Chapter IV: The Mannerisms of Stentor

A problem for the consideration of the Dictators of the Press is that of reconciling the up-to-date nature of the modern newspaper in most respects with its extraordinary conservatism in others, an inconsistency that affords genuine amusement to the student of contemporary life and manners. The Press is still old-fashioned enough to regard Woman (with a very large “W”) as a remarkable creature that has only just been discovered. Her slightest and most inconsequential doings are regarded as of the most compelling interest. “Women Present at Football Match” declaim the headlines, and the game is immediately vested with a special and romantic atmosphere.[7]

[7] I do not dilate on this theme, since it has so admirably
been expounded by Rose Macaulay, who is human enough to rebel
against her sex being treated by the Press as though it were
almost human.

Again, we have progressed beyond the “Book of Snobs,” but “public schoolboy,” “old Etonian,” “wife of Ex-M.P.,” and “Colonel” are still imagined by sub-editors to be invested in the reader’s mind with an aura denied to the mass of human beings. As for members of the nobility, let an amiable and undistinguished peer die of heart failure in his eightieth year, or collide in his motor car with a taxi-cab, and the news is conveyed to a bored public by means of special contents bills. For the public is bored, when it is not disgusted, by these endeavours to make the world safe for Snobocracy. Yet a journalist who attempted to point out that both social values and news values had altered since the days of the Great Exhibition, and, in particular, since the Great War, would be told that he did not know his business and that he was most certainly a Bolshevik.

Again, while proprietors and editors long ago realised the implication of Northcliffe’s discovery that Woman was a creature of sufficient intelligence and curiosity to read a newspaper (even if only for the advertisements of drapers), they still regard her in the light of an intellectual crétin so far as concerns the provision of reading matter. If any critic consider this statement too severe, let him――or her――concentrate exclusively for the next two days on the fashion and “Society” columns and the “Woman’s Pages” of the Popular Press.

Moreover, the editorial conception of women is that they are without exception possessed of inexhaustible means, leisure, and ability to make holiday at expensive resorts all the year round and to attend all the costliest “functions” as a matter of course. No other explanation of the fatuous drivel offered up for the special delectation of female readers offers itself to the reasoning mind.

Do you think I have been unfair? Then read this characteristic paragraph from an evening paper, headed “Earnest Young Women”:

“It must not be thought that the American girl merely dances
her way through life. Not at all. She must have variety,
therefore she dabbles lightly in art, literature, politics, or
philanthropy. She has days for visiting hospitals or other
institutions or she makes political speeches as Miss Barbara
Sands, grand-daughter of Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, has been
doing recently, and as Sarah Murray Butler does all the time,
or she even takes up business in her odd moments, like Elinor
Dorrance, who at eighteen has decided to know all about the
famous Campbell soups company of which her father is head and
which she will inherit.”

This is not parody. It is the real thing, complete with snobbishness, clichés, naïveté, and the conviction that it doesn’t in the least matter how you write or what you write about so long as you are writing for other women. And it is published in a paper whose owners lay stress on the fact that it caters especially for intelligent and cultured womanhood.

“The famous Campbell soups company.” “Famous” is the sub-editor’s favourite word,[8] applied by him with unwearying zeal to all men and women who have ever got themselves in the public eye――unless they are really famous――applied even to furniture polishes, blends of whisky, and popular cigarettes. The sub-editor, that romantic soul, also assumes that the normal behaviour of the notorious or the merely well-known is flamboyant, so that when they manage their affairs without limelight they are “quietly married,” or they “leave quietly” for their honeymoon. The one thing the Press will in no circumstances permit them to do is to die quietly.

[8] “Amazing,” “mystery,” “thrilling,” and “dramatic” are also
hot favourites in the Stock Phrase Stakes.

Is it not time that the pages of the Press were one quarter so up-to-date as the machinery which prints them? and that “journalese” should cease to be a synonym for the vapid, the crude, the provincial, and the semi-illiterate?

Impartiality being even rarer than commonsense, no one would be foolish enough to demand from a newspaper either complete lack of bias, or the presentation with equal prominence of both sides of a controversial case. Such impartiality would be contrary to human nature. But natural prejudice does not necessarily involve the deliberate distortion of news.

News can be, and is, habitually manipulated both by distortion and suppression. The first procedure is, on the whole, less objectionable, since a little knowledge on the part of a reader will often enable him to realise that a case is being overstated. Moreover, he may allow for the known political complexion of a journal. Suppression assumes two shapes, partial and complete. The latter, which is the more unusual, comes into play when a newspaper does not find it convenient or politic to give publicity to events or ideas, but this reticence does not necessarily spring from sinister or interested motives. Indeed, it may simply be because the news editor, who lives in a curious world of his own, often remote from the contacts of the outer world, and who is avid only of stereotyped sensations, fails to recognise news when it is thrust under his nose. In such instances, a rival may possibly recognise “news value.” Or again, he may not.

This partial suppression, of which the Socialist newspapers are quite as guilty as the so-called “Capitalist Press” denounced by them for the practice, is one of the deadliest weapons in the armoury of journalism. Let it be clearly understood that we are concerned here not so much with a matter of unfairness or injustice to an individual or a section of the community, as with injustice to the community as a whole, which is deliberately and systematically deprived of knowledge of all the facts necessary to form a judgment regarding the issues at stake in a question which may affect the national well-being.

For instance, it is impossible for the average newspaper reader to form a detached opinion of the rights and wrongs of a coal strike. The miners’ wages are alternatively exaggerated and minimised; exceptionally high earnings in the coal fields are paraded as typical of the average for the industry as a whole; or the earnings of coal hewers are represented at much below the real level on the strength of figures including the wages of boys and surface workers. All these facts are readily available and accessible in any modern newspaper office. But only a selection of them is published by any one paper.

Again, to take an example of complete suppression, the curtain may never be lifted by the Press on a political or other scandal of which the exposure is emphatically in the public interest. Such a boycott may be just as much due to the belief that the subject has no news value as to any ulterior reasons. But the injury to the community is the same in either event. Newspaper readers are not concerned with the motives animating editors and proprietors; they _are_ concerned with the results of those motives.