Herman Melville - "Moby Dick; or The Whale"

George Bernard Shaw - "O'Flaherty V. C."

Cherubini - "Pinocchio in Africa"

Juliet James - "Palaces and Courts of the Exposition"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Public Opinion

W >> Walter Lippmann >> Public Opinion




The classic formula for such a newspaper is contained in a letter
written by Horace Greeley on April 3, 1860, to "Friend Fletcher" who
was about to start a country newspaper: [Footnote: Cited, James Melvin
Lee, _The History of American Journalism,_ p. 405.]

"I. Begin with a clear conception that the subject of deepest interest
to an average human being is himself; next to that he is most
concerned about his neighbors. Asia and the Tongo Islands stand a long
way after these in his regard.... Do not let a new church be
organized, or new members be added to one already existing, a farm be
sold, a new house raised, a mill set in motion, a store opened, nor
anything of interest to a dozen families occur, without having the
fact duly, though briefly, chronicled in your columns. If a farmer
cuts a big tree, or grows a mammoth beet, or harvests a bounteous
yield of wheat or corn, set forth the fact as concisely and
unexceptionally as possible."

The function of becoming, as Mr. Lee puts it, "the printed diary of
the home town" is one that every newspaper no matter where it is
published must in some measure fill. And where, as in a great city
like New York, the general newspapers circulated broadcast cannot fill
it, there exist small newspapers published on Greeley's pattern for
sections of the city. In the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx there
are perhaps twice as many local dailies as there are general
newspapers. [Footnote: _Cf._ John L. Given, _Making a Newspaper,_
p. 13.] And they are supplemented by all kinds of special publications for
trades, religions, nationalities.

These diaries are published for people who find their own lives
interesting. But there are also great numbers of people who find their
own lives dull, and wish, like Hedda Gabler, to live a more thrilling
life. For them there are published a few whole newspapers, and
sections of others, devoted to the personal lives of a set of
imaginary people, with whose gorgeous vices the reader can in his
fancy safely identify himself. Mr. Hearst's unflagging interest in
high society caters to people who never hope to be in high society,
and yet manage to derive some enhancement out of the vague feeling
that they are part of the life that they read about. In the great
cities "the printed diary of the home town" tends to be the printed
diary of a smart set.

And it is, as we have already noted, the dailies of the cities which
carry the burden of bringing distant news to the private citizen. But
it is not primarily their political and social news which holds the
circulation. The interest in that is intermittent, and few publishers
can bank on it alone. The newspaper, therefore, takes to itself a
variety of other features, all primarily designed to hold a body of
readers together, who so far as big news is concerned, are not able to
be critical. Moreover, in big news the competition in any one
community is not very serious. The press services standardize the main
events; it is only once in a while that a great scoop is made; there
is apparently not a very great reading public for such massive
reporting as has made the New York Times of recent years indispensable
to men of all shades of opinion. In order to differentiate themselves
and collect a steady public most papers have to go outside the field
of general news. They go to the dazzling levels of society, to scandal
and crime, to sports, pictures, actresses, advice to the lovelorn,
highschool notes, women's pages, buyer's pages, cooking receipts,
chess, whist, gardening, comic strips, thundering partisanship, not
because publishers and editors are interested in everything but news,
but because they have to find some way of holding on to that alleged
host of passionately interested readers, who are supposed by some
critics of the press to be clamoring for the truth and nothing but the
truth.

The newspaper editor occupies a strange position. His enterprises
depend upon indirect taxation levied by his advertisers upon his
readers; the patronage of the advertisers depends upon the editor's
skill in holding together an effective group of customers. These
customers deliver judgment according to their private experiences and
their stereotyped expectations, for in the nature of things they have
no independent knowledge of most news they read. If the judgment is
not unfavorable, the editor is at least within range of a circulation
that pays. But in order to secure that circulation, he cannot rely
wholly upon news of the greater environment. He handles that as
interestingly as he can, of course, but the quality of the general
news, especially about public affairs, is not in itself sufficient to
cause very large numbers of readers to discriminate among the dailies.

This somewhat left-handed relationship between newspapers and public
information is reflected in the salaries of newspaper men. Reporting,
which theoretically constitutes the foundation of the whole
institution, is the most poorly paid branch of newspaper work, and is
the least regarded. By and large, able men go into it only by
necessity or for experience, and with the definite intention of being
graduated as soon as possible. For straight reporting is not a career
that offers many great rewards. The rewards in journalism go to
specialty work, to signed correspondence which has editorial quality,
to executives, and to men with a knack and flavor of their own. This
is due, no doubt, to what economists call the rent of ability. But
this economic principle operates with such peculiar violence in
journalism that newsgathering does not attract to itself anything like
the number of trained and able men which its public importance would
seem to demand. The fact that the able men take up "straight
reporting" with the intention of leaving it as soon as possible is, I
think, the chief reason why it has never developed in sufficient
measure those corporate traditions that give to a profession prestige
and a jealous self-respect. For it is these corporate traditions which
engender the pride of craft, which tend to raise the standards of
admission, punish breaches of the code, and give men the strength to
insist upon their status in society.

3

Yet all this does not go to the root of the matter. For while the
economics of journalism is such as to depress the value of news
reporting, it is, I am certain, a false determinism which would
abandon the analysis at that point. The intrinsic power of the
reporter appears to be so great, the number of very able men who pass
through reporting is so large, that there must be some deeper reason
why, comparatively speaking, so little serious effort has gone into
raising the vocation to the level say of medicine, engineering, or
law.

Mr. Upton Sinclair speaks for a large body of opinion in
America, [Footnote: Mr. Hilaire Belloc makes practically the same
analysis for English newspapers. _Cf. The Free Press._] when he
claims that in what he calls "The Brass Check" he has found this
deeper reason:

"The Brass Check is found in your pay envelope every week--you who
write and print and distribute our newspapers and magazines. The Brass
check is the price of your shame--you who take the fair body of truth
and sell it in the market place, who betray the virgin hopes of
mankind into the loathsome brothel of Big Business." [Footnote: Upton
Sinclair, _The Brass Check. A Study of American Journalism._ p.
116.]

It would seem from this that there exists a body of known truth, and a
set of well founded hopes, which are prostituted by a more or less
conscious conspiracy of the rich owners of newspapers. If this theory
is correct, then a certain conclusion follows. It is that the fair
body of truth would be inviolate in a press not in any way connected
with Big Business. For if it should happen that a press not controlled
by, and not even friendly with, Big Business somehow failed to contain
the fair body of truth, something would be wrong with Mr. Sinclair's
theory.

There is such a press. Strange to say, in proposing a remedy Mr.
Sinclair does not advise his readers to subscribe to the nearest
radical newspaper. Why not? If the troubles of American journalism go
back to the Brass Check of Big Business why does not the remedy lie in
reading the papers that do not in any remote way accept the Brass
Check? Why subsidize a "National News" with a large board of directors
"of all creeds or causes" to print a paper full of facts "regardless
of what is injured, the Steel Trust or the I. W. W., the Standard Oil
Company or the Socialist Party?" If the trouble is Big Business, that
is, the Steel Trust, Standard Oil and the like, why not urge everybody
to read I. W. W. or Socialist papers? Mr. Sinclair does not say why
not. But the reason is simple. He cannot convince anybody, not even
himself, that the anti-capitalist press is the remedy for the
capitalist press. He ignores the anti-capitalist press both in his
theory of the Brass Check and in his constructive proposal. But if you
are diagnosing American journalism you cannot ignore it. If what you
care about is "the fair body of truth," you do not commit the gross
logical error of assembling all the instances of unfairness and lying
you can find in one set of newspapers, ignore all the instances you
could easily find in another set, and then assign as the cause of the
lying, the one supposedly common characteristic of the press to which
you have confined your investigation. If you are going to blame
"capitalism" for the faults of the press, you are compelled to prove
that those faults do not exist except where capitalism controls. That
Mr. Sinclair cannot do this, is shown by the fact that while in his
diagnosis he traces everything to capitalism, in his prescription he
ignores both capitalism and anti-capitalism.

One would have supposed that the inability to take any non-capitalist
paper as a model of truthfulness and competence would have caused Mr.
Sinclair, and those who agree with him, to look somewhat more
critically at their assumptions. They would have asked themselves, for
example, where is the fair body of truth, that Big Business
prostitutes, but anti-Big Business does not seem to obtain? For that
question leads, I believe, to the heart of the matter, to the question
of what is news.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE NATURE OF NEWS

1

ALL the reporters in the world working all the hours of the day could
not witness all the happenings in the world. There are not a great
many reporters. And none of them has the power to be in more than one
place at a time. Reporters are not clairvoyant, they do not gaze into
a crystal ball and see the world at will, they are not assisted by
thought-transference. Yet the range of subjects these comparatively
few men manage to cover would be a miracle indeed, if it were not a
standardized routine.

Newspapers do not try to keep an eye on all mankind. [Footnote: See the
illuminating chapter in Mr. John L. Given's book, already cited, on
"Uncovering the News," Ch. V.] They have watchers stationed at certain
places, like Police Headquarters, the Coroner's Office, the County
Clerk's Office, City Hall, the White House, the Senate, House of
Representatives, and so forth. They watch, or rather in the majority
of cases they belong to associations which employ men who watch "a
comparatively small number of places where it is made known when the
life of anyone... departs from ordinary paths, or when events worth
telling about occur. For example, John Smith, let it be supposed,
becomes a broker. For ten years he pursues the even tenor of his way
and except for his customers and his friends no one gives him a
thought. To the newspapers he is as if he were not. But in the
eleventh year he suffers heavy losses and, at last, his resources all
gone, summons his lawyer and arranges for the making of an assignment.
The lawyer posts off to the County Clerk's office, and a clerk there
makes the necessary entries in the official docket. Here in step the
newspapers. While the clerk is writing Smith's business obituary a
reporter glances over his shoulder and a few minutes later the
reporters know Smith's troubles and are as well informed concerning
his business status as they would be had they kept a reporter at his
door every day for over ten years. [Footnote: _Op. cit._, p. 57.]

When Mr. Given says that the newspapers know "Smith's troubles" and
"his business status," he does not mean that they know them as Smith
knows them, or as Mr. Arnold Bennett would know them if he had made
Smith the hero of a three volume novel. The newspapers know only "in a
few minutes" the bald facts which are recorded in the County Clerk's
Office. That overt act "uncovers" the news about Smith. Whether the
news will be followed up or not is another matter. The point is that
before a series of events become news they have usually to make
themselves noticeable in some more or less overt act. Generally too,
in a crudely overt act. Smith's friends may have known for years that
he was taking risks, rumors may even have reached the financial editor
if Smith's friends were talkative. But apart from the fact that none
of this could be published because it would be libel, there is in
these rumors nothing definite on which to peg a story. Something
definite must occur that has unmistakable form. It may be the act of
going into bankruptcy, it may be a fire, a collision, an assault, a
riot, an arrest, a denunciation, the introduction of a bill, a speech,
a vote, a meeting, the expressed opinion of a well known citizen, an
editorial in a newspaper, a sale, a wage-schedule, a price change, the
proposal to build a bridge.... There must be a manifestation. The
course of events must assume a certain definable shape, and until it
is in a phase where some aspect is an accomplished fact, news does not
separate itself from the ocean of possible truth.

2

Naturally there is room for wide difference of opinion as to when
events have a shape that can be reported. A good journalist will find
news oftener than a hack. If he sees a building with a dangerous list,
he does not have to wait until it falls into the street in order to
recognize news. It was a great reporter who guessed the name of the
next Indian Viceroy when he heard that Lord So-and-So was inquiring
about climates. There are lucky shots but the number of men who can
make them is small. Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an
event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news. The most
obvious place is where people's affairs touch public authority. De
minimis non curat lex. It is at these places that marriages, births,
deaths, contracts, failures, arrivals, departures, lawsuits,
disorders, epidemics and calamities are made known.

In the first instance, therefore, the news is not a mirror of social
conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself. The
news does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the ground, but
it may tell you when the first sprout breaks through the surface. It
may even tell you what somebody says is happening to the seed under
ground. It may tell you that the sprout did not come up at the time it
was expected. The more points, then, at which any happening can be
fixed, objectified, measured, named, the more points there are at
which news can occur.

So, if some day a legislature, having exhausted all other ways of
improving mankind, should forbid the scoring of baseball games, it
might still be possible to play some sort of game in which the umpire
decided according to his own sense of fair play how long the game
should last, when each team should go to bat, and who should be
regarded as the winner. If that game were reported in the newspapers
it would consist of a record of the umpire's decisions, plus the
reporter's impression of the hoots and cheers of the crowd, plus at
best a vague account of how certain men, who had no specified position
on the field moved around for a few hours on an unmarked piece of sod.
The more you try to imagine the logic of so absurd a predicament, the
more clear it becomes that for the purposes of newsgathering, (let
alone the purposes of playing the game) it is impossible to do much
without an apparatus and rules for naming, scoring, recording. Because
that machinery is far from perfect, the umpire's life is often a
distracted one. Many crucial plays he has to judge by eye. The last
vestige of dispute could be taken out of the game, as it has been
taken out of chess when people obey the rules, if somebody thought it
worth his while to photograph every play. It was the moving pictures
which finally settled a real doubt in many reporters' minds, owing to
the slowness of the human eye, as to just what blow of Dempsey's
knocked out Carpentier.

Wherever there is a good machinery of record, the modern news service
works with great precision. There is one on the stock exchange, and
the news of price movements is flashed over tickers with dependable
accuracy. There is a machinery for election returns, and when the
counting and tabulating are well done, the result of a national
election is usually known on the night of the election. In civilized
communities deaths, births, marriages and divorces are recorded, and
are known accurately except where there is concealment or neglect. The
machinery exists for some, and only some, aspects of industry and
government, in varying degrees of precision for securities, money and
staples, bank clearances, realty transactions, wage scales. It exists
for imports and exports because they pass through a custom house and
can be directly recorded. It exists in nothing like the same degree
for internal trade, and especially for trade over the counter.

It will be found, I think, that there is a very direct relation
between the certainty of news and the system of record. If you call to
mind the topics which form the principal indictment by reformers
against the press, you find they are subjects in which the newspaper
occupies the position of the umpire in the unscored baseball game. All
news about states of mind is of this character: so are all
descriptions of personalities, of sincerity, aspiration, motive,
intention, of mass feeling, of national feeling, of public opinion,
the policies of foreign governments. So is much news about what is
going to happen. So are questions turning on private profit, private
income, wages, working conditions, the efficiency of labor,
educational opportunity, unemployment, [Footnote: Think of what guess
work went into the Reports of Unemployment in 1921.] monotony, health,
discrimination, unfairness, restraint of trade, waste, "backward
peoples," conservatism, imperialism, radicalism, liberty, honor,
righteousness. All involve data that are at best spasmodically
recorded. The data may be hidden because of a censorship or a
tradition of privacy, they may not exist because nobody thinks record
important, because he thinks it red tape, or because nobody has yet
invented an objective system of measurement. Then the news on these
subjects is bound to be debatable, when it is not wholly neglected.
The events which are not scored are reported either as personal and
conventional opinions, or they are not news. They do not take shape
until somebody protests, or somebody investigates, or somebody
publicly, in the etymological meaning of the word, makes an
_issue_ of them.

This is the underlying reason for the existence of the press agent.
The enormous discretion as to what facts and what impressions shall be
reported is steadily convincing every organized group of people that
whether it wishes to secure publicity or to avoid it, the exercise of
discretion cannot be left to the reporter. It is safer to hire a press
agent who stands between the group and the newspapers. Having hired
him, the temptation to exploit his strategic position is very great.
"Shortly before the war," says Mr. Frank Cobb, "the newspapers of New
York took a census of the press agents who were regularly employed and
regularly accredited and found that there were about twelve hundred of
them. How many there are now (1919) I do not pretend to know, but what
I do know is that many of the direct channels to news have been closed
and the information for the public is first filtered through publicity
agents. The great corporations have them, the banks have them, the
railroads have them, all the organizations of business and of social
and political activity have them, and they are the media through which
news comes. Even statesmen have them." [Footnote: Address before the
Women's City Club of New York, Dec. 11, 1919. Reprinted, _New
Republic_, Dec. 31, 1919, p. 44.]

Were reporting the simple recovery of obvious facts, the press agent
would be little more than a clerk. But since, in respect to most of
the big topics of news, the facts are not simple, and not at all
obvious, but subject to choice and opinion, it is natural that
everyone should wish to make his own choice of facts for the
newspapers to print. The publicity man does that. And in doing it, he
certainly saves the reporter much trouble, by presenting him a clear
picture of a situation out of which he might otherwise make neither
head nor tail. But it follows that the picture which the publicity man
makes for the reporter is the one he wishes the public to see. He is
censor and propagandist, responsible only to his employers, and to the
whole truth responsible only as it accords with the employers'
conception of his own interests.

The development of the publicity man is a clear sign that the facts of
modern life do not spontaneously take a shape in which they can be
known. They must be given a shape by somebody, and since in the daily
routine reporters cannot give a shape to facts, and since there is
little disinterested organization of intelligence, the need for some
formulation is being met by the interested parties.

3

The good press agent understands that the virtues of his cause are not
news, unless they are such strange virtues that they jut right out of
the routine of life. This is not because the newspapers do not like
virtue, but because it is not worth while to say that nothing has
happened when nobody expected anything to happen. So if the publicity
man wishes free publicity he has, speaking quite accurately, to start
something. He arranges a stunt: obstructs the traffic, teases the
police, somehow manages to entangle his client or his cause with an
event that is already news. The suffragists knew this, did not
particularly enjoy the knowledge but acted on it, and kept suffrage in
the news long after the arguments pro and con were straw in their
mouths, and people were about to settle down to thinking of the
suffrage movement as one of the established institutions of American
life. [Footnote: _Cf._ Inez Haynes Irwin, _The Story of the
Woman's Party._ It is not only a good account of a vital part of a
great agitation, but a reservoir of material on successful,
non-revolutionary, non-conspiring agitation under modern conditions of
public attention, public interest, and political habit.]

Fortunately the suffragists, as distinct from the feminists, had a
perfectly concrete objective, and a very simple one. What the vote
symbolizes is not simple, as the ablest advocates and the ablest
opponents knew. But the right to vote is a simple and familiar right.
Now in labor disputes, which are probably the chief item in the
charges against newspapers, the right to strike, like the right to
vote, is simple enough. But the causes and objects of a particular
strike are like the causes and objects of the woman's movement,
extremely subtle.

Let us suppose the conditions leading up to a strike are bad. What is
the measure of evil? A certain conception of a proper standard of
living, hygiene, economic security, and human dignity. The industry
may be far below the theoretical standard of the community, and the
workers may be too wretched to protest. Conditions may be above the
standard, and the workers may protest violently. The standard is at
best a vague measure. However, we shall assume that the conditions are
below par, as par is understood by the editor. Occasionally without
waiting for the workers to threaten, but prompted say by a social
worker, he will send reporters to investigate, and will call attention
to bad conditions. Necessarily he cannot do that often. For these
investigations cost time, money, special talent, and a lot of space.
To make plausible a report that conditions are bad, you need a good
many columns of print. In order to tell the truth about the steel
worker in the Pittsburgh district, there was needed a staff of
investigators, a great deal of time, and several fat volumes of print.
It is impossible to suppose that any daily newspaper could normally
regard the making of Pittsburgh Surveys, or even Interchurch Steel
Reports, as one of its tasks. News which requires so much trouble as
that to obtain is beyond the resources of a daily press. [Footnote: Not
long ago Babe Ruth was jailed for speeding. Released from jail just
before the afternoon game started, he rushed into his waiting
automobile, and made up for time lost in jail by breaking the speed
laws on his way to the ball grounds. No policeman stopped him, but a
reporter timed him, and published his speed the next morning. Babe
Ruth is an exceptional man. Newspapers cannot time all motorists. They
have to take their news about speeding from the police.]