JOURNALISM AS A DANGEROUS TRADE.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sin,—Mr. Massingham has the honour to be an unpopular man. He deserves that honour, for he has told the truth about syndicate, dope-distributing journalism. In these days he is a brave man who dare tell the truth as he sees it about anything. But then Mr. Massingham has always been courageous. And he has stood for clean journalism and sincere politics. For. his letter in the Spectator of December 1st all journalists who love journalism more for what they can put into it than for what they can extract from it can only be glad. I know it was a plain statement of fact against the newspaper monopolists. But I took it as a direct challenge to myself as a journalist. It does us journalists good to be so exposed, and I hope we shall both mentally and morally benefit. Unhappily, I fear that most journalists who read what dangerous public servants they are will ignore its sound- ness, will believe that Mr. Massingham has attacked the comfortable citadel in which they work ; and the Press monopolists, both Liberal and Tory (so-called), will consider it merely inconsequential—while they remain secure behind their monopolies.
All journalists know they are, economically, helpless victims of circumstance, bound to write as their masters, through their editors, dictate. Whatever the journalist may believe, he is told to write down to the public level of intelli- gence. As though there were such a vague thing as a low- down standard level of intelligence ! The stuff sold on the news-stalls every minute of the day is a direct insult to people's intelligence. The popular newspapers are produced for the ill-educated masses whose only fault is not that they fail to see through the hollow mockery of the whole mind- poisoning business, but that, though only partly educated, they allow incapable, shallow, often insincere thinkers to guide them in their thought. No wonder our semi-democracy is in grave peril of overbalancing itself into degeneracy. The wonder is, indeed, that, based on such hollow foundations, the democratic structure of society has stood for even ten years.
I write as a young journalist on a provincial weekly, and if my intimate knowledge of the syndicate Press is not very great, I may be qualified to speak my thought about it, for daily I see the deliberately-created effects of this sweet- tasting drug which is dwarfing the minds of millions. I talk
with people whose opinions are precisely those broadcast by the papers they read. Somehow, with extreme artfulness, the conductors of this rampant journalism know exactly what their public will want. They keep just ahead of their readers.
And the reader says of a certain article,' Ah, just what I was thinking. How right this paper always is ! " So the
insidious game goes on. Always the readers' intelligences appear to be flattered, their consciences lulled into easy con- tentment and their minds drugged into pleasant titillation by the vaporous stuff sold to them. Nothing to rack their minds about, nothing solid to bite on, nothing that points the clear way to honest citizenship ; only a surfeit of coloured news and evasive opinions.
All this at the dictates of a few monopolists—they who must be obeyed. I feel, as a student of the English Press, that the
irresponsible owners have never yet deeply felt one big emotion about life—except the emotion they must feel when the dividends mount higher. One needn't blame them for that. But one should pity them their real poverty. It must be because they have not seen life clearly and seen it whole that their journalists seldom or never have a chance of saying what they feel about things. A journalist is a recorder of life's little ironies, comedies, tragedies. In that he may record the whole truth. But he can't collect all the facts of events which stir nations. He must select, and then have his selection selected for the readers. And the damage is done there, because only the facts which suit the bias of the paper are selected, and opinions arc based on these distorted facts. There is such a thing as the accurate interpretation of a great man's speech—if it cannot be reported thoroughly. The speaker may be a man of national, and therefore of interna- tional, influence, but if his belief conflicts with the views of the newspaper owner the poor reporter's copy must be so hacked that a gross misrepresentation of the speech will go out to the world. Lord Northcliffe once said that, great as was the power of the Press, the power of suppression was greater. And Lord Northcliffe should have known. But a Press which deliberately distorts and so destroys truth must soon die—and soon deserves to die.
For the safety of public opinion, for the cleanness of politics, and for the sake of the honesty of journalism, I could wish that the journalists of this country—the National Union of Journalists and the Institute of Journalists—would stand up against this thing. They may say it is none of their business. But it is. For when the sordid creation is stripped naked to the world the journalists will bear as much of the justice us the monopolists. We delude ourselves when we say it is nothing to us that the people arc fed with part-truths. Journalists' work is rushed, I know, and suffers the penalty of all rushed work. But would that they would think clearly before writing. Only clear writing, which follows from clear thought, can adequately record what the day's affairs have meant to the peoples of the world. And that is what matters as news. A journalist must feel a thing before he can reveal it to others.
I would have Mr. Alassingham's letter and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Cambridge lecture, " On Jargon," in The Art of Writing, soak into the minds of all newspaper owners
and journalists.—I am, Sir, &c., 11. J. W.
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