THE PEOPLE AND THE PRESS
EVERY reader of The Spectator, it may safely be asserted, is a reader of at least one daily paper. Often he reads more than one, and forms his own views on public questions after considering what papers of the Left as well as of the Right have to say about them. But the average citizen has his favourite, or at any rate his familiar, organ. He rarely sees, or thinks of, the national Press as a whole, and if he did he could not by the nature of things view it with the same detachment as a well-qualified foreign observer,—such, for example, as Mr. Harold Scarborough, who contributes to the current issue of the well-known American quarterly Foreign Affairs a discriminating study of London daily newspapers as he sees them after years of residence here as correspondent of the New York Herald-Tribune. It is not to be supposed that an American writer should be able to tell American readers much that British readers have overlooked about the Press of London. But familiar facts are often disregarded, or their sig- nificance ignored, and it is well to be reminded from time to time of the character of the journals on which the electorate of one of the few remaining democratic countries depends for its news, and from which in con- siderable measure it derives its views.
No adequate survey of the British Press could exclude from its scope the great provincial papers in whose pages many of the best traditions of British journalism have been faithfully preserved. That has been empha- sized more than once in these colunms. But in this country more than any other of comparable importance the papers published in the capital city dominate the country as a whole. It is, of course, largely a question of distances. A London paper can get anywhere in England, and to a good deal of Scotland and part of Ireland, by breakfast-time. There is every reason, there- fore, for singling out the London Press for special scrutiny. The London daily papers—and only the morning papers have a more than local circulation—are seven in number (apart from the picture papers and the Morning Adver- tiser, an organ of the liquor trade, which few people have ever heard of), and they fall into two sharply defined categories. There are what may be termed the three serious journals—The Times, Morning Post and Daily Telegraph—with a joint circulation of perhaps 750,000, and the four popular papers—the- Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Herald and News-Chronicle—whose com- bined output must be upwards of 7,000,000. It would not be much beside the mark to say that the four popular papers have roughly ten times the circulation of the three others.
Distinctions are to a certain extent a matter of con- venience, and not too much stress must be laid on the adjectives " serious " and " popular " ; but obviously there arc three papers which appeal to the few and four which command the patronage of the masses. Traditionally the difference was reflected in price. The serious papers cost a penny before the War and the rest a halfpenny, the figures being doubled in each case for some time after it. Though that difference has almost disappeared, all seven papers except The Times now costing a penny, the distinction in type remains, which suggests that it reflects a fundamental difference in popular taste. It is not a reassuring reflection that irrespective of cost ten times as many people should prefer the popular to the serious type, for the defects of the large-circulation papers are too glaring to be ignored. They have, of course, their virtues. As pure journalism they are highly competent. They spend vast sums on securing news from the ends of the earth, pressing every latest invention—the aeroplane, the transatlantic telephone, telephotography—into the ser- vice, and presenting it to the public in what, judged by the standards they themselves have set, is a highly effective piece of display. The treatment of the death and funeral of the late King of the Belgians by every London paper was highly creditable in every way. In point of efficiency the four popular papers have no superiors in any country.
But on a broader view they have much to answer for. The author of the article in Foreign Affairs handles them indulgently. After speaking of the three serious papers, he continues : " In considering the four. popular newspapers one passes into altogether a different category of journalism—into a world where film stars are normally more important than statesmen ; where a crime paseionel in Peckham will always drive a famine in Pekin off the front page ; where ladies undressed to tho legal limit frolic through the picture cture sections ; where women do not have babies, but only happy events' ; where human activities fall largely into the headline categories of sensations' or amazing scenes' ; and where the world's doings are presented with the bright incon. sequence of motion-picture news reels."
That is putting the indictment relatively low, but it does lay emphasis where it should be laid, on the grave dis- tortion of values of which the popular Press is con- sistently guilty. Ultimate values, it is true, cannot be assessed, still less accurately compared, but that broad distinctions exist between ephemeral and trivial events on the one hand and the play of far-reaching forces on the other no one will deny. The popular paper is under an irresistible compulsion to maintain a vast circulation, and if possible increase it, for without the circulation it will not get the advertisements (though advertisers are learning to distinguish between quantity and quality in circulation), and in the fierce competition of today that means financial breakdown. The tempta- tion to play down to the popular taste, instead of trying to elevate it, is therefore irresistible. At any rate it is not with any visible success resisted.
Values must inevitably be distorted in the minds of a public brought up on the adjectives with which, to the exclusion of all sobriety, the vocabulary of the popular Press bristles. Every event worth recording must be " amazing," " astounding," " sensational " or " unique " ; an engagement of marriage is invariably a " romance " ; individual writers in particu/ar papers, always " brilliant " or " world-famous," are acquired like professional footballers and advertised ad nauseam like film-stars. Life is a fever. Plain news as news is something too dull to countenance. In such a world no balance can be held. No reader of the Daily Express or the Daily Mail would realize that there is anything to be said for the League of Nations ; or of the Daily Herald that humanity and sincerity of purpose could reside in any politicians outside the Labour Party. And it is on such presentations of the situation in the country and the world that millions of electors, men and women, subsist. The astonishing, and almost the only reassuring, feature is the apparent resistance of the average reader to such influence. Five papers out of seven in London back the Conservative Municipal Reformers on the County Council consistently—and Labour wins by a comfortable margin. Water does run off ducks' backs, but there would be more reason for feeling confidence in the future of democracy if the Press democracy supports could reconcile itself to treating serious problems seriously and eschewing the inflammatory and hyper- bolical, and leave trivialities to the oblivion that befits the trivial.
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