La Presse

“ I have had no cause to regret my choice of a profession. I begin to feel the tremendous power wielded by the press in formulating public opinion, and am in a position to build up, by reflection upon what it is, a conception of what a newspaper should be, all of which I trust will enable me, when the time comes, to do my share in furthering the highest interests of the State and mankind in general. I have come to see where the dangers which surround the young newspaper man lie, and am endeavouring to keep myself free from their influence. ”

“ The modern newspaper is a product of city life; it is no longer merely an organ of propaganda and opinion, but a form of popular literature. The journal of opinion was largely a business man's newspaper. The so-called independent press added to its public the so-called artisan class. The yellow press was created mainly to capture immigrants, and women.
It was this increase of circulation that made the newspaper—formerly a subsidized organ of the parties an independent business enterprise, an envelope and carrier for advertising. ”

“ This is true not only of periodicals and weeklies but also of the great morning dailies, which are by far the most influential part of that institution,16 which we casually refer to as “the press.” Here is where power is presumed to reside. Whether it be politics or art or finance, everyone, who wants anything important done to influence the general public, feels that it is here that the first and most valiant effort must be made. The press must be got at and persuaded or bullied into taking what is the only possible point of view, as each individual sees it for himself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The day of the labor editor is just commencing.
Newspapering is a trade. Avoid the set schools of journalism, training for the commercial press. Get job after job as reporter or copyreader on six or eight papers and one news agency in as many cities, including a metropolitan paper, a big small-town paper, and one in a state capital or in Washington. Learn something about the business office—the advertising revenue and circulation—and about the printing plant of each paper you work on. Study the news agencies. Your ambition is to lose your job the minute you have made good on it. ”

“ The time when the opinions, the power in phraseology, or the individuality of one man could alone make a daily newspaper a financial, literary, or political success had passed. The press had become an institution, journalism a profession, and the publication of newspapers a practical business requiring and rewarding enterprise and sagacity. ”

“ I need not elaborate upon the wonderful growth of the press in our country, or refer to the great power which journalism wields in the development of the new world. I need not ladle out statistics to show you how the newspaper has encroached upon the field of oratory and how the pale and silent man, while others sleep, compiles the universal history of a day and tells his mighty audience what he thinks about it before he goes to bed. ”

“ So, young ladies, as I said in the beginning, from a literary standpoint, from a social standpoint, from a business standpoint, and from the standpoint of philanthropic and Christian usefulness, your future position and success in life depend upon the company you keep. Under the great principle of the freedom of the press, the newspaper has become a universal institution in America,—omnipresent, and almost omnipotent. ”

“ The newspaper press is organized so as to be a more perfect expression of public opinion than it possibly could be in your day, when private capital controlled and managed it primarily as a money-making business, and secondarily only as a mouthpiece for the people. ”

“ Want some advice from the Old Man?"
"I most surely do, Dad."
"Listen here, then. A newspaper is a business proposition. Never forget that. All these hifalutin' notions about its being a palladium and the voice of the people and the guardian of public interests are good enough to talk about on the editorial page. Gives a paper a following, that kind of guff does. But the duty of a newspaper is the duty of any other business, to make money. There's the principle, the policy, the politics, ethics, and religion of the newspaper in a nutshell. ”

“ For several years the newspaper press had been rapidly growing in political importance, and the vehicle of mere general news became the channel of political and social enlightenment. In proportion to the development of its power and the creation of public opinion favorable to its views, was the increase of its boldness, and at the beginning of 1770 the American press was not only united in sentiment, but almost as fearless in the expression of political and religious opinions as the newspapers of the present day. ”

“ Day after day the Press Bureau, of course under official inspiration from higher sources, issues statements in which the good news is unduly emphasised and the bad unduly slurred over. Day by day a large section of the Press helps on, with every ingenious device of big type and sensational headlines, the official hoodwinking of the public. Many pay their nimble halfpennies to be gulled. ”

“ More than that,—and here I come to the crux of the whole business.—in my judgment, the newspaper that meets every important issue that comes up, not militantly necessarily, but squarely, is not only an example of better journalism from a moral standpoint but from a business standpoint. In other words I believe that in the long run, in spite of necessary sacrifices and set-backs, a vigorous and clear-cut editorial policy pays. ”

“ The general press prints what the public wants; the specific newspaper prints what its editor thinks the class of readers to which it caters wants. If he gauges his public right, he succeeds; if he does not, he fails. You can no more make the people read a newspaper they do not want than you can make a horse drink when he is not thirsty. In this respect the pulpit has the better of the press. ”

“ But I am chiefly conscious to-night of the debt of gratitude we all owe to the press. The newspaper—say what you will of it—is the immediate recorder and interpreter of life. Morning and evening it offers us that perpetual stimulus which makes the zest of living. Be your interests what they may, though you abstract your mind from the tumult of affairs and devote it to art or science, you cannot open a news [Pg 683] paper without the sensation of laying your hand upon the throbbing pulse of the world. ”

“ Newspapers give us the news of the day for the day. Yet in them we find the history of our own times, and we are constantly kept in mind of how important they are in our everyday life by such phrases as "the freedom of the Press," "the opinion of the Press," the Press meaning all the newspapers, journals and magazines and the people who write for them. ”

“ The history of our newspapers is the strongest argument in favor of the establishment of a press. These papers abundantly prove, that we have all the talent and industry requisite to conduct a paper such as we need; and they prove also, that among 500,000 free people of color, no one man is yet set apart with a competence for the purpose of advocating with the pen our cause and the cause of our brethren in chains. ”

“ You don’t need to be told how vast is the domain and how electric and irresistible is the influence of the newspaper press. You do not care to listen to a lecture on the duties and responsibilities of your profession. ”

“ You must recall that the entire newspaper industry as we know it has been developed within comparatively recent years. The great daily, with its Sunday edition of pictures, colored sheets, news of classified varieties, and advertising and sporting sections, is only possible by means of the modern press which has the capacity for turning out in a short time such an immense number of papers. ”

“ Has the time come, or is it near at hand, when we can point to a person who is alert, superficial, ready and shallow, self-confident and half-informed, and say, "There is a product of the American newspaper"? The newspaper is not a willful creation, nor an isolated phenomenon, but the legitimate outcome of our age, as much as our system of popular education. ”

“ There is much that is ridiculous in the every-day tone of American newspapers, in their thirst for sensations and réclame, in their petty interviews. But here everything was suddenly swept aside, and the dominant tone of the American press became deep and significant. ”

“ Let us tell each other sad stories of the bestiality of the beast whom we feed. What he likes is the newspaper; and to me the press is the mouth of a sewer, where lying is professed as from an university chair, and everything prurient, and ignoble, and essentially dull, finds its abode and pulpit. ”

“ The newspaper press is one of the most extraordinary features in the United States. Its influence is omnipresent. Every party in religion, politics, or morals, speaks, not by one, but by fifty organs; and every nicely defined shade of opinion has its voices also. Every town of large size has from ten to twenty daily papers; every village has its three or four ”

“ Of what value are all the opinions and advice given here without the aid of the press? We will attain our aim only when the press is in our hands. Our people must direct the daily publications. We are cunning, shrewd, and we possess money which we know how to utilize for our purposes. ”

“ It is only fair to the would-be reporter, therefore, to tell him that at times in his journalistic career he may be permitted to see snow only through a motorist's yellow goggles. The modern newspaper is a business organization run for the profit or power of the owners, with the additional motive in the background of possible social uplift,—social uplift as the owners see it. ”

“ The newspaper was then a means of supplying information upon which men could depend in the guidance of these affairs, but the conditions have entirely changed and it too has changed with them. In our day a newspaper, generally owned by a corporation, is organized for the purpose of making money for the stockholders by the sale of news. ”

“ The most acute problem of this vexed time is the ever-growing power of the newspaper press. Legislation of a drastic kind is needed to cope with certain newspaper ‘bosses’ in Great Britain and America and their combinations, national and international, of periodicals, agencies, special correspondents and their sinister antennae, which persistently foul at the source the wells of truth. ”

“ Newspapers in hand, they receive the reports of their lord high chancellors, digest the social gossip of their realm, review its crimes, politics, discoveries, and inventions, and are entertained by their jesters, who, I have it on the authority of a current advertisement, all democratically smoke the same kind of tobacco. 'You know 'em all, the great fun-makers of the daily press, agile-brained and nimble-witted, creators of world-famed characters who put laughter into life. ”

“ The Associated Press from the time of its organization and establishment in business sold the news reports to various newspapers who became members, and the publication of that news became of vast importance to the public so that public interest is attached to the dissemination of that news. The manner in which that corporation has used its franchise has charged its business with a public interest. ”

“ In such departments of a modern newspaper as the City, Telegraph, Sporting, Financial, etc., the work of the reporters and editors is to chronicle and present the actual news. If nothing of vital interest has happened during the day, that is not their fault. ”

“ Journalism, so far from being in the hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and then a commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or scruple, like other commercial speculations. Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. ”

“ By far the greater part of the news which the American people absorb about the outside world comes through the Associated Press, and the news they get is, of course, the raw material of their thought. ”

“ Yet they are all in turn set upon by the press or public opinion and hounded like criminals. They try (somebody tries) to drive 'em out of office every once in a while. If there's anything I'm afraid of, it's the newspapers. The correspondents are as thick as flies in summer—all hunting sensations—especially the yellow American press. I play the game with these fellows always squarely, sometimes I fear indiscreetly. ”

“ It is perfectly clear that the Press in itself simply represents the news which its owners desire to print and the opinions which they desire to propagate; and this argument against the Press has always been used by those who are opposed to its influence at any moment. ”

“ You cannot compare journalism with law, medicine or engineering, for in every one of these professions the consumer pays for the service. A free press, if you judge by the attitude of the readers, means newspapers that are virtually given away. ”