2 JULY 1881, Page 10

LORD SHERBROOKE ON JOURNALISM.

THAT Lord Sherbrooke, called on at the Lord Mayor's Literary Dinner to return thanks for Journalists, should belittle journalism, is only consistent. He owes his elevation to his classical culture and his pen, and as he never misses an opportunity of declaring classical culture worthless, in com- parison with knowledge of physical science, he must be expected, when the chance is offered, to give the pen also a gentle little snip. It is not grateful; but gratitude is not a virtue in states- men, and it is as statesman, and not as journalist, that Mr. Lowe, with a quite pardonable pride, looks back upon his career. We rather wonder, however, as he had decided to quiz the profession which he did not care to represent, that he should have selected so very old and so very untrue a charge as the vehicle for his humour. We may do him an injustice—for we frankly admit that, even in these days of inefficient reporting, we never came upon a speech which was reported in quite so muddle-headed a manner—but he appears to have repeated the old charge against journalists, that they presumptuously take upon themselves the work of making up people's minds for them, a work for which, he intimated, they were from circumstances singularly incompetent. The journalists receive, he says, every night, under the new conditions of the Press, a huge mass of information ; they have no time to study it or weigh it as history used to be studied and weighed, but they know their readers have still less, and so "as fast as Nature "—by which Lord Sherbrooke means the tele- graph, which we should have thought was art—or, " if necessary,

even faster," they tell their readers what they are to think about the news. Their readers are quite happy to be told, pro- vided only the drift of the telling accords with their precon- ceived convictions ; and so the Tory buys the Tory paper, and the Liberal the Liberal, and finds not only an opinion, but an accept- able opinion, ready-made for him. He is spared the trouble of thinking, and his ignorance is no barrier to arriving at a con- clusion. "That is surely," said Lord Sherbrooke, with scarcely disguised and hardly explicable contempt, " a magnificent institution."

Why is that arrangement any worse than any other arrange. ment by which the majority of mankind who are, and must always be, intent upon their own daily work, obtain rapidly and without effort such aid as they may to their own intelligence from the knowledge of trained experts P Lord Sherbrooke feels a pain, or notices a symptom in his health, which gives him some alarm, and he goes to a doctor, who, with the smallest possible expenditure of time, and sometimes after very little in- vestigation, tells him what he thinks the symptoms mean, and what course of treatment will do him good, and dismisses him, decidedly better informed than when he entered the consulting- room. Lord Sherbrooke need not take the doctor's opinion, and, in all human probability, would not, unless it was con- firmed by his own internal feelings; but he would confess that he knew more about the matter for having received it, and in no way ridicules the doctor. Or he desires to press some legal claim, and does not quite understand the regular practice or the limitations of his own rights, and asks a solicitor to tell him. He is told, always with the least expenditure of time pos- sible, and he goes away with his mind clear, where before it was confused, or uncertain. Does he think the solicitor has injured him, or cheated him, or is in any way deserving to be quizzed ? The journalist who writes "leaders "for a daily paper is precisely in the position, as regards political news, of the doctor with respect to disease or the solicitor with respect to practice; he knows a little more than the person who consults him. He may not have half of the ability of his patient or his client—very few physicians or lawyers would compare their minds with Lord Sherbrooke's—but he knows something, much or little, which the other wants to know. An important telegram received at night in the office of a morning paper really falls into the hands of a kind of corporation. Some one member of the staff proba- bly knows the question fairly well, has watched the events leading up to the event recorded in the telegram for years, has a distinct idea what the news means, and has thought out, superficially, it is true, but still with some distinctness, what result such an occurrence would probably produce. Long habit enables him to put his opinion on paper quickly, clearly, and pleasantly, and he does put it; and if he is even decently competent, his readers next morning have something besides the news, which increases the value of the news to them. That the something may not be as valuable as the doctor's opinion or the lawyer's may be true, because the journalist's range is apt to be too wide for equally accurate and minute knowledge; but it has a value, nevertheless. Lord Sherbrooke despises journalists, but they are, we take it, quite as intelligent as lawyers and doctors, and are much quicker, a rigorous natural selection starving out slow men; and they are compelled to learn a vast number of facts, which are not harder to learn than the anatomy of the body or the practice of the Courts. Continuous attention alone, apart altogether from special intellectual capacity, im- mensely increases knowledge, and with it the power of form- ing an opinion. Take the most ordinary illustration. There is no subject upon which the average Englishman is so densely ignorant as South-American politics. The telegraph informs him that the Argentine Confederation has declared war upon Chili, and leaves him just as ignorant as he was before. But he happens to know a rather stupid South-American merchant, dealing with the Republics of the Plate ; he talks to him, and in ten minutes he possesses four or five times the capacity for an opinion that he possessed before. He may not form an accurate opinion, but still it is not a totally ignorant one, and is therefore, pro tanto, safer than the one which, without the merchant, he would have formed. The journalist stands to his readers just in the relation of that mer- chant; that is, he can help his questioner a good deal towards an opinion, which will be sound or unsound, according to the joint capacity of them both, but will be indefinitely sounder than that of the man who has only heard the news, and cannot

connect it with any previous or correlated. facts. Of course, there are pretenders in the profession, as in all others—though, as in all others, even the pretender has probably a certain special aptitude for getting what he wants out of books and conversation with experts—but the winnowing is at least as sharp as in any other department of human life. The jour- nalist who will write on what he knows nothing about, is found out, as least as quickly as any other quack ; and as he is not appointed by the public, though he is paid by them, he is dis- missed much more quickly than either the doctor who does not know, or the lawyer who makes mistakes. That is as true of matters of mere opinion as of matters of fact, the exception being that a journalist, like a Member of Parliament, may possess a faculty of expression greatly in excess of his thinking power; but, in that case, his claim to exist resembles that of any other artist, and is based not upon the knowledge he imparts, but upon the pleasure he gives. Why is he more deserving of ridicule or reprehension than any other musician P But Lord Sherbrooke would probably say, if he were talking the matter over, " The journalists are so pretentious, give out their opinions with such an infallible air, and are so apt to speak in the name of multitudes or of the nation, that their words have an unreal, and therefore mischievous authority." There is some truth in that form of the charge, but not much, and the amount is becoming less every day. Allowing for that extra touch of vanity which seems inseparable from all who teach or directly address the public, and which is found equally in schoolmasters, actors, lecturers, orators, and popular preachers, we should doubt if in the present day journalists were pretentious, if the tendency among them were not to undervalue their art and mystery, and to write more hesitatingly than most authors. If Lord Sherbrooke will compare his own style on the Times with that adopted in any " leader " published this week, he will find, we think, that the most decided change is a want of decisiveness, a hesitation, and so to speak, a modesty of demeanour, which in his time was unknown, and which is frequently carried so far as to destroy much of the utility of what is -said. The leader-writer of to-day balances too much, perhaps from an unconscious exaggeration of the possible effect of his opinion, and too often lets the reader see him thinking. With an exception or two, for cases in which the writer is burning with rancour or prejudice, the tone of the journalistic writing of to-day is curiously hesitating and tenta- tive, more especially when it refers to current events, upon which the next hour may bring an unforeseen telegram. This is quite remarkable in the Times, once very " absolute " in tone, but it extends* more or less to the whole body of journals, and is only concealed from the public by a few tra- ditionary assumptions, such as the use of the impersonal " we," originally adopted as a defence against prosecutions, and now justified by the corporate character of most uewpapers ; and by the necessity, under which every journalist labours, of avoiding qualifying phrases, as at once tedious and unmeaning. It seems very arrogant to say, " We think, and the people of this country think," so-and-so ; but it would not be arrogant if the writer said, "I think, and I fancy, as far as I can judge, most Englishmen also think," which is all he means to convey in that compressed phrase. The air of infallibility is nothing more than the air of confident assertion with which almost every debater in the House of Commons, except Mr. Glad- stone, speaks, and is neither meant to impose nor, so far as we can read the public mind, imposes. That there was once and to a certain extent is still one kind of arrogance peculiar to journalists, is true enough. By an odd but natural confusion of ideas, the man who knows that he is addressing a hundred thousand readers is apt to fancy there is in him the voice of a hundred thousand men, more especially when he is addressing a Government which will not go his way. He forgets his own want of certainty that his readers will agree with him, and talks as if he represented the multitude whom he is only addressing. That peculiar form of illusion grew, how- ever, out of the great influence which, for a short time, journals had over opinion, an influence which was owing to the accidental concurrence of great ability on the Press and a very narrow suffrage, mainly of one way of thinking, and which is now disappearing, as it is seen that news- papers are more and more read and less and less accepted with implicit confidence. The journalist of to-day is either an expounder or, at most, a debater, who contri- butes what is in him to the mass of useful discussion upon which government by opinion rests. As such, he is a very use- ful member of the community, and may even become a power- ful one, and is no more to be put down by Lord Sherbrooke than by Mr. Cobden. The latter wished publicly,—as, by the way, Robespierre did, in his secret papers,—that journals should be confined to news, and should give no opinions. Lord Sherbrooke does not wish that, and is content that the opinions should be published, but cannot conceal his scorn that, when published, anybody should accept them. It is better for every man to form his own views, but why he should not listen to Mr. Lowe in the Ti uses' " leader " as well as to Mr. Lowe speak- ing for Kidderminster, we confess we do not see. The turns of debate demand speed as much as the necessities of the printing- machine, and the thought expressed in writing ought to be at least as clear as the thought expressed in speech. It is a good deal clearer, sometimes, if we have been unjust to the reporters, and if they have not made mincemeat of Lord Sherbrooke's Mansion-House speech on journalism.