JOURNALISM AND THE PUBLIC
C.
L. R. SASTRI
“The
time may come when even men of the word, those who live in the present, who
labour not for the future nor learn from the past, will recognise that man is a
complex creature, and that material wealth satisfies only a moiety of his
nature, and that material goods possessed in excess by one portion of a
community, and lacking wholly to the other, mean a condition of disease ...
that the railway train which brings the prostitute, the stock exchange, and the
foes of the freedom of a people into the heart of its land had better, for
humanity, have been the slowest ox-wagon crawling across the plains...that a
submarine cable, used to whisper from land to land, and stir up the hearts of
people against people, and to urge on the powerful against the weak, is the
devil’s own tube, and has a connection direct with hell; that a daily paper not based on a determination to disseminate truth is
a cup of poison sent round fresh every morning to debilitate the life of the
people.”
–Olive
Schreiner: Thoughts on South Africa
Any
number of articles can be (and, in fact, have been) written on the newspaper
press. This is, after all, the “Newspaper Age’, as I may call it, and
newspapers naturally claim “first priority”, so to speak, in the matter of
public interest. Without that public interest, of course, they would, in the
military idiom, be deprived of the use of their principal life-line: they would
not be able to function for a single day. The debt, however, is mutual. Without
the newspapers the public, on its part, would be equally helpless: Forlorn to
the point of feeling orphaned.
That
explains why we are favoured with them on the Sabbath also: and that is,
likewise, the justification for those evening editions, too, which the
news-vendors about at us from every street corner when we are hurrying
homewards from what Charles Lamb has described, in his inimitable fashion, as “the dull drudgery of a dealwood desk.”
My point is that we have arrived at a stage in human evolution when, in their
absence, we stand in danger of simply languishing, of simply declining into
desuetude. They sustain us in moments of deepest gloom. They bid fair to be the
surest safeguard against the twin maladies of “boredom” and “brown study” which
flesh is heir to: and they quieten us when we are in a fractious mood, a malady
most incident to the incredibly hectic pace at which we live.
It is not an uncommon experience that familiarity
breeds contempt. We are so very much used to newspapers these days that we are
only too prone to forget that there had been a period in the history of the
world when this peculiar form of popular entertainment was, by the exigencies
of circumstance, not available to the public. Indeed, we cannot conceive of such a period: the dyer’s hand, as the poet has
it, being subdued to what it works in.
But, as our good luck would have it, in the course
of what George Bernard Shaw had been pleased to call “Creative Evolution”, and
what we, humbler folk, Abraham Lincoln’s “common men”, are content to term
“Divine Dispensation”, newspapers burst upon a bewildered public,
“Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides,”
and, ever since, we have “fallen for” them, and have become well-nigh
incapable of doing anything without them.
A Host of Associations
The phrase, “the newspaper press”, recalls to us a
host of associations–not all of them uniformly pleasant. It is an institution
in, and by, itself. “It is a mighty engine, Sir,” as Mr. Pott, of the Eatanswill Independent, boasted to Mr. Pickwick on an historic occasion.
It wields enormous power: a Power that is steadily escalating with the passing
of days.
A modicum of power, to be sure, had not been
unknown to it even before. As a matter of fact, “power” and “press” would seem
to be almost synonymous. In a sense, indeed, it would be true to say that a
press that wields no sort of power is a contradiction in terms: a
“terminological inexactitude”, nothing less!
The
press, in general, as I have indicated above, wields no negligible power.
Power, of a kind, is possessed even by our indigenous press. A newspaper is
published in order to be read by one section of the community or another. From
the instant that it issues out of the printing press it becomes, in a manner of
speaking, public property. Every paper worth the name has a clientele of its
own; and, among them, it wields undisputed sway. That, predictably, confers
upon it a certain amount of influence that no draconian legislation whatever
can hope entirely to eradicate.
So
long as newspapers are permitted to be published–be it in the most attenuated
form imaginable–no government on earth is capable of robbing them of an
irreducible minimum of power and of prestige and of glory. All these, I need
hardly stress, are inherent in the printed word. If, as we have been assured
repeatedly by savants, the pen is far mightier than the sword, then it is
indisputable that the printed word is
mightier still. It goes forth as an unofficial plenipotentiary of the paper concerned
to every hearth and home. There the
message is first inculcated: and thence, in ever-widening circles, it is
publicised.
Thus
it transpires that even in a subject-country the power of the press is by no
means to be despised: it is quite definitely there, “rough hew it” as the
authorities may. My thesis is that the power of the press is infinite, not
infinitesimal, notwithstanding at any given moment of the protean restrictions
upon it of an excessively paternal government. This being granted, it is my
purpose to point out that this enormous power is not wielded always for the
good of the people, and has not been so wielded all the while.
It
is a sarcastic commentary on human affairs that, when the press was still in
its infancy, in its swaddling clothes, as it were, it had been a more potent
instrument of public instruction than when it began to grow to its present
bloated size and shape and status. Its very prosperity, in short, has been
largely its undoing. The “old” journalism, paradoxical as it may sound, had
much to its credit. It paraded fewer pounds, shillings, and pence, it is true,
but it was a genuine force to be reckoned with in the education of public
opinion. It moulded public opinion along infallibly correct lines: and, in that
respect, its services were truly invaluable, even the established universities
ranking only second to it.
The
press had been the press then: and it
thoroughly merited the celebrated title of the “Fourth Estate of the Realm.”
The newspapers may not have been able to flaunt before the bewildering gaze of
a gullible public their net sales of millions and to boast about the largest
circulation in the whole solar system. But they knew what they were about and,
within their strict limits, set about the task of enriching the common heritage
in a manner worthy both of themselves and of that common heritage.
Then
Lord Northcliffe (born as Mr. Alfred Harmsworth) came bouncing and bounding
into the arena and threw what can only be described as a monkey-wrench into the
works. Did not Cardinal Newman suggest, in one of his more inspired moments,
that “where there is a Jerusalem, there is a Samaria close at hand”? He (Lord
Northcliffe. I mean) was the serpent that entered this enchanting garden. Him it
was that we must hold primarily responsible for inaugurating that fatal
downward trend in newspapers which is still, unluckily for us, going on
unabated, and for the reprehensible reorientation of their policies which is
such a marked feature of modern newspapers.
The Syndicated Press
We
have, nowadays, what has come to be known as the “syndicated press”.
Previously, one person, or one group of persons, owned one newspaper. But that
halcyon period is past. We have now a few business tycoons, a few “press
barons”, who have parcelled out the kingdom of the newspaper press among
themselves. They are the proud owners of a chain
of newspapers: and, through this vast megaphone, contrive to blare forth
their views to the multitudes that are their clientele. It is not surprising
that they hold those multitudes in the palms of their
hands: that they can do with them what they choose and can make them dance to
any crazy tune that may momentarily have caught their fancy.
One
of the sources of the power of the “syndicated press”, as the late Mr. H. W. Massingham said in the
paper he read to the Cooperative Congress at Nottingham at Whitsun, 1924, is that
“its
vast resources are employed in so large a scale, its allied companies produce
so much of the material it requires, and it can effect such large economies of
management, as almost to drive the single newspaper to the wall. I was speaking
to the director of a powerful and highly profitable group of illustrated
newspapers. ‘I regard’, he said, ‘the day of the single daily paper is over. It
costs far too much to produce and maintain’.”
It
may be asked: is there no remedy? Massingham suggests that there is. He cites
the famous example of the American Christian
Science Monitor. It is produced, we are told,
“not
for profit, but for the benefit and interest of its readers. With that object
it gives no descriptions of death or crime or scandal. It simply leaves the
destructive activities of men out of account, so as to have space to
concentrate on the constructive ones.”
He
has one more valuable suggestion to offer:
“One
thing I would respectfully urge. If you keep your newspaper good, you do not
want to make it too large. Avoid the nuisance and the unnecessary cost of the
monster newspaper. Size is no good to value. These enormous papers give a great impression of
space and variety and enterprise; in reality, they are little more than huge
advertisement sheets. I often think that journalism in England was at its
greatest when its form was the simplest and that the day of the pamphleteer was
also the day of the truly great editor.” (My italics)
Wiser
words than these have never been uttered by anyone, before or since. What he
said deserves, as the late Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q” of revered memory)
wrote of Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of
University, “being bound by the young student of literature for a frontlet
on his brow and a talisman on his writing wrist.
For
“literature” we may substitute “journalism.”