Hamilton Holt

“ Or do we follow faithfully the stern daughter of the voice of God? In short, is journalism a profession or a business?
There are almost as many answers to these questions as there are people to ask them. There are those of us who jubilantly burst into poetry, singing:—
"Here shall the press the people's rights maintain,"
Unawed by influence and unbribed by gain."
On the other hand there are some of us quite ready to corroborate from our own experience the confessions of one New York journalist who wrote:—
There is no such thing in America as an independent press. ”

“ I invite your attention first of all to the Press Agent, that indispensable adjunct of all projects that have something to gain or to fear from publicity. I have seen the claim made in print, though doubtless it is a press agent's story, that there are ten thousand press agents in the city of New York,—that is, men and women employed to boom people and enterprises in the papers and magazines. You are familiar with the theatrical press agent, the most harmless, jovial, inventive, and resourceful of his kind. ”

“ While commercialism is at present the greatest menace to the freedom of the press, just as it is to the freedom of the Church and the University, yet commercialism as it develops carries within itself the germ of its own destruction. ”

“ If the world federation commission is appointed by the United States government with Theodore Roosevelt as chairman, can anyone believe that the day will not be brought measurably nearer, when as Victor Hugo prophesied in 1849, "the only battlefield will be the market opening to commerce and the human mind opening to new ideas?" ”

“ Advertising is also responsible for the fact that our papers are no longer organs but organizations. The individuality of the great editor, once supreme, has become less and less a power, till finally it vanishes into mere innocuous anonymity. To show you how far the editor has receded into public obscurity, it is only necessary to try to recall the portrayal of a modern editor in a recent play. ”

“ The only two powers that ever have or ever can govern human beings are force and reason-war and law. If we do not have one we must have the other. The problem before the world is how to decrease the area of war and increase the area of law until war vanishes and law envelopes the world. At the present moment the world is organized into fiftynine nations claiming independence and within their territories-nominally at least-organization, law and peace prevail. We have already learned to substitute law for war in cities and states and even up to the fifty-nine nations ”

“ The department stores are seldom or never referred to unfavorably by the New York papers. When an elevator falls down in an office-building and somebody is injured, the headlines ring to heaven. A similar catastrophe in a department store is considered of hardly sufficient human interest to publish. The name and shame of a woman caught shoplifting in a department store can seldom be kept out of the papers. A department store caught overworking and underpaying its sales-girls—well, that is of no public concern. ”

“ The creation of a world federation commission would guarantee to our own people as well as to the peoples of the world that the United States is in earnest and ready to take the lead in the only practical and promising method of obtaining international peace. ”

“ The danger of manufactured public opinion in this country comes not from governments. Even the political parties are losing the allegiance of the press. The days when the Republican organs told the people the worst Republican was better than the best Democrat, and the Democratic papers said the same about the Republicans, have happily passed, never to return again, though the spirit still lingers in the organs of the Socialist, Populist, and Prohibition parties. ”

“ Today there is no such thing as a code of international law which is binding on the nations. What passes under the name of international law is simply a series of arguments, maxims, precedents and opinions. It is the work, not of legislators, but of scholars. The nations are at perfect liberty to accept it or reject it as they wish. ”

“ The danger from the advertising columns is not, as I have said, that the advertisements misrepresent the goods, but that the terms on which they are solicited tend to commercialize the whole tone of the paper and make the editor afraid to say what he believes. The advertiser is coming more and more to look on his patronage as a favor, and he seldom hesitates to withdraw his advertisement if anything appears that may injure his business or interfere with his personal fad or political ambition. ”

“ At last all the peoples of the world have achieved in some measure representative government. Russia has its Duma; China has announced that shortly it will promulgate a constitution, while Turkey and Persia have each just gone through the throes of revolution and emerged with a vigorous parliament. If Kant's philosophy is sound, therefore, the world is at last ready for world organization and universal peace. ”

“ To be frank and confidential with you, "The Ladies' Home Journal" is published expressly for the advertisers. The reason I can put something in the magazines that will catch the artistic eye and make glad the soul of the reader is because a good advertiser finds that it pays to give me $4000 a page, or $6 an agate line, for advertising space.
Yes, the tremendous power of advertising is the most significant thing about modern journalism. It is advertising that has enabled the press to outdistance its old rivals, the pulpit and the platform, and thus become the chief ally of public opinion. ”

“ Roosevelt in his remarkable Nobel peace address the other day at Christiania goes so far as to urge a "league of peace" to abolish war, paradoxically, by force if necessary. The governments themselves, however, have not yet officially recognized that world organization is the goal of international effort, though they have unconsciously and inevitably been driven much faster and farther along this path than they realize. ”

“ COMMERCIALISM AND JOURNALISM
In the United States of America, public opinion prevails. It is an axiom of the old political economy, as well as of the new sociology, that no man, or set of men, may with impunity defy public opinion; no law can be enforced contrary to its behests; and even life itself is scarcely worth living without its approbation. Public opinion is the ultimate force that controls the destiny of our democracy. ”

“ In his famous essay Perpetual Peace published in 1795, Emanuel Kant declared that we can never have universal peace until the world is politically organized, and it will never be possible to organize the world politically until the majority of the nations have a representative form of government. ”

“ In the yellow press they now have their own champion,—a press that serves them, represents them, leads them, and exploits them, as Tammany Hall does its constituency. Of course they give it their suffrage. The hopeful thing is that yellow readers don't stay yellow always. When a man begins to read he is apt to think. When he begins to think there is no telling where he will end,—maybe by reading the London "Times" or the "Edinburgh Review." In New York the yellow papers, while they still have an enormous circulation, are losing their influence as a political and moral force. ”

“ Thus you see advertising has made possible the great complex papers and magazines of the day with their corps of trained editors, reporters, and advertising writers, in numbers and intellectual calibre comparable with the faculty of a good-sized university. Advertising makes it possible to issue a paper far below the cost of manufacturing—all to the benefit of the consumer. So far as I know there is not an important daily, weekly, or monthly in America that can be manufactured at the selling price. ”

“ The Socialists and other utopian critics, who are supposed to drill to the bedrock of questions, have looked upon advertising as essentially a parasite upon the production and distribution of wealth. They tell us that in the good time coming, advertising will be relegated to the scrap-heap of outworn social machinery, along with war, race prejudice, millionaires, the lower education of women, and other things of an undesirable nature. ”

“ The beginnings of world organization, however, have already taken place. In the Hague Court and the recurring Hague Conferences we see the germs of the international court and the parliament of man. The problem is how to develop these so that they will become the judicial and legislative departments. of a powerful world constitution, just as our Articles of Confederation and Continental Congress developed into the present United States Constitution, which a century of storm and stress has not broken and which still serves as a model to all the republics of the earth. ”

“ I have taken the pains to go over the advertising columns of the leading papers and periodicals of New York during the month of February, and, with the exception of a few medical, financial, and perhaps real-estate advertisements, I could find absolutely nothing that on the face of it seemed fraudulent, and very little that was misleading. The advertisers have at last come to realize that for the long run, whatever the rule may be for the short run, it does not pay to overstate the qualities of their merchandise. ”

“ Whether they have attained more than other men to the Christian ideal of turning the other cheek; whether they think that nobody pays any attention to a scathing book-review, or whether they hold that the "best seller" is the offspring of hostile criticism, I do not know. But again and again we denounce books in our literary department that the publishers pay good money to praise in the advertising pages of the same issue. ”

“ As advertising still further increased, rival papers competed for it and the professional solicitor became a necessary adjunct of every paper, until now the advertising department is the most important branch of the publication business, for it is the real source of the profits. Because the solicitor seeks the advertiser, and, therefore, is in the position of one asking for favors, he puts himself under obligations to the advertiser, and so in his keenness to bring in revenue for his paper, he is often tempted to ask the aid of the editor in appeasing the advertiser. ”

“ The advertisers when offended stop their advertisements; the readers, their subscriptions. The editor who is afraid to offend both must make a colorless paper indeed. He must discuss only those things about which every one agrees or nobody cares. The attitude of such an editor to his readers is, "Gape, sinner, and swallow," and to his advertisers, as Senator Brandegee said at a recent Yale Commencement in regard to a proposed Rockefeller bequest, "Bring on your tainted money." As a rule, the yellows are most in awe of the mob, while the so-called respectables fear the advertising interests. ”

“ Comparatively few buy the New York "Evening Post" for three cents. This is all the more remarkable, because advertising is the most sensitive feature of a most sensitive business and is sure to suffer first in any industrial crisis or depression.
No wonder that the man who realizes the significance of all these figures and the trend disclosed by them is coming to look upon the editorial department of the newspaper as merely a necessary means of giving a literary tone to the publication, thus helping business men get their wares before the proper people. ”

“ Most of the Philadelphia criticism counts for no more than what New Orleans says of sugar, or Pittsburg of steel, or San Francisco of fruits, or Chicago of packing-house products. And it is common knowledge that what almost every big New York paper says is an echo of Wall Street. ”

“ The great journalists of the past, whatever their personal idiosyncrasies, have all been men of integrity; the great journalists of to-day are of the same sterling mould; and the journalistic giants of to-morrow—and the journalists of the future will be giants—must also be men of inflexible character. ”

“ By common consent we editors are called the "moulders of public opinion." Writing in our easy chairs or making suave speeches over the walnuts and wine, we take scrupulous care to expatiate on this phase of our function. ”