Chapter III: The Dictators

Few people understand the economic, still less the social, significance of Trusts and Combines. The public is familiar enough with the amalgamation of a number of more or less competing concerns engaged in the same industry; it is not so familiar with the conception of a Trust which owns or controls undertakings of widely-differing nature, such as the modern Combine which aims at controlling an article during the whole cycle of operations from the winning of the raw material to the marketing of the finished product. Still less is it familiar with the process whereby control, which is far more important than ownership, can be acquired by putting up quite a small proportion of the total capital invested in a commercial undertaking.[2]

[2] A large proportion of the capital of modern joint-stock
companies is provided by debenture-holders, who normally have
no voting rights whatever, and by preference share-holders,
who may vote at meetings only when their dividend has been in
arrears for a prescribed period. Even ordinary share-holders
may have no voting rights, and the entire control, including
the appointment of directors, can be vested in the owners of
a particular class of share representing less than a tenth of
the company’s total capital.

It is as the result of control rather than actual ownership that the British Press has within the past few years largely come into the hands of some four or five men. The Independent Press has, in consequence, almost ceased to exist. There are still, of course, newspapers uncontrolled by Combines or Trusts, but these are in the main restricted alike as to circulation, influence, and the range of their geographical distribution. Moreover, independence of ownership does not necessarily mean independence of control by a political party in whose interests the paper is administered by its nominal owners.

The “Trustification” of the Press is an entirely logical development, and has been accepted by the public in much the same way as amalgamations in any other industry. But there is a vital difference between a Newspaper Trust and a Beef Trust. The Newspaper Trust controls and manipulates public opinion. Its workings are largely subterranean. It is guided on occasion by purely political considerations to an extent impossible in any other industry. It may exercise a decisive influence on the issue of war or peace. Obviously, the control of a nation’s Press by a handful of men is not to be regarded in the same light as the control of its chemical industry. A “deal” in newspapers embodies, ultimately, a “deal” in the means of manipulating public opinion.

In every industry, the appetite for amalgamation grows by what it feeds on. The tendency is for the immensely powerful and wealthy Newspaper Trusts to absorb more and more publications. Very often, a competing organ is bought only that it may be “killed,” as happened to London’s oldest evening paper, _The Globe_. Amalgamation is often only a euphemistic term for the disappearance of an old-established paper. The independent journals cannot withstand the tentacles of the Octopus. Either they are forced out of existence by sheer inability to stand up against their much wealthier rivals, or the owners are induced to sell by offers too tempting to refuse. In the latter instance, the matter has usually been decided on down to the last detail by the directors on both sides before the offer is submitted to the share-holders who are the nominal and legal owners of the property.

The Dictators of Public Opinion thus enlarge their realm. It may be asked why, granted that the disappearance of existing Independent Newspapers is inevitable, new Independent organs do not make their appearance. The answer is that few undertakings involve the risk of such great loss, coupled with so much uncertainty and the necessity of putting up so much working capital to provide for possible losses during the first two or three years of existence, as the launching of a great newspaper. Excluding a journal subsidised by Labour organisations, only one serious attempt has been made in England during the last twenty years to found a new morning paper of national scope. It failed, after its millionaire proprietor had tired of losing money on the venture. The last attempt to establish a new London evening paper failed on the score of finance, distribution alone (_i.e._, getting the paper into the hands of readers after it had been printed) costing a thousand pounds a week. London, which is the journalistic centre of the United Kingdom (the small size of the country making possible the “nation-wide” newspaper, with which there is nothing really comparable in the United States), has actually far fewer morning and evening papers than twenty years ago.

It has more Sunday papers. But that is one of the results of Trustification. By placing a Sunday paper under the same control as one or more morning and evening journals, overhead charges, which eat up money in the newspaper industry, are largely reduced. Administrative and mechanical costs are lowered. Each paper in the Combine can give free publicity to the rest. Distribution costs are shared. Against such conditions, the lone hand fights a losing battle, and economic factors operate as much against the creation of new Independent journals as they operate for the absorption of those still in existence.

Since the armistice, the process of Trustification has undergone a remarkable acceleration. It has also entered on a new and immensely significant phase, the unification of control of publications of the most widely differing nature, thus bringing illustrated weeklies, fashion papers, monthly magazines, technical and trade journals, children’s weeklies and monthlies, and directories and other works of reference under the same ownership as morning, evening, and Sunday Newspapers. The modern Combine will even control the manufacture of its paper, and the supply of raw material for the purpose.[3]

[3] See Appendix.

Such comprehensive Trustification may either assume the shape of complete amalgamation of separate companies, or be effected by the process known as unification of interests, in which a common control is brought about by such means as the presence of the same men, or their nominees, on the boards of companies which retain their corporate entity but are animated by a common policy and administered to serve common interests. The result is in either instance the same.

The world has never known anything comparable. A handful of men, sitting over a luncheon table, can decree what the community is to think, what it is to be told, what it is not to be told. So we have reached the “Fordisation” of the intellect, which works through mass suggestion reinforced by damnable iteration. And this is mainly the work, not of men with missions, not of enthusiasts, or patriots, or men of culture, not even of journalists, but of men who have “gone into” the newspaper industry as they might have “gone into” the establishment of bacon-curing factories.

Does it require a prophet to forecast the colossal influence of the Dictators on the opinions, the conduct, and the ideals of the next generation?

For the process of Trustification cannot be arrested. Law and public opinion are alike powerless to stem it. No Anti-Trust legislation, as has been proved by America, is ever or can ever be of the smallest effect, since there are too many means of evading the spirit of the law while adhering to the letter. Interlocking directorates, ownership of shares carrying control over the entire undertaking, secret arrangements for pooling profits, are among the common methods adopted in order to set up a _de facto_ Trust when it may not be legal or politic to establish a Trust in name. Newspapers which succeed in maintaining a semblance of independent ownership and independent policy will thus be brought within the orbit of the Combines although they may nominally remain outside. The Trusts will become Super-Trusts, and the Press of the whole country may be dominated by two, three, or even one combine, with a single individual as Arch-Dictator.

The process is inevitable, even if only for the reason that the splitting up of a Trust that has once been formed entails reduction in profits. Northcliffe, who was above and beyond everything else a journalist, aimed merely at the supreme control of the journals created by his genius. The contemporary Dictators, who are not journalists, aim at dominion over the whole field of the Press. They have already gone most of the way towards attaining their ambition.

A special factor which has received very little consideration will operate in the near future towards the tightening of the stranglehold of the Press Combines. Trustification of the Newspaper Industry has recommended itself to financiers on the ground, _inter alia_, that it enables expenditure to be cut down. The history of nearly every industrial combine, excepting those affecting the Press, has since the armistice been one of profits that have failed to come up to the promoters’ estimates. In numerous instances, despite the considerable economies foreshadowed in the prospectus, earnings have been materially lower than those of the former separate undertakings now under one control. Indeed, the process of amalgamation or of acquiring controlling interests has during the past few years been in general disappointing to share-holders.

Until now, the Newspaper Trusts have been more fortunate, partly because certain classes of advertisers have been induced to spend much more money, partly because of the economies effected by the wholesale discharge of staffs consequent on the so-called amalgamation of papers which have been bought only that they might be “killed”;[4] and in part because the results of acquiring share-holdings at fancy prices have yet to materialise.

[4] “_The Yorkshire Evening Argus_ having been amalgamated with
the _Bradford Daily Telegraph_, the Editor of the former paper
(Mr. J. W. Masters) confidently recommends the members of his
loyal and competent staff to all who need literary assistance,
and would be glad to receive applications from editors and
others having positions to offer.”――Advertisement in the
_Times_, December 15, 1926.

This prosperity cannot be expected to last indefinitely. The newspaper brokers, that new class of financial intermediary which is playing so significant a part in the making of “deals” in public opinion, have done uncommonly well out of their buyings and sellings. They may still do well in the immediate future, but they have no concern with the ultimate prosperity of the industry. The future position of share-holders in the Press Trusts does not seem so assured as they imagine to-day. As profits decline, or fail to increase in accordance with expectations, the dictators will decree reductions in expenditure, beginning with the human material which has created their profits and their goodwill. The desire for economy, which is on the whole more likely to be attained by means of centralised administration than with a number of separate and individual undertakings, will obviously outweigh any arguments that might be brought forward in favour of “unscrambling” the Press Trusts, or splitting up the Combines into smaller undertakings. Furthermore, when the Trusts feel the pinch, or regard their profits as insufficiently bloated, the ambition to drive out what remains of the Independent Press will be accentuated, and yet more journals outside the Combines will be forced to surrender.

With the process of Trustification has come a complete change in the character of the Controllers of the Press. Men such as Delane of the _Times_ were great editors, that is, great journalists, who stamped their impress on an age which still held to the belief that the editor was responsible for the editorial policy of his paper, and was something more than the mere paid servant of his proprietors, to be engaged and discharged as one “hires and fires” a scullery maid. Men such as Northcliffe (with all his faults a great man and one with a touch of that indefinable quality which we term genius) were possessed of creative ideas; they had vision and ideals; they saw in the newspaper something more than a mere instrument for money-making. If they made money it was not because it was their primary ambition to do so, or even because they particularly cared about money, but because their creations could not help attaining a considerable degree of material success.

To-day, with negligible exceptions which are unlikely to be perpetuated, editors are merely hired servants. A. C. P. Scott is an exception.[5] Another Delane is an impossibility. Another Northcliffe is unthinkable, since the new Dictators have fashioned the rôle of the Press, and their own rôle, after a diametrically opposite conception.

[5] Editor of the _Manchester Guardian_, and controller of its
editorial policy.

In the stead of the Delanes and the Northcliffes, we have control by self-seeking millionaires with a megalomaniac itch for interference. A dozen years ago, the spectacle of a newspaper proprietor expressing on the front page of his principal organ his entire disagreement with the opinions of his dramatic critic on an entirely undistinguished play would have been incredible. Such an outrage on taste is symptomatic of the dictatorship by the new Overlords of the Press. Here we have yet another manifestation of the amateur’s conception of journalism. Anyone, thinks the modern proprietor, can be a dramatic critic, a musical critic, a literary critic, a Parliamentary correspondent, an editor, especially if his name be known to the public in a capacity entirely unrelated to journalism. If he be a peer or possess a courtesy title, then he is the beau ideal of journalism.[6]

[6] “Anyone can write leading articles,” the author was once
solemnly assured by one of our best-known editors. He was
neither endeavouring to be humorous nor to be cynical; he was
merely expressing what the Conductors of the Press themselves
think of the Press which they conduct.

Amateurishness and the love of interference also combine to give us the ponderous signed contributions with which newspaper proprietors regularly favour their own journals. Whether these articles are in every instance, or in any instance, actually written by their signatories, is a matter with which I have no immediate concern. But they are significant of the driving forces behind the modern Press Trust; they exemplify the rôle of the Press as an engine of propaganda, self-advancement, and self-advertisement, for its millionaire owners.

To quote Mr. St. John Ervine:

“We know there are certain demented millionaires who own
newspapers and will write for them; and when one of these men
writes an article, the staff hides its head and goes about the
rest of the week explaining it away. We (the journalists) are
the paper. We are the goodwill of the paper, and when they
sell a paper they sell what we have made. When they sell what
we have made and say ‘We don’t want you any more,’ we should
be regarded as the first charge on the price of that paper.
We have known proprietors who have ruined papers. Such a man
should be in gaol for ruining a good business.... Editors used
to put the proprietors of newspapers in their place, and there
is no reason why it should not be done again.”

Mr. Ervine, it may be added, made these remarks at a meeting convened by the Institute of Journalists on December 11, 1926, under the chairmanship of Sir Robert Bruce, editor of the _Glasgow Herald_. His remarks were, of course, boycotted by the leading organs of the Press Trust.