Good Newspapers and Bad

I

NEWS vending has become highly diversified in the modern world. Of old, the town crier and the beggar going from European village to village purveyed the news. Their companion in commerce was the peddler of oddments with his pack on his back. The town crier was more or less a subsidized news merchant. The beggar was a free agent, except that the better his story, the better bed and board he got. Thus lying early became highly profitable in merchandising the news. But after the peddler put down his pack and opened a store he found beside him the town crier or the beggar, or both, running a printing office. The peddler’s store developed departments. The mendicant printer and the town crier became editors, selling opinions with the news.

Two or three generations back, in the English-speaking countries, the editor, who had prospered partly by mendacity and partly by blackmail, who until then would crook a knee to a patron and pull a forelock to his betters, suddenly began to brace up. The merchant prince, grandson of the peddler, was using the printer and editor to promote merchandising. In the early part of the last quarter of the old century, in the English-speaking world the sums paid to publishers for advertising began to outstrip the sums paid to editors for subscriptions. Advertising directed the course of development of the newspaper. In continental Europe, where such advertising as we know in the English-speaking democracies is considered unethical, the press remains a pamphlet — more or less. It is subsidized. It is still the town crier with a louder voice than his knee-breeched great-grandfather had.

But in the English-speaking world the domination of advertising in the printer’s revenue has developed a new profession. The journalist is a hybrid — partly business man, partly sleuth, partly professional worker, partly publicist, carrying traces here and there of showman, philosopher, scavenger, and charlatan. In different newspapers different qualities take precedence, coloring the product of the different presses. Broadly speaking, however, American journalism divides along one line, an ancient line, the line which marks the precedence of the business office over the editorial department. Speaking broadly again and allowing for many notable exceptions, this is the truth — that the more definitely the business office dominates a newspaper and makes it conspicuously profitable, the less valuable the newspaper is to its community. Like all simplifications, this one should be distrusted, because it implies a connection between dishonesty and prosperity in a newspaper which is not always warranted by the facts. Yet, while obvious venality and a lust for profits are evidences of dishonesty, a newspaper may prosper tremendously and yet be incorruptible. Possibly its dishonesty is intellectual. Or maybe its dishonesty is imaginary — a matter of good taste or bad.

Now that matter of good taste or bad brings us down to another subdivision in the newspaper business. This subdivision separates newspapers that appeal to the higher strata of intelligence in their potential readers from those that appeal to the lower strata of intelligence. Similarly, churches in our urban centres attract their members from men and women living upon a certain economic standard, and hence, presumably, of a similar grade of intelligence. At any rate, different newspapers in many communities are directed at different reader groups up and down the spectrum of intellectual capacity in their communities. In general, a newspaper that tries to give its community complete coverage has a hard task, especially in our great metropolitan areas.

Now these different kinds of newspapers appealing to different classes of readers would seem to have different standards of morals. Thus one speaks loosely of certain newspapers which appeal to the more literate, the more reasonable, and the more comfortable classes of society as good newspapers. Similarly, one refers to newspapers that pander to the ignorant, to the underprivileged, to the men and women of clouded vision and low I. Q., as bad newspapers. Possibly, indeed probably, the terms used thus are unjustified. New Yorkers, for instance, who buy either type of newspaper regard the other as mercenary and wicked. The subscriber who invests in the tabloid and in the gutter sheet regards the Times as corrupt and class-conscious, and what the readers of the Times think of the newspapers that appeal blatantly or even unconsciously to their less fortunate neighbors fills the Times readers with emotion inexpressible in their polite vocabulary.

II

Two books appeared last autumn significantly telling the stories of these differences in objective so often manifest in American newspapers. Watching the World Go By is the autobiography of Willis J. Abbot, long-time editor of the Christian Science Monitor, now member of its Editorial Board. Timber Line, by Gene Fowler, is the chronicle of the professional careers, with more or less of the private lives, of H. H. Tammen and F. G. Bonfils, who made the Denver Post, which proclaimed itself at its masthead the ‘paper with a heart and soul’ — and, added its unfair enemies, a price. It may be worth while for a moment to consider two opposite careers in American journalism. For in these books the lives, aims, and achievements of Willis Abbot and the Denver editors dramatize broad differences of character and purpose in our journalism.

Mr. Abbot’s story recalls a well-born youth with average American college education setting forth in the newspaper profession to find his Holy Grail: this being, first, distinction through services; second, security in his person; third, a modicum of honor; and finally, but above all, well-grounded selfrespect. He begins as a reporter in New Orleans, tries his hand at establishing an evening paper in Kansas City and fails like a gentleman, turns up in Chicago, capitalizes his experience, becomes managing editor and editor in chief of a number of journals in the interior metropolis, moves up and on in his profession until he finds himself seated in the editorial chair of the Christian Science Monitor. That journal has been established by Mrs. Eddy, prophetess of the Christian Science Church. The Monitor is to be a newspaper appealing to readers who are not interested in sensations, who do not demand the news of crimes, of sex, or of violence. Under the guidance of Mr. Abbot the ideals of the founder are maintained. After a generation of hard, intelligent work, a successful newspaper appears, a newspaper known all over the world, a model for newspaper men who are counted leaders of the upper middle class. Mr. Abbot has achieved success. He is not without honor, he has personal and economic security, he may well take pride in his life.

His career exemplifies a typical American journalist of, let us say for euphony, the best type. He has sought for rewards in realities, asking of Fate only incidentally fame and money and power. He has made a lifelong appeal to newspaper readers of good taste, men and women of discernment and of a certain sophisticated perspicacity, who are not fooled by flash and blare and boasting — solid upper-middleclass citizens, the solid basis of a bourgeois civilization, citizens who like to feel that they form our ruling class. Indeed, in the long run, probably they do dominate America and finally have their say, considering American life in terms of decades.

III

Behold now the shining contrast. Let us open the book Timber Line, wherein Gene Fowler tells the story of Tammen and Bonfils, owners and editors of the Denver Post. Harry Tammen was a barkeeper in Denver in the eighties. Fred Bonfils in the early nineties was running what is commonly known as a policy game — a lottery device that did not use the mails, but appealed to the proletarian submerged tenth around the packing houses of Kansas City. Many of his patrons were the Negroes who had come from the South in the exodus of the seventies. Tammen was a child of the streets, a Dutch immigrant boy who had drifted from the Atlantic Coast to the Rocky Mountains, and then in his twenties knew that life was a merciless, cruel game, in which the winner was a fool if he hesitated to deal from the bottom or run in cards from another deck.

Tammen and Bonfils bought the Denver Evening Post during the depression of the middle 1890’s. They ran it for forty years on Showman Barnum’s theory that a sucker was born every minute. Tammen also was a showman. Every thimblerigger’s trick, every form of ballyhoo, every cheap device to attract cheap people, Tammen used as a publisher. Bonfils was the editor of the Post. He had been exposed to a West Point education, was an able abettor of the showman in baiting the hook with a certain flashy elegance which attracted the vulgar.

Denver, in the 1890’s, was the capital of a pure plutocracy. Colorado was a mining state in those days. Hard metal, chiefly gold and silver, came out of the Colorado hills. Great fortunes fell into the laps of pick-and-shovel miners, men frankly seeking raw wealth for its raw sake. This wealth, when it came, being ignorant, was arrogant and purse-proud and an easy mark for swdndlers. Colorado politics were full of violence and sudden death. The chief end of man was the immediate dollar and no questions asked.

In such a society the Denver Post ‘waxed fat and kicked’! Its antics seemed to give shrewd encouragement to the gossip that some part of the Post’s revenues came from blackmail. Probably reputation brought more revenues than actual achievement in blackmail, if it was ever tried. Yet, as the harlot insists upon being called a lady, so the Post advertised its honor, its devotion to the common people. With their profits Tammen and Bonfils built a newspaper office building and emblazoned on the portals, ‘Let Justice, When Denied Another Home, Find Refuge Here.’ Bonfils, who wrote the editorials, wrote under the caption, ‘So the People May Know.’ Money rolled into the coffers of the Post in a steady golden stream.

With money came power, with power came a certain prestige that was almost respectability. Politicians doffed their hats and smirked when they crossed the threshold of the Red Room where the editors presided. Circulation spread their sphere of influence all over Colorado, into New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, and Utah. Famed hack writers, whom money would tempt, were promised and sometimes paid fabulous prices to contribute special articles or run departments for the Post. Naturally, as the circulation widened and included practically all of the gullibles within two hundred miles of Denver, the Post became a braggart. It swaggered. It sought to imitate gentility. In the meanwhile irate subscribers called with their firearms and chased the editors around the Red Room, and Bonfils retaliated with assault and battery.

Here were scenes that would have pleased Dickens. Yet for all the obviousness of its vulgarity, for all the plain evidences of its quackery, if not venality, its profits mounted steadily. The sucker born every minute seemed to be hurrying with his pennies to the office of the Post. It reigned over and more or less ruled a region of America. Its rich owners were able to demand baksheesh from oil men who were ‘cutting melons’ in this region. They were to be seen on presidential trains — on Harding’s train, for instance. They had congress with statesmen of sorts. Yet, in the newspaper profession, among editors who held fast to certain old American ideals, Bonfils and Tammen were not names to conjure with. They were outcasts in higher journalistic circles — perhaps Pecksniffian circles, but nevertheless quarters that are highly esteemed.

IV

While Bonfils and Tammen caricatured a type of American journalist which has infested our urban population, and while they emphasized its meaner points, they still did represent the virtues of their type. They and their kind represent to-day the only sort of journalism that the newly literate moron in American life can understand and enjoy. This moron’s name is Legion. He spawns by the millions in our high schools and on the campuses of our colleges. In flashy raiment he runs over the great stadia. He roars through the fraternity houses, at football games, not half so drunk as he pretends to be. He is moved by catchwords, slogans; talks in the short, monosyllabic headline language of the first-page screamer. His wife, his sisters, and his daughters get their art from the dime store, their intellectual stimulus from bridge, and their morals from the movies. The members of this branch of the Legion family form mobs, mass movements. They follow phantoms, and in vast schools go darting hither and yon on the surface of the times, attracted by the shibboleth of the hour. These mobs set their heroes on thrones, adore them for an hour, and forget them. They seem to have no memories, no capacity for logical processes. They are shallow and rather shameless in their inconsistencies. That Tammen and Bonfils ruled the mobs of the Rocky Mountain region and so held sway there for three decades indicates certain substantial qualities in these two merry monarchs of mendacity.

It is a long, genealogical jump from the town crier’s rival, the beggar, to editors of the sensational press. Yet the line comes down without a break, and collateral lines reach into every American city of over 200,000, where some editor, either on his own or operating upon a transcontinental or a regional chain, is spreading his net for the same shoal of suckers that are fattening the vats of our American journalistic garbage refiners. And always remember that they generally die after attaining success, according to their lights and leadings.

And who shall gainsay their success according to their lights? They serve their clients. They give the multitude the sort of newspaper that the multitude can read and understand. Wherever a newspaper thrives which makes a low appeal, other newspapers which are intelligent and apparently honest are offered to the public. But the readers who support the sensational press will not have the other type of paper.

In every community this human stratum exists. It is one of our modern problems rising out of universal education. We are teaching the mentally submerged and sluggish how to read and write. We are giving them all they will take of education in high schools and colleges. They remain what they were. Happily, they do not always breed their kind. Probably, as their environment improves, each generation moves up a peg in its I.Q. But today they make our different kinds of lynching mobs. They exalt our movie heroes, our baseball and football stars.

Occasionally some sharp demagogue is able to segregate this group into one voting unit when more intelligent groups are dividing. Thus for the hour he has power. But we have always had demagogues. They thrive as they have always thrived, sporadically, by uniting dupes who ordinarily may be depended upon to divide in political matters. Yet if they are more in evidence than in other days and times, they are probably not numerically greater, nor much more important politically, than they have been before in human history.

V

About so many of us are dumb, so many of us are keen, and so many of us are nondescript — which means that, being between poles, so many of us are the salt of the earth. And alas, those who are smart about one thing are dumb about other things. Genius and stupidity often walk under the same hat. Those who know good books, good pictures, and so-called good newspapers, are often easily fooled in statesmen. The philosopher is easily misled in business. Those in the middle crowd, the average mill run of persons, have always had this problem of their betters and their inferiors. Or they think so. Generally speaking, they seem to run the world. But often their smarter friends become antisocial, develop into great scoundrels, unscrupulous rulers, dishonest financiers; whereupon the common man curbs them and sometimes cuts off their heads. Sometimes he puts them in jails or banishes them and knocks them about rather roughly. Very likely the other group — lower or upper — breaks out only in crises. The abnormals frequently have menaced the ordinary processes of civilization. But apparently here in America they have been growing more vocal than formerly, more noisy, more arrogant. They insist more ruthlessly on ruling the roost, on vulgarizing the country. Their united support of a man or an institution like a flashy newspaper or the movie industry presents really grave difficulties in social progress.

What are we going to do about them — ‘we’ meaning the average citizen, ‘them’ meaning these literate millions who make the intellectual underworld? ‘They’ are pious, God-fearing Americans, many of them well-to-do; most of them live within a fairly stable economic status. They are by no means the underprivileged and the dispossessed. They are the dumb, brash, noisy, opinionated hillbillies of our cities, our country towns, our rural communities, led by the smart ones with highly developed instincts for money or power for antisocial leadership. They are here, these feckless followers of humbugs. We cannot pop off their heads, banish them, or put out poison for them as we do for our antisocial gamins who turn crooked or get too much financial or economic power. The overcredulous, who are also oversuspicious, must have diversion and amusement. They must have their Denver Posts, which call for more Bonfils and Tammens. In the meantime, men like Willis Abbot continue to make their private opinion public opinion, and so govern the land.

Now this issue in American life between those of the low intelligence quotient and those with a normal degree of intellectual capacity would seem to point to stratification. But no — they do not stratify. In the blood strain of our national life the genes which carry the thing, whatever it is, called brains, or the lack of it, are liable to occur in any grade, step, or stratum of our social, economic, or intellectual life. We are likely to go from moron to genius in a generation, and from genius to moron in the next generation. The same parents breed children of widely different qualities, so completely have we mixed our social classes here in the last three hundred years. There can be no hereditary ruling class because of this pied blood stream of ours — which fact brings some comfort.

But here and now abide these two entirely different careers, each successful according to its kind and its aim. A career like that of Willis Abbot appeals bravely, courageously, with chivalry and distinction in all its attitudes, to one type of our citizenship. And there are the Denver Post and its kind, the tabloids, the cheap chain newspapers, with their flashy features, their emphasis on crime, smearing sex across their front pages in dirty headlines, making money, making even ideals of a sort, crystallizing vulgarity into institutions. And what does it mean? Where are we going? Who knows the answer?