Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/471



CHAPTER XX

JOURNALISM OF TO-DAY

VIEWS AND INTERVIEWS

ATTENTION has been repeatedly called to the fact that jour- nalism is a mirror of the times. It is a mirror of the people in general, and the individual paper is a mirror of its subscribers. Arthur Brisbane in discussing newspaper work once remarked:

The newspaper is not, as Schopenhauer says, "a shadow on the wall," although many a newspaper is a mere shadow of what a newspaper should be. A newspaper is a mirror reflecting the public, a mirror more or less defective, but still a mirror. And the paper that the individual holds in his hand reflects that individual more or less accurately.

On this point the late Whitelaw Reid, when editor of The New York Tribune, said :

The thing always forgotten by the closest critic of the newspapers is that they must be immeasurably what their audiences make them; what their constituencies call for and sustain. The newspaper cannot uniformly resist the popular sentiment any more than the stream can flow above its fountain. To say that the newspapers are getting worse is to say that the people are getting worse. They may work more evil now than they have ever wrought before, because the influence is more widespread; but they also work more good, and the habitual attitude of the newspaper is one of effort toward the best its audiences will tolerate.

Arthur Twining Hadley, president of Yale University, prac- tically concurred in the opinions just noted when he wrote:

If we are to have responsible newspapers, the reform must begin with the readers themselves. Most of the men who edit newspapers will give the people the kind of newspapers they want. There will, of course, be exceptionally good editors who will make their papers better than their readers demand, and try to educate the people up to a higher level; just as there will be exceptionally bad editors, who will make papers worse than the readers want, and be the instruments, whether they try to or not, of educating the public down to a lower level. But