All Things Considered
monopolist who has lost his monopoly, and a demagogue who has lost his
mob, can both write anonymously and become the same newspaper. It is
quite true that there is a young and beautiful fanaticism in which men
do not care to reveal their names. But there is a more elderly and a
much more common excitement in which men do not dare to reveal them.
Then there is another rule for making journalism honest on which I
should like to insist absolutely. I should like it to be a fixed thing
that the name of the proprietor as well as the editor should be printed
upon every paper. If the paper is owned by shareholders, let there be a
list of shareholders. If (as is far more common in this singularly
undemocratic age) it is owned by one man, let that one man’s name be
printed on the paper, if possible in large red letters. Then, if there
are any obvious interests being served, we shall know that they are
being served. My friends in Manchester are in a terrible state of
excitement about the power of brewers and the dangers of admitting them
to public office. But at least, if a man has controlled politics
through beer, people generally know it: the subject of beer is too
fascinating for any one to miss such personal peculiarities. But a man
may control politics through journalism, and no ordinary English
citizen know that he is controlling them at all. Again and again in the
lists of Birthday Honours you and I have seen some Mr. Robinson
suddenly elevated to the Peerage without any apparent reason. Even the
Society papers (which we read with avidity) could tell us nothing about
him except that he was a sportsman or a kind landlord, or interested in
the breeding of badgers. Now I should like the name of that Mr.
Robinson to be already familiar to the British public. I should like
them to know already the public services for which they have to thank
him. I should like them to have seen the name already on the outside of
that organ of public opinion called _Tootsie’s Tips_, or _The Boy
Blackmailer_, or _Nosey Knows_, that bright little financial paper
which did so much for the Empire and which so narrowly escaped a
criminal prosecution. If they had seen it thus, they would estimate
more truly and tenderly the full value of the statement in the Society
paper that he is a true gentleman and a sound Churchman.
Finally, it should be practically imposed by custom (it so happens that
it could not possibly be imposed by law) that letters of definite and
practical complaint should be necessarily inserted by any editor in any
paper. Editors have grown very much too lax in this respect. The old
editor used dimly to regard himself as an unofficial public servant for
the transmitting of public news. If he suppressed anything, he was
supposed to have some special reason for doing so; as that the material
was actually libellous or literally indecent. But the modern editor
regards himself far too much as a kind of original artist, who can
select and suppress facts with the arbitrary ease of a poet or a
caricaturist. He “makes up” the paper as man “makes up” a fairy tale,
he considers his newspaper solely as a work of art, meant to give
pleasure, not to give news. He puts in this one letter because he
thinks it clever. He puts in these three or four letters because he
thinks them silly. He suppresses this article because he thinks it
wrong. He suppresses this other and more dangerous article because he
thinks it right. The old idea that he is simply a mode of the
expression of the public, an “organ” of opinion, seems to have
entirely vanished from his mind. To-day the editor is not only the
organ, but the man who plays on the organ. For in all our modern
movements we move away from Democracy.
This is the whole danger of our time. There is a difference between the
oppression which has been too common in the past and the oppression
which seems only too probable in the future. Oppression in the past,
has commonly been an individual matter. The oppressors were as simple
as the oppressed, and as lonely. The aristocrat sometimes hated his
inferiors; he always hated his equals. The plutocrat was an
individualist. But in our time even the plutocrat has become a
Socialist. They have science and combination, and may easily inaugurate
a much greater tyranny than the world has ever seen.
ON THE CRYPTIC AND THE ELLIPTIC
Surely the art of reporting speeches is in a strange state of
degeneration. We should not object, perhaps, to the reporter’s making
the speeches much shorter than they are; but we do object to his making
all the speeches much worse than they are. And the method which he
employs is one which is dangerously unjust. When a statesman or
philosopher makes an important speech, there are several courses which
the reporter might take without being unreasonable. Perhaps the most
reasonable course of all would be not to report the speech at all. Let
the world live and love, marry and give in marriage, without that
particular speech, as they did (in some desperate way) in the days when
there were no newspapers. A second course would be to report a small
part of it; but to get that right. A third course, far better if you
can do it, is to understand the main purpose and argument of the
speech, and report that in clear and logical language of your own. In
short, the three possible methods are, first, to leave the man’s speech
alone; second, to report what he says or some complete part of what he
says; and third, to report what he means. But the present way of
reporting speeches (mainly created, I think, by the scrappy methods of
the _Daily Mail_) is something utterly different from both these ways,
and quite senseless and misleading.
The present method is this: the reporter sits listening to a tide of
words which he does not try to understand, and does not, generally
speaking, even try to take down; he waits until something occurs in the
speech which for some reason sounds funny, or memorable, or very
exaggerated, or, perhaps, merely concrete; then he writes it down and
waits for the next one. If the orator says that the Premier is like a
porpoise in the sea under some special circumstances, the reporter gets
in the porpoise even if he leaves out the Premier. If the orator begins
by saying that Mr. Chamberlain is rather like a violoncello, the
reporter does not even wait to hear why he is like a violoncello. He
has got hold of something material, and so he is quite happy. The
strong words all are put in; the chain of thought is left out. If the
orator uses the word “donkey,” down goes the word “donkey.” If the
orator uses the word “damnable,” down goes the word “damnable.” They
follow each other so abruptly in the report that it is often hard to
discover the fascinating fact as to what was damnable or who was being
compared with a donkey. And the whole line of argument in which these
things occurred is entirely lost. I have before me a newspaper report
of a speech by Mr. Bernard Shaw, of which one complete and separate
paragraph runs like this—
“Capital meant spare money over and above one’s needs. Their country
was not really their country at all except in patriotic songs.”
I am well enough acquainted with the whole map of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s
philosophy to know that those two statements might have been related to
each other in a hundred ways. But I think that if they were read by an
ordinary intelligent man, who happened not to know Mr. Shaw’s views, he
would form no impression at all except that Mr. Shaw was a lunatic of
more than usually abrupt conversation and disconnected mind. The other
two methods would certainly have done Mr. Shaw more justice: the
reporter should either have taken down verbatim what the speaker really
said about Capital, or have given an outline of the way in which this
idea was connected with the idea about patriotic songs.
But we have not the advantage of knowing what Mr. Shaw really did say,
so we had better illustrate the different methods from something that
we do know. Most of us, I suppose, know Mark Antony’s Funeral Speech in
“Julius Cæsar.” Now Mark Antony would have no reason to complain if he
were not reported at all; if the _Daily Pilum_ or the _Morning Fasces_,
or whatever it was, confined itself to saying, “Mr. Mark Antony also
spoke,” or “Mr. Mark Antony, having addressed the audience, the meeting
broke up in some confusion.” The next honest method, worthy of a noble
Roman reporter, would be that since he could not report the whole of
the speech, he should report some of the speech. He might say—“Mr. Mark
Antony, in the course of his speech, said—
‘When that the poor have cried Cæsar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.’”
In that case one good, solid argument of Mark Antony would be correctly
reported. The third and far higher course for the Roman reporter would
be to give a philosophical statement of the purport of the speech. As
thus—“Mr. Mark Antony, in the course of a powerful speech, conceded the
high motives of the Republican leaders, and disclaimed any intention of
raising the people against them; he thought, however, that many
instances could be quoted against the theory of Cæsar’s ambition, and
he concluded by reading, at the request of the audience, the will of
Cæsar, which proved that he had the most benevolent designs towards the
Roman people.” That is (I admit) not quite so fine as Shakspere, but it
is a statement of the man’s political position. But if a _Daily Mail_
reporter were sent to take down Antony’s oration, he would simply wait
for any expressions that struck him as odd and put them down one after
another without any logical connection at all. It would turn out
something like this: “Mr. Mark Antony wished for his audience’s ears.
He had thrice offered Cæsar a crown. Cæsar was like a deer. If he were
Brutus he would put a wound in every tongue. The stones of Rome would
mutiny. See what a rent the envious Casca paid. Brutus was Cæsar’s
angel. The right honourable gentleman concluded by saying that he and
the audience had all fallen down.” That is the report of a political
speech in a modern, progressive, or American manner, and I wonder
whether the Romans would have put up with it.
The reports of the debates in the Houses of Parliament are constantly
growing smaller and smaller in our newspapers. Perhaps this is partly
because the speeches are growing duller and duller. I think in some
degree the two things act and re-act on each other. For fear of the
newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for
the newspapers. The speeches in our time are more careful and
elaborate, because they are meant to be read, and not to be heard. And
exactly because they are more careful and elaborate, they are not so
likely to be worthy of a careful and elaborate report. They are not
interesting enough. So the moral cowardice of modern politicians has,
after all, some punishment attached to it by the silent anger of
heaven. Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be
reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are
carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.
Thus we may concede that politicians have done something towards
degrading journalism. It was not entirely done by us, the journalists.
But most of it was. It was mostly the fruit of our first and most
natural sin—the habit of regarding ourselves as conjurers rather than
priests, for the definition is that a conjurer is apart from his
audience, while a priest is a part of his. The conjurer despises his
congregation; if the priest despises any one, it must be himself. The
curse of all journalism, but especially of that yellow journalism which
is the shame of our profession, is that we think ourselves cleverer