PUBLIC SERVICE OR BIG BUSINESS?
Genn, Irving
Public Service or Big Business? HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION. By Edwin Emery. University of Minnesota Press. 263 pp. $3.50. IReviewed by IRVING GENN IT is...
...Death, as-it-must-comeetc, comes to protagonist Gorse...
...He deals here with problems of the hectic 'twenties that have lasting importance to the second-oldest profession as they do to the oldest profession—when do you stop being amiably willing, and start being a whore...
...Prof...
...Prof...
...SITUATIONS in which ANPA has gone on the "we're just a private business" assumption occur just as frequently in this history...
...Publisher as Tempter THE SECOND OLDEST PROFESSION...
...This policy has imposed a serious handicap en Prof...
...The hero, name of Ned Gorse, gets more and more tangled up in the tempter's schemes...
...Thus the publishers opposed the American Newspaper Guild in the thirties on the grounds that newspapermg is not a trade but a noble profession and that reporters would lose their unbiased viewpoint if they belonged to a union...
...In its early years, the Association battled laws against harmful patent medicines—although such legislation was plainly in the public interest— because it feared a consequent loss of profitable advertising...
...By Robert Sylvester...
...Irving (Sean is a reporter now warning for the American Newspaper Guild...
...Good stuff, actually...
...In the end he discovers that he has sold his soul, betrayed his wife and beat friends, and has got himself a bum ticker...
...THE ANPA was guilty of some more distorted reasoning along the same lines when it came up against sue New Deal legislation as the Wagner Act, the NRA, the Wages and Hours Act and social security...
...Depending purely on self-interest, the ANPA sometimes will act on the assumption that the press is a public institution and sometimes on the assumption that it is a private business...
...Sylvester's protagonist is a very important newspaperman, a managing editor no less...
...Since its founding in 1887, it has made use of the ambivalent sitaution of the press in all too human a manner...
...379 pp...
...IReviewed by IRVING GENN IT is generally understood that the press of the United States plays a dual role...
...Including such publicity stunts as the "Globe Gladiators" (even the alliteration makes it a twin brother of the News's "Golden Gloves...
...For a view of how American publishers react to it en masse, we must turn to Professor Emery's recently published work...
...Emery's history...
...Emery has succeeded in writing a detailed history...
...Reviewed by martin EBON In VIEW of what's happening to the New York press—from the death of the Sun to the Post's rediscovery of sex as a circulation builder—this novel has its timely elements...
...Its author, Robert Sylvester, reviews plays for the Daily News, leading local tabloid...
...Such laws, the publishers maintained through their association, might be legal for all other industries but would violate the sacred freedom of the press when applied to them...
...When ANPA formulates labor policy, the "public institution" attitude is most advantageous and is therefore brought forward...
...When radio became a serious competitor, the ANPA forgot its oft-proclaimed allegiance to freedom of information and tried to cut off the networks from wjre service news...
...Without minutes on convention proceedings, hs has had to rely en whatever information slips through via dribs and drabs published in the ANPA's bulletins...
...Despite this limitations...
...3.00...
...Emery refers to the establishment in 1909 of an arbitration policy in cooperation with the printing trade unions as "perhaps the most praiseworthy and imaginative of all the Association's sctiens...
...Histories of individual journals, crttical surveys of the newspaper field and the biographies of leading Journalists have given us considerable information on how well or how ill individual publishers have adjusted to this dual situation...
...In short, whfle H was perfectly all right for publishers to organize the ANPA as a trade association it was all wrong for their employes to organize the ANG as a trade union...
...Gorse is a lesser Willy Loman of the newspaper game...
...While generally sympathetic, the book is by no mean* unduly biased toward ANPA...
...And, say, Sylvester—would you have written this while Joe Patterson was still around...
...On the ether hand, it is a business enterprise which is geared to return a profit to Hs owners...
...One other example: While the press clamors for free access to courtrooms, legislative chambers, administrative departments, labor union conventions, international conferences, etc., the ANPA blandly holds its principal discussions in executive sessions...
...The tempter of his journalistic virtue is on Mister John Brown Hodgeman, "publisher of the all-powerful New York Globe...
...It seems a sad easement on America's leading publishers that a friendly, well disposed hiatcriao can fmd nothing fresher te single out ttvm a pohey adopted M years ago and since then almost entirely dissipated by mutual distrust...
...Might even make a movie controversial enough to be daring, and caricaturistic enough not to bother anyone seriously...
...On the one hand, it is a medium el mass communication, guaranteed in lis freedom by the Constitution and consequently obligated to tender public service...
...THE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER Publishers Association is a trade association with a membership of 809 publications, representing more than 90 percent oi the total circulation of dallies in the United States and Canada...
...In his concluding paragraph...
...Some of the sketches of city room inhabitants ought to give a tight throat to anyone who has ever put his feet on a copy desk...
...The book is full of nice work-a-day details of the newspaper game...
Vol. 33 • April 1950 • No. 15
