The American Newspaper | Page 4

well informed; for, although there are scattered
through the land many persons, I am sorry to say, unable to pay for a
newspaper, I have never yet heard of anybody unable to edit one.
The topic has many points of view, and invites various study and
comment. In our limited time we must select one only. We have heard
a great deal about the power, the opportunity, the duty, the "mission,"
of the press. The time has come for a more philosophical treatment of it,
for an inquiry into its relations to our complex civilization, for some
ethical account of it as one of the developments of our day, and for
some discussion of the effect it is producing, and likely to produce, on
the education of the people. Has the time come, or is it near at hand,
when we can point to a person who is alert, superficial, ready and
shallow, self-confident and half-informed, and say, "There is a product
of the American newspaper"? The newspaper is not a willful creation,
nor an isolated phenomenon, but the legitimate outcome of our age, as
much as our system of popular education. And I trust that some
competent observer will make, perhaps for this association, a
philosophical study of it. My task here is a much humbler one. I have
thought that it may not be unprofitable to treat the newspaper from a
practical and even somewhat mechanical point of view.
The newspaper is a private enterprise. Its object is to make money for
its owner. Whatever motive may be given out for starting a newspaper,
expectation of profit by it is the real one, whether the newspaper is
religious, political, scientific, or literary. The exceptional cases of
newspapers devoted to ideas or "causes" without regard to profit are so
few as not to affect the rule. Commonly, the cause, the sect, the party,
the trade, the delusion, the idea, gets its newspaper, its organ, its
advocate, only when some individual thinks he can see a pecuniary

return in establishing it.
This motive is not lower than that which leads people into any other
occupation or profession. To make a living, and to have a career, is the
original incentive in all cases. Even in purely philanthropical
enterprises the driving-wheel that keeps them in motion for any length
of time is the salary paid the working members. So powerful is this
incentive that sometimes the wheel will continue to turn round when
there is no grist to grind. It sometimes happens that the friction of the
philanthropic machinery is so great that but very little power is
transmitted to the object for which the machinery was made. I knew a
devoted agent of the American Colonization Society, who, for several
years, collected in Connecticut just enough, for the cause, to buy his
clothes, and pay his board at a good hotel.
It is scarcely necessary to say, except to prevent a possible
misapprehension, that the editor who has no high ideals, no intention of
benefiting his fellow-men by his newspaper, and uses it unscrupulously
as a means of money-making only, sinks to the level of the physician
and the lawyer who have no higher conception of their callings than
that they offer opportunities for getting money by appeals to credulity,
and by assisting in evasions of the law.
If the excellence of a newspaper is not always measured by its
profitableness, it is generally true that, if it does not pay its owner, it is
valueless to the public. Not all newspapers which make money are
good, for some succeed by catering to the lowest tastes of respectable
people, and to the prejudice, ignorance, and passion of the lowest class;
but, as a rule, the successful journal pecuniarily is the best journal. The
reasons for this are on the surface. The impecunious newspaper cannot
give its readers promptly the news, nor able discussion of the news, and,
still worse, it cannot be independent. The political journal that relies for
support upon drippings of party favor or patronage, the general
newspaper that finds it necessary to existence to manipulate stock
reports, the religious weekly that draws precarious support from
puffing doubtful enterprises, the literary paper that depends upon the
approval of publishers, are poor affairs, and, in the long run or short run,
come to grief. Some newspapers do succeed by sensationalism, as some
preachers do; by a kind of quackery, as some doctors do; by trimming
and shifting to any momentary popular prejudice, as some politicians

do; by becoming the paid advocate of a personal ambition or a
corporate enterprise, as some lawyers do: but the newspaper only
becomes a real power when it is able, on the basis of pecuniary
independence, to free itself from all such entanglements. An editor who