Sensation journalism

“ Nothing comes amiss to their endless columns: scandal, politics, crochet-patterns, bogus interviews, puerile hoaxes, highly seasoned police reports, exaggerations of every kind, records of miraculous cures, funny stories with comic cuts, society paragraphs, gossip about foreign royalties, personalities of every description. In fact, they form the very ragbag of journalism. ”

“ Perhaps the tendency of modern journalism is to epitomize too much. In the hurry of daily newspaper work and the press of matter upon our pages, very likely we are fatally brief, and sacrifice rhetorical beauty to naked and goose-pimply facts. ”

“ The reason, I am sure, that journalism is so popular a calling, in spite of its many drawbacks, is this: each journalist feels he is the boy walking up and down with the cane. The Government, the Classes, and the Masses, Society, Art, and Literature, are the other children sitting on the doorstep. He instructs and improves them.
But I digress. It was to excuse my present permanent disinclination to be the vehicle of useful information that I recalled these matters. Let us now return. ”

“ You’re never safe in journalism. Get a post as editor, and begin to bound on your so many hundreds a year. Phew! the paper changes hands or politics—where are you? Get regular weekly features, make yourself an authority on some subject or other. The public doesn’t want your subject—or you. Journalism is rotten, I tell you, rotten. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the difference is this: that the paper comes out so quickly that even its mistakes are important, while the encyclopaedia comes out so late that even its discoveries do not matter. The newspaper should be the best account of the daily impressions of an intelligent man on one side or the other. If it is anything else but this, it is, or tends to be, a fraud. Honest milk is milk that is milky; honest wine is wine that is wine, and nothing else; honest journalism is journalism that is journalistic. ”

“ Newspapers.—In these times we fight for ideas, and newspapers are our fortresses.—Heinrich Heine.
Before this century shall run out journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light ”

“ Yet while it is true that this duplicate and to some extent self-overlapping system fulfils the fundamental duty of every paper, which can be called in any sense a newspaper, it is not that side of newspaper life, which arouses the greatest amount of attention from outside, at any rate in this country, nor does it absorb the greatest amount of energy and talent within. The sensational part of journalism is the control of opinion. ”

“ But however great a gift, if news instinct as born were turned loose in any newspaper office in New York without the control of sound judgment bred by considerable experience and training, the results would be much more pleasing to the lawyers than to the editor. One of the chief difficulties in journalism now is to keep the news from running rampant over the restraints of accuracy and conscience. ”

“ There is always an enormous temptation presented by our peculiar newspaper situation; our Journalism is maintaining a vacuum, with incessant pressure on the outside. The people want the news; the people clamor for the news; and there is always a mass of vitally important news withheld. The Socialist papers are publishing scraps of it, orators are turning it into wild rumor on ten thousand soap-boxes; if only the people could get it in a newspaper or a magazine, what fortunes they would pay! ”

“ All points to this simple conclusion, which we firmly believe to be the golden rule of journalism:—that daily newspaper which has the best corps of reporters, and handles them best, necessarily takes the lead of all competitors.
There are journalists who say (we have often heard them in conversation) that this is a low view to take of their vocation. It is of no importance whether a view is high or low, provided it is correct. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It must not be inferred that the feature story, or any other kind of news story, should distort the facts. The writer in the Sun has merely attempted to reduce to the absurd the theory that journalism should put aside attractiveness in writing for a bare summary of facts. The modern newspaper, while its main purpose is still to inform, is coming more and more to be a source of101 entertainment also. It aims to instruct, but in such a manner that the reader will not be bored. ”

“ The so-called leading article is the chorus to the drama of passing events.
Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists ”

“ But the, people know in their hearts that journalism is a conventional art like any other, that it selects, heightens, and falsifies. Only its Nemesis is the same as that of other arts: if it loses all care for truth it loses all form likewise. The modern who paints too cleverly produces a picture of a cow which might be the earthquake at San Francisco. And the journalist who reports a speech too cleverly makes it mean nothing at all. ”

“ The circumstances under which we live and the problems we have to deal with demand nothing more imperatively than independent journalism—that is, journalism honestly and fearlessly treating public questions on their own merits. ”

“ The first step in the making and keeping of journalism an honest thing, is to confess that it is journalism and nothing more. It is a thing produced in a violent hurry, generally in the middle of the night, by men who (terrible as it may sound to say so) are commonly of the average human intelligence. ”

“ We are not yet educated to that spirit of appreciation we should possess for those who are struggling to perfect themselves in journalism. The great mass of our people do not look upon our Press as educators, or even truthful reporters or delineators of the live issues of the day. Most of our papers are issued weekly, generally containing news read in the daily Press, and many things are found in them foreign to a well-conducted newspaper, which some denominate gossip; and again, there is a demand for light reading matter to the exclusion of all other. ”

“ The tireless effort to secure novelty and variety in present-day journalism prevents the news story or the headline from becoming absolutely fixed in form or style. Instead of attempting to formulate dogmatic rules and directions, the author has undertaken to analyze current methods of newspaper work with the purpose of showing the reasons for them and the causes which have produced them. ”

“ He is, therefore, one example, and there are many others, of the singular power which is exercised in journalism by a man, under whatever disadvantages, who possesses, or rather who is possessed by, some master-thought, and utters it in season and out of season with perhaps disproportionate intensity, but with perfect sincerity. ”

“ This is the right ideal of journalism whenever it is considered as more than a form of commercialism. No newspaper attains its ideal in completeness. If it steadfastly works toward attainment, it gives proof of its right to be. The advancing newspaper, going on from good to better in the substance of its character and the ability of its endeavor, is the type of journalism which affords hope for the future. ”

“ Journalism, so far as it is more than mere reporting and mere money making, so far as it undertakes to frame and guide opinion, to educate the thought and instruct the conscience of the community, by editorial comment, interpretation and homily, based on the news, is under obligation to the community to be truthful, sincere, and uncorrupted ”

“ Even the old six-cent journals admitted editorially that the new type of journalism had both spirit and intelligence and that all that was wanting to make it a real force in the community was a little common decency and honesty. ”

“ The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesmanlike habits, supplies their demands. ”

“ It is equally true in journalism, that the various forms of discouragement, hope, and final success through which the individual worker in the art passes, during his progress from the reportorial egg-cell to the fully developed executive-editorial organism, is a compressed reproduction of the long series of misfortunes and interferences through which the ancestors of the American newspaper of to-day have passed. ”

“ The paper came out every Monday, always truculent and always propagandizing one point of view in politics. The political issue was the only raison d’être of publication. Everything else—foreign news, essays, verses, squibs, advertisements—was filler.
Here was something original for this side of the ocean, an experiment in journalism as critical as ever was attempted by any members of our fourth estate; and successful, for the Journal lived and throve and became the ancestor of the great American political organs of modern times. ”

“ The student of journalism should know the conditions as they exist, so that he may face the problems squarely and choose deliberately the course that he desires to pursue. Too often reporters, editors, or publishers have not weighed fully the ultimate effects produced by suppressing or coloring the news. It is only by full consideration of the public function of the newspaper as a factor in the social and political life of the community that the true significance of dealing lightly with the truth as a crime against society is revealed in unmistakable colors. ”

“ So long as party feeling ran high this style of journalism was popular and successful, but the newspaper, being in the nature of an educator of the masses, soon set the people to thinking for themselves, and created a demand for the news of public and political events without the color of individual opinion. ”

“ That the interest thus shown is not confined to the hundreds of attendants, but must be shared by your great public, is shown by the unfailing barometer of journalism. Here we have a field in which the non-survival of the unfit is the rule in its most ruthless form. The journals that we see and read are merely the fortunate few of a countless number, dead and forgotten, that did not know what the public wanted to read about. ”

“ The young reporter has to steel his heart to these disappointments. He must not agonize too much if, after a day and night of intense and nervous effort, he finds no line of his work in the paper, or sees his choicest prose hacked and mangled by impatient subeditors, or his truth-telling twisted into falsity. ”

“ He had no faith in purposeless journalism, in journalism which has so little insight into the tendencies of the time that it shifts its view from day to day in accommodation to transient popular caprices. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Anthony and the Reporters.—I am Interviewed.—My Manager drops Asleep over it.—The Interview in Print.—The President of the United States and the Reporters.—"I am the Interviewer."
ournalism has killed literature, and reporting is killing journalism. It is the last gasp of the dying of literature of an epoch ”

“ A new journalism aided and was aided by the zeal to expose and the greed of the public for literature of exposure. In the later nineties city journalism was reorganized under the influence of the "yellow" papers, and sensational news was made a profitable commodity as never before. ”

“ As the world passes from the rule of force—force of prowess, force of habit, force of convention—to the rule of numbers, the daily journal is destined, if it survives as a power, to become the teacher — the very Bible of the people. The people are already beginning to distinguish between the wholesome and the meretricious in their newspapers. Newspaper owners likewise are beginning to realize the value of character. Instances might be cited where the public, discerning some sinister but unseen power behind its press, has slowly yet surely withdrawn its confidence and support. ”