Eric W. Allen

“ It is, in a way, a mandate from the press to the Oregon School of Journalism to regard journalism "as a learned profession." This is not the way his vocation is regarded by many a reporter today, as anyone familiar with the American press well knows. Little midnight oil is burned in the study of the arts and sciences, or the fundamentals of sociology, economics, politics or religion by many reporters. Unlike the young ambitious lawyer or doctor, the reporter does not usually believe that success in his profession depends upon any intellectual effort aside from performing the tasks of the day ”

“ The modern press, as we know it, is less than a hundred years old. Three generations, in this country at least, have witnessed nearly the whole of the evolution of the journalist, the man who regards the gathering, presentation and interpretation of the news of the world as a science and an art, and its practice as a profession. Before, say, 1830 we have in journalism only the psychology of the pamphleteer and the politician applied through one of the collateral activities of the job printer. ”

“ The most virulent critics of the press as it exists do not deny the presence in the working personnel of the profession of a tremendous element of good will, character, technical knowledge, and aspiration for social improvement. The most satisfied of the newspaper's defenders—and there are many who point with pride to the contrast its present condition makes with its often erring past—cannot overlook the imperfections of the present and the need for vigilant care lest progress slacken and retrogression or decay set in. ”

“ The American journal therefore is too much like a public service corporation to make partisanship, in the news at least, permissible. It is the American newspaper that has developed the "non-editorial" method of telling news facts, and which is struggling toward an unpartisan way of selecting news and governing emphasis—a much more difficult matter. It is for this attempt that the Oregon papers have declared themselves. As for propaganda, it is a snake that must somehow or other be scotched, or it will choke out much of the best opportunity in the profession. ”

“ Section VI, "Public Service and Social Policy" (page 285) , does not deny that the determination of "what the public wants "is and ever will be one of the great and puzzling problems of the journalist, but it does deny that the gratification of the public's whims is the foundation or only principle of journalism or that the newspaper editor is a mere merchant of information and entertainment. The public must have the facts; it must not be fooled or enticed to what the editor regards as right action; it must receive no prettier picture of the world than the facts justify ”

“ A single reporter, stationed at a strategic point, can collect columns of readable news of this kind in a single day, while the economic reporter engaged on an industrial item might require greater ability and training and yet have to work weeks upon a single article. The tendency, therefore, can scarcely be ignored to let industry and government assume the burden of the more expensive investigations, while the reporter employed by the newspaper concentrates upon the most productive matter—the cheap stuff. ”

“ Economic laws are behind most of the tendencies of present day journalism. The public is not willing to pay the newspaper for studious and unbiased and laborious researches into public and business questions while the private interests concerned are willing to relieve the newspapers of this expense for the apparently trifling privilege of editing the copy from their own point of view. ”

“ Yet it is this personnel that is the strongest force behind the effort to raise journalism to a position as one of the learned and scrupulous professions. It is these men who are the backers of the new schools of journalism and it is they who encourage the teachers of journalism to criticise freely, to set up such ideals as they are capable of conceiving and presenting, to face the facts of the situation and to seek ethical solutions. The sons of such men form a large portion of the student bodies of the better schools of journalism which have been established in the last dozen years. ”

“ Newspaper Publishers of Today
The newspaper publishers of today are men of varied origins and training. Many began their careers as printers; others inherited or invested in newspaper properties. The advertising solicitor, the circulation man, the newsboy, the office boy, the printer's devil, have developed into controllers of policy as frequently as the man who served his apprenticeship, such as it was, in the gathering and writing of news. An acute business judgment is a more uniform characteristic than any familiarity with the social effects of journalistic policies. ”

“ Even today a careless apprentice system furnishes nearly all the training for what must become, in any really well-ordered system of society, one of the most learned and scrupulous of the higher professions. ”

“ Yet newspapers vary from the honest and courageous to the supine, and a code can set as a minimum the best practices of the profession, and as the optimum the state of perfect knowledge, perfect good will and perfect courage. ”

“ The problems of journalism can never be disconnected from the dilemmas that confront society as a whole and every newspaper office decision arises in some way from and has a reactive effect upon economic and social forces that play upon the community at large. ”

“ He left the profession for a higher salary than he was earning as reporter or copy editor. The increasing power and prestige of the "promotion" industry helps to anesthetise the wound to his professional conscience and pride. As a trained newspaper man he needed no written code to tell him that it was wrong to sell his pen and to write news for the public under the censorship of a private interest. ”

“ A great many cases are "exceptional" to this rule in average newspaper practice the country over. Not only is much of the most able and most highly paid journalistic talent of the country working today on these "exceptional cases" for private interests but the new system, that has grown so great since the War demonstrated the efficacy of organized propaganda, has obtained nearly exclusive control of much of the most important news matter, and has nearly shut out the professional journalist from many of its sources.
No more than any other tradesman does the promotion agent live by his vices. ”

“ It was such a body of men that adopted the Kansas Newspaper Code in 1910, and such a body that decided to make clear to the public a rather definite statement of their professional practices in Oregon in 1922.
It is becoming old-fashioned in such meetings to deny that there is room for further progress in journalism, or that study of newspaper problems may be of some effect. The old tendency to resent and sweepingly repudiate anything said in criticism of the press is disappearing from the newspapers themselves. ”

“ Much that happens in these days is presented to the public in the words of the actors or their satellites, without evaluation through the mind of the professional journalist.
Whole sections devoted to the automobile industry, columns of theatrical "notes" and even "criticism," book "reviews," much industrial, financial and real estate "news," college and university items, stories of organized uplift movements, and a considerable body of political and administrative news from governmental centers are furnished to the press in the form of publicity "handouts." ”

“ Powerful individuals never like to be cross examined, and now they have largely exempted themselves from the questioning minds of the reporters who, with all their faults, represented the point of view and, as best they could, the interests of the public. ”

“ He is strong because of his virtues. The news he writes he writes well. He is well trained; he has every reason for exercising great care in his work. He has sympathetic access to the prime movers in the events he records; he fortifies himself by reference to documents; he has greater leisure than the reporter and often devotes it to a sound study of his specialty. ”

“ These facts illustrate some of the difficulties that await the future author of a code which shall be explicit as to practices and which will not, like the Oregon Code, rest content with principles. There are mining and oil prospects which by reason of their location and management are good speculative investments; there are some internal remedies which—while they may work evil by postponing the needed visit to the doctor—are useful and harmless; and many think tobacco is one of the blessings bestowed upon man by a kindly Providence.
But conscience is alive in the newspaper profession ”

“ Here Rules 11, 12, 14 and 15 will in actual office practice come into conflict almost daily with Rule 13. Rule 13 means that the friend must be treated with the same cruelty with which the friendless stranger is treated; that the eminent citizen and wealthy advertiser has no more right to privacy for his misdeeds than the resourceless stranger within the gates; that the tortured applicant who comes in person to beg the editor's mercy may not have it unless the paper policy is equally merciful to all. ”

“ He is a real problem; scolding will not eliminate him. He is respectable. After a course in sophistry, necessitated by his self-esteem, he comes to regard himself as ethical, and his own careful statement of his functions exhibits him as a useful member of society. ”

“ The reluctance of newspapers to retract erroneous statements and opinions in any wholehearted way has an interesting history reaching back to some not ignoble English precedents of a hundred years ago, but under American laws and conditions today, remedy through the court is not adequate, and refusal to make a willing and wholehearted retraction is often only stubborn meanness. This the Oregon editors disown. ”

“ His employers value his work because it is more accurate, fairer (especially to them) than the articles that used to appear as the result of their verbal interviews with reporters, and because his articles, after they are written, can be examined and perfected before publication. ”

“ But in America geography decrees that two or three papers must serve the entire population of a given area, rich and poor, ignorant and educated, Democrat and Republican, coarse and refined, conservative and radical. ”

“ These, too, are the men who, in many of the western states, gather year after year in their state universities in ever increasing numbers to discuss professional problems with each other and with the faculties and students of the schools of journalism. ”