper, that the other 981 have but one each. This is nearly three fourths of the communities having daily newspapers; it is nine more than an exact one half of the whole number of dailies.

It must always be difficult, if not impossible, for the one newspaper of a town to maintain a pronounced partisan position unless it reflects an overwhelming sentiment of the community. There is still no much surer way of making enemies than through politics, and a newspaper, like any other merchant, must have friends among advertisers no less than among readers, even though it be without direct competition. There is no reproach in this. It does not mean that integrity or sincerity of purpose should be sacrificed to expediency; the duty of a newspaper to serve its whole clientele impartially and alike is primary and paramount. But even where sentiment falls little, if at all, short of being overwhelming, the rise of the independent newspaper has been notable.

There are, for example, thirteen states with neither Democratic nor Independent Democratic newspapers, and eight states with neither Republican nor Independent Republican newspapers. It may be assumed fairly that the Opposition’s strength is negligible in these states and that so far as purely partisan opinion is concerned there would be few difliculties in the way of even violent party preference. These twenty-one states have more than one fourth of all the newspapers in the country, and considerably more than one fourth of the one-newspaper communities — 282 out of 981. Nearly one half of these communities have Independent newspapers — 129 out of the 282. If the Independent newspaper has so rooted itself in such soil as this, its spread, especially under other more favorable conditions, may be expected to be unbroken.

III

Repudiation of the ancient tradition, however, is far from complete. On national issues 59 per cent of all our papers (although they hold but 48 per cent of the circulation) are either Democratic or Republican, and on local as well as national issues 40 per cent still fly the party flag. Numerically they are aligned: Democratic, 326; Republican, 430; Independent Democratic, 139; Independent Republican, 216 — the joint Republican group numbering one third of all the papers in the country, and the joint Democratic one fourth. An Independent Democratic or an Independent Republican newspaper, it may be explained here, is one that is partisan in national affairs but may or may not be so in local affairs. In circulation the disparity is greater than in numbers, for the Republican-Independent Republican group, with 11,500,000, is something more than half again as great as the Democratic-Independent Democratic group, with 7,000,000. So far as party competition is concerned the gap is wider still, for 55 per cent of the Democratic papers and 54 per cent of their circulation are in the ‘Solid South,’ with 52 per cent of the Independent Democratic newspapers and 29 per cent of their circulation in the same area. In all these ten states there are no Republican papers, and but two Independent Republican.

There is support in this for the feeling, which became so strong during the Presidential campaign of 1928, that the Democratic cause lacks newspaper support comparable with that which is given the Republican. So far as distribution is concerned this is unquestionably true, for, outside the South, Democratic papers are almost entirely in the larger cities. Yet if the relation between party vote and party circulation be considered, it will be found that the Democrats are actually better off than the Republicans. In the last three Presidential elections Republican candidates have polled 57 per cent of the total vote, while Republican newspapers have 29 per cent of the circulation. Over the same period Democratic candidates have polled 38 per cent of the vote, while Democratic newspapers have only 18 per cent of the circulation. The Democratic vote, in other words, has been 2.1 times the Democratic circulation; the Republican vote only 1.9 times its circulation.

Any study of the relation between newspaper alignment and the outcome of political elections, however, must leave grave doubts of the influence that newspapers wield. For a generation evidence has been accumulating that they are, at best, only coincident factors in success. Not all the readers of even a partisan newspaper are of its faith, and many of those who are do not always keep perfect step with it. The fond belief to the contrary was no monopoly of the newspapers themselves; candidates accepted it, bosses had no doubt of it. The time had been, of course, when it was true. No one can say just when it began not to be true, but probably the last national campaign in which newspaper influence was an unmistakable factor was that of 1896. Steadily, since then, the folly of dependence on newspaper support has been growing.

There was vivid illustration of this in the mayoralty election of 1917 in New York City. John F. Hylan then was supported only by William Randolph Hearst’s American and Evening Journal; every other newspaper of general circulation in the city fought him to the last shot in their lockers. With a newspaper alignment of seven to one against him, Hylan got fortyseven out of every one hundred votes; John Purroy Mitchel, with a newspaper alignment of seven to one for him, got twenty-three, and barely escaped the humiliation of running third to the Socialist, Morris Hillquit. A more significant thing than this alone marked the election. In the Mitchel newspapers Hylan had his moiety of space and position. It may be added that Mitchel was accorded no such treatment in the Hylan newspapers. Never before was a campaign in any city so impartially or so adequately covered, and it is no figure of speech to say that Mitchel newspapers did more to give Hylan his great plurality, if not actually to elect him, than did his own. Nor has the practice changed; it has spread throughout the country until now it is quite a matter of course to give full and fair coverage to every major contender. Even Socialists share in this, and partiality runs only against Communists and Drys.

Passing over the years between, a second illustration may be found in 1928. Reference has been made to the eight states with neither Republican nor Independent Republican newspapers, and the thirteen with neither Democratic nor Independent Democratic newspapers. The eight states are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina; the thirteen arc Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. In the eight states with no Republican newspaper the vote for Hoover was 1,368,370, or 6.4 per cent of the total. In the thirteen states with no Democratic newspaper the vote for Smith was 2,202,235, or 14.7 per cent of the total, a result to be compared, incidentally, with a Republican vote in these states that was only 18 per cent of the total. These figures are of true significance. If it be said that unprecedented conditions prevailed in 1928 it must be remembered that what we are speaking of is the political influence of newspapers, and the conditions which did prevail exerted their least influence upon those agencies of argument and opinion. The very fact of these conditions, indeed, makes the showing the more convincing.

IV

Some curious conditions mark a number of communities where transition from the old partisanship is unmistakably under way but has not run its course. Notable among these are ninety-five towns and cities (in thirtyfour of the states) where all the newspapers are under a single ownership. For the great part this common ownership has come about through the economic reasons already discussed, and the situation is not less significant than the great number of one-newspaper communities. It is fairly to be expected that from this group will emerge many more towns with but a single newspaper, and then will come a final test of absence of competition in opinion as well as in news and in advertising. For among these ninety-five are six cities of more than 100,000 population — Providence, Rhode Island; Des Moines, Iowa; Springfield and New Bedford, Massachusetts; Camden and Trenton, New Jersey. Eight have more than 75,000 — St. Joseph, Missouri; Manchester, N ew Hampshire; WinstonSalem, North Carolina; Huntington, West Virginia; Springfield, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; Beaumont, Texas; and Roanoke, Virginia. Fifteen have more than 50,000, and thirty-five have between 25,000 and 50,000. In so preponderantly an urban country as the United States has become these should prove admirable crucibles for such an experiment.

In the meantime these ninety-five owners are making such shift as they may in meeting the partisan pleasure of their clienteles. Thirty-six of their papers are Republican, and twentythree Independent Republican. Fiftytwo of them are Democratic and twenty-three Independent Democratic. (It is to be remarked that thirty-seven of these fifty-two and twenty-one of the twenty-three are in states of the Solid South.) Fifty-six of them are Independent, and it is significant of the transition that this is the largest of the five classifications.

In eighteen of these ownerships the necessity exists of carrying two party flags, however embarrassing it may be upon occasion. The same circumstance affects fifteen other ownerships in towns where no monopoly is held. So it comes about that within the same seigniory there are Democratic and Republican papers in Columbia City, Evansville, and Portland, Indiana; Hagerstown, Maryland; Great Falls, Montana; Findlay, Middletown, Sandusky, and Zanesville, Ohio; Dubois and Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Johnson City, Tennessee; and Beckley, Bluefield, Clarksburg, Fairmont, and Huntington, West Virginia. In San Bernardino, California; Rockford, Illinois; Lewiston, Maine; Springfield, Worcester, and New Bedford, Massachusetts; Rochester, New York; Williamsport, Pennsylvania; and Wheeling, West Virginia, will be found Republican and Independent papers under one ownership. In Albany, New York, will be found an Independent Republican and an Independent paper; in Springfield, Ohio, an Independent Democratic and a Republican paper; in Bristol, Virginia, and Charleston, West Virginia, Independent Democratic and Independent Republican papers; and in Dallas and San Antonio, Texas, Independent Democratic and Independent papers, under the same house flag if under no other.

Official advertising is a factor in not a few of these adventures in dual partisanship, and in many another instance where there is not even ostensible reason for partisanship. Official advertising embraces the wide range of public notices of city, county, and state, and immemorially it has been the most toothsome dish on the newspaper menu, paying a high rate, requiring luxurious space, and involving a minimum of expense of composition. Immemorially, too, it has gone by political favor, and even of late years when many states regulate its distribution by statute, more often than not it is provided that it shall go to recognized organs of the dominant parties. Indiana, with such a provision, offers a striking example of the consequence. In Illinois, to the west, there are five Democratic newspapers — 5 per cent of the whole number. In Ohio, to the east, there are fifteen — 13 per cent. Indiana has twenty-five, 25 per cent, yet there is only negligible difference in the Democratic strength of the three states — in 1928 this vote was 42 per cent in Illinois, 35 per cent in Ohio, and 40 per cent in Indiana.

Despite these various lets, the trend away from party commitment among the newspapers of the United States is not to be questioned. There are many who lament it, fearful of a day when the Opposition, whatever label it bear, may find itself without a forum. Ernest Gruening, editor of the Portland (Maine) Evening News, defined this feeling well in a recent address at the University of Iowa.

‘Amorphous newspapers resulting from the merger of others,’ he said, ‘which attempt a general policy of “fairness to all parties,” do not meet the needs of the situation at all. Usually such papers are dominated wholly by the commercial motive and do not discuss vital political issues with intellectual honesty and vigor; they pussyfoot or ignore such matters altogether. The result is that the public gets little information on essential public matters through its press, and, not getting it from the press, gets it from nowhere else. The newspapers of an older day were undoubtedly much more biased, partisan, and unfair than the prevailing newspaper of to-day. But from the vigorous clash of diverse views emerged a more virile political-mindedness than we have to-day.’

This attitude on the part of many of our newspapers is undeniable. It has been fostered by a variety of other influences than the commercial motive alone, however, and it is an attitude that has to do with more than politics and public affairs. It affects news of every category in increasing measure.

Spontaneous news is the fashionable news nowadays, and fashion never before ruled the newspapers of this country as it does just now. Competition in the seeking and finding of news has all but passed. It is only here and there that evidences are to be found of the old curiosity as to what lies behind and beneath any given situation, as to where and how far its implications may run. The news that comes in, and as it comes in, suffices for the overwhelming majority, and, for a majority of that majority, more than suffices. Acquiescence in things as they are has become as standardized as form and matter; often acquiescence is complete indifference.

All these are habits common to the newspapers of the country as a whole. Their exemplification is most striking in political affairs, perhaps, but there is reason for deeper concern in the fact that they embrace all other affairs of social import. The degree of the newspapers’ own responsibility for them is not easy to establish. External influences have been many, and all the more powerful because they have not affected newspapers alone. The really important thing is that a fundamental change is being wrought in what has been a vital agency of guidance throughout our history. The character of the newspaper’s service in the future lies wholly within the realm of speculation.