What's Wrong With U.S. Newspapers
MAY, RONALD W.
A Reporter's View What's Wrong With U.S. Newspapers By Ronald W May Recent polls indicate wide popular indifference toward the missiles race, the Middle East crisis, the East European...
...Beck lives in Seattle...
...In the effort to achieve local monopoly or lessened competition, mergers and purchases have been occurring at a rapid clip...
...It shows first in little things: a general slackness, a carelessness about details, a preoccupation with profit rather than product, a lack of professional discipline, a widening gulf between those who produce and those who "manage...
...In 1900, there were about 2,700 daily newspapers...
...Most papers ignored it...
...Yet, in the Hodge case the facts had already been offered to—and rejected by—at least one other Chicago newspaper...
...And I use the word 'fix' advisedly...
...they select their big stories and bury others...
...The newspapers will get what they are willing to pay for—second-grade material...
...But low salaries are more an effect than a cause of the deterioration of newspaper standards...
...The pages of the magazine serve as a psychiatrist's couch for confessing past sins...
...The story was important in evaluating the man sitting in the chief executive's chair...
...telegraph editor of the Hartford Times, in an article in the American Editor—that "there was no editing—or practically none—and that story sequence, no matter how awkward, was accepted without question...
...First-rate reporting—as in the Times—takes first-rate reporters...
...It ends with a newspaper becoming, as Dean Barrett has described it, "a paper broker —buying paper, adding some black matter to it and selling it again...
...more experienced men go...
...And they all get the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth...
...Journalism-school enrollments have declined almost 40 per cent since 1948, although new schools have been set up and several old ones given bigger budgets...
...Admittedly, it is to their credit that they did this at once...
...Yet, Beck's misdeeds somehow escaped their attention...
...they pontificate about the purity of their news columns, and yet few of them are willing to risk a real debate about the real issues of our time.' In the same vein, Herblock, Pulitzer Prize political cartoonist of the Washington Post and Times Herald, said in Minneapolis: "Certainly many newspapers have altered their past ideas about the responsibilities of the President...
...The result...
...There are about 100 individuals or corporations that own daily newspapers in more than one state, averaging five newspapers each...
...Unfortunately, however, the analysis has as yet produced no improvement in the patient's condition...
...The two newsmen had been given access to Beck's files and had spent hours questioning him...
...But on all except the big metropolitan newspapers—the "prestige papers"— and to some extent the wire services, the reporter finds himself placed near the bottom of the journalistic totem pole in both status and pay...
...Not long ago, a young reporter aglow with the ideals of journalism school wired a story from Washing-Ion to his paper in a city served by the Tennessee Valley Authority...
...Yet, newspapers are suffering a steady "percentage decline of the national advertising dollar, in spite of the apparent increases in business and population," members of the Newspaper Advertising Executives Association were informed last January...
...Upset at being told of this situation, the editor told the reporter that such news had no place in a family newspaper...
...Newspaper mergers or outright purchases of one paper by another are long remembered by the public...
...They manipulate news...
...Then he sprinted to a nearby drug store to dictate an eye-witness report in time for his newspaper's second afternoon edition...
...At Northwestern's Medill school, in a recent year, it was estimated at less than 10 per cent...
...Newspapers By Ronald W May Recent polls indicate wide popular indifference toward the missiles race, the Middle East crisis, the East European revolution—practically all public issues except high living costs...
...This is in line with complaints about stuffy writing and fragmented presentation of news in most of our gazettes...
...Representative Evins learned that no poll of Chamber members had ever been made on the subject and publicly charged Sutton with misleading statements...
...Some months ago, a reporter on a medium-sized East Coast daily brought his managing editor information he had gathered at considerable risk indicating police protection of a vice ring...
...Raymond Wilcove, second in command of the Congressional reporting staff of the International News Service, quit news work this year to join the staff of a House committee...
...In addition, the percentage of graduates going into newspaper work has fallen well below 50 per cent...
...The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was long deferential to the Teamster boss...
...The editor refused...
...A penny-pinching attitude toward the news side is merely a reflection of management's conviction that the newsroom is less important than the well-financed departments devoted to advertising, accounting and public relations...
...Now get over to that airline hearing you were going to cover...
...We'll use the AP story on it...
...Dr...
...The wire news is already there, ready to pick up and set...
...Yet, Dean Barrett did mention the "peanut salaries" that most reporters are paid...
...It should be noted that these criticisms are not so flagrantly true of a dozen or so outstanding metropolitan dailies, although none of them can escape entirely...
...More than 500 are absentee-owned...
...The business manager of this absentee owner quickly is afflicted with the country-club point of view...
...Editors and publishers have failed to learn one of the first rules of their business—a simple rule well stated by the Philadelphia Inquirer in a booklet to advertisers: "A newspaper must succeed as a newspaper before it can succeed as an advertising medium...
...This year, the lambasting of journalism by persons within its ranks has grown heavier and more specific...
...Henry Ladd Smith, director of the school of communications of the University of Washington, reported: "Of ten reasons given by a group that had left the newspaper business, low pay was eighth in the list of complaints...
...Edward W. Barrett, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, told a conference last January: "There is some cause for gloom, but the situation is not nearly hopeless...
...The witness, Louis V. Sutton, president of the Carolina Power and Light Company, had told the House Public Works Committee that the Chamber's membership favored curtailing the power of the TVA system...
...Many factors combine to bring the accumulation of middle-age fat that has transformed a once dynamic press into a doddering old fogey...
...Tell the public why it needs newspapers, what newspapers bring about that nothing else does...
...Yet, he began his address by saying that he had returned to the White House because he wanted to talk from "the house of George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson" on the crucial racial problem...
...R. H. MacDonald, executive editor of the Western Producer of Saskatoon, Canada, wrote in Editor & Publisher : "Industry is in there bidding up the bright young university graduates, but the newspapers aren't...
...Nothing was done...
...The incident reveals something that is happening to journalism...
...They don't have the experience, and they don't have and can't get the confidence of the people they have to deal with...
...Last summer...
...Capital Times, reported last June that he had learned that the circulation of the weekly Argus of Seattle "zoomed" during the Dave Beck hearings in Washington because the Argus published fuller details than the city's two dailies...
...Not all comment about newspapers condemns them...
...In a few years, we'll have a bunch of second-grade newspapermen calling on top-grade PR officers, and who do you think is going to control the press then...
...Louis Post-Dispatch declared: "Many . . newspapers are dull because they have lost, if they ever had it, the ability to get angry...
...The newspaper must be part of his family...
...It was the feeling you get with UP that you're expendable, just a hired hand that can easily be replaced by some kid who will think it's a big deal to come to Washington and work cheap...
...There has been a reduction in the number of newspapers, but no reduction in their responsibility...
...Behind this general complacency, say many, is the failure of all but - handful of newspapers to educate our citizens...
...press is overwhelmingly owned and operated by Republicans who fix the rules of U.S...
...Editor & Publisher ran an editorial pointing with pride to the crusades of the Portland Ore-gonian and the Chicago Daily News, which resulted in the Teamster inquiry and the embezzlement conviction of Illinois State Auditor Orville Hodge...
...The hot indignation which gives birth to most crusades has been stifled by years of compliance with prevailing ideas and cooperation with the prevailing community powers...
...The telegraph editor listened for a moment, then broke in: "Forget that...
...A few newspapers —notably the New York Times— mentioned it, but briefly and obscurely...
...As compensation, newspapers offer more flaccid Sunday-supplement-type articles, entertainment features and money-making special sections filled with canned copy...
...They take the news the press agents bring in...
...But the kids they hire can't do the job...
...In fact, readers of Editor & Publisher, the newspaper executives trade organ, might well think that the world of journalism is seething with self-criticism and shame...
...Your story was killed...
...Asked about the rewards for initiative with wire services, he answered: "There are none...
...But high production costs, a popular lack of interest in serious news, the increasing complexity of public issues, competition from television, less time for reading—none of these things can obscure the fact that the chief blame rests on the flabby shoulders of the nation's newspaper publishers...
...Until this year, he was treated by the powers that be with all the respect due one of their number...
...Louis Seltzer, editor of the Cleveland Press, has detected a habit among editors of taking the easy way out: "It's much easier to hire wire services than to gather, write and print local news...
...Every reporter has his own stories to illustrate the loss of newspaper standards: • One of the few staunch supporters of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy among Washington correspondents readily admits, now that the Senator is dead, that his personal opinion of Joe and his work was nearly the opposite of what he wrote day after day...
...Special mention must be made of the New York Times, which soars above the common level...
...To paraphrase the movie industry's slogan of several years ago: "Newspapers are duller than ever...
...After learning about it, he telephoned an editor in a city several hundred miles away and suggested that the latter send someone to cover the story...
...Walter Aronoff, circulation manager of the Detroit Times, stated the rationale of this approach in a speech to newspaper executives: "We must promote our product as a group—like the orange growers...
...Only after investigation revealed that technical difficulties made this impossible did Eisenhower agree to go to Washington...
...A great editor, William Allen White, saw it coming and thought he detected the reason: "Too often, the publisher of an American newspaper is a rich man seeking power and prestige...
...They cover meetings and speeches and good causes that come easy and that no one can find any fault with...
...Another East Coast editor tried to run out on a story about an illegal, hoodlum-run casino operated secretly in a nearby resort...
...now it must go to him...
...May, who has worked for the United Press and the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, co-authored McCarthy: the Man, the Senator, the Ism...
...Any talent with a yen for journalism is soon snapped up by PR-hungry industry...
...We're not the conscience of this community or its police department," he remarked tartly...
...Correspondents on the scene reported privately that the President at first ordered the networks to arrange broadcasting facilities in Newport...
...Now there are only 1,759...
...The profession has gone stale, stodgy and standardized...
...No longer are editors and reporters fired with a driving ambition to get all the news first and best or perish in the attempt...
...You don't have to hire a lot of men and women to round it up...
...They had only lo check a story whose outlines thev already knew...
...Fear of controversy, dissent and criticism has led newspapers away from hard-swinging, three-dimensional reporting and pushed them into the brittle, "objective," "he-said" kind of stories that leave readers cold...
...Press shortcomings have been pointed out frequently in recent years...
...William T. Evjue, editor of the Madison (Wis...
...he is now making far more...
...After Beck got in trouble, it was discovered that he had paid Nard Jones, the P-I's chief editorial writer, and Douglas Welch, its top reporter, a total of S15,000 to write his biography...
...He watched the whole occurrence, quickly collected the names of dead and wounded, and got excited quotes from spectators...
...He implied that if some of his publisher friends are really as intent as they say on improving their product, the obvious first step is to halt the exodus of crack newspapermen into better-paid jobs in public relations, magazines and television...
...The main reason given was lack of pride in the job...
...In too many cities and on too many papers, it's the easy way out that editors seek...
...The magazine failed to mention that in each case the newspaper was handed the basic story by someone who walked into the news room and plunked it down...
...He's got to feel the editor is his friend and not just a big corporation trying to take his money...
...Soon the managing editor's wife nags him into it...
...Now there are only 85...
...The loyalty and dedication to journalistic ideals is all on one side —the reporter's side...
...And they are meeting that responsibility better than fifteen years ago...
...A poll showed that most people find political news from radio and television easier to understand than that from newspapers...
...The 50-man reporting staff of the United Press bureau in Washington has lost 12 of its best men since last December...
...political debate...
...Perhaps optimistic words should be expected from journalism deans...
...Instead of just reporting the news, they start playing games with it—and with you...
...Many earnestly pray he is right...
...They also learned that newspaper circulation is not keeping pace with population growth...
...Jacob Scher puts his hope in new mechanical processes that may make the founding of newspapers comparatively cheap...
...When two Puerto Ricans stormed Blair House in 1950 in a wild attempt to kill President Harry Truman, the Washington correspondent of a large Midwestern newspaper happened to be standing only 100 yards away...
...Where misdeeds of even minor officials of a few years ago were termed typical of 'the Truman gang,' it is more likely to be said of recent officials whose conduct was questionable that "they have done a disservice to the President.' " A glaring example of this sort of thing occurred only recently...
...A survey of wire-copy editing and story structure in New England revealed—according to George K. Moriarity...
...For a healthy nation requires a free and fearless press—and we are in danger of losing ours...
...When Eisenhower decided to make a nationwide radio and television speech explaining why he had ordered troops to Little Rock, he was vacationing at Newport...
...Earl J. Johnson, general news manager of the United Press, reported that telegraph editors are concerned chiefly with mechanical problems and spend little time evaluating news, with the result that they are losing standing in news rooms...
...Two went to the New York Times and nearly all the rest to public relations or related fields...
...Eighteen states have no cities with competing dailies...
...You don't get into arguments with your readers over it...
...He added: "Press associations don't seem unhappy about letting their higher-paid...
...In an article in the monthly bulletin of the International Press Institute, Robert Lasch of the St...
...Therefore, it is hard to get a modern American newspaper to go the distance necessary to print all the news about many topics...
...They're overimpressed by the big shots and get hoodwinked...
...He has the country-club complex...
...Here Ronald May, Washington correspondent of the Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times, sums up the criticisms newspapermen themselves have made of the press...
...In 1900, there were about 700 cities with competing dailies under independent editorial management...
...The dispatch told how Representative Joe L. I'A ins...
...The nation's publishers this year surveyed the problem and decided that the "practical" and "modern" way to get more readers is not by improving newspapers but by spending millions on public relations...
...James A. Wechsler, editor of the New York Post, charges widespread political bias...
...The young reporter worked half a day nailing down the facts and telegraphed a 1,000-word story to his editor...
...People pay attention to newspapers that pay attention to people...
...He was the only newsman present...
...This may seem obvious, but to most publishers it is the kind of foolish idealism that "impractical" men are always spouting...
...I take off my hat to the few newspapers in this country whose editors are going out and getting the local stories which are hard to get— and which sometimes loose all hell on the editorial offices—but these papers are very, very scarce...
...Rut there is no difference of opinion about the Chamber of Commerce...
...Thus, more than one out of every four American newspapers are run by chains...
...Jacob Scher, professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, recently commented on the profession in general: "Newspaper work has become more and more frustrating to the intelligent person.' How does an institution deteriorate...
...A few hours later, he received a reply: "There is some difference of opinion in these parts about TVA...
...As Louis Seltzer put it: "Once the reader came to the newspaper because he had few other places to go...
...He told an audience in Cincinnati: "The U.S...
...it is actually a national newspaper that cannot be compared with others...
...Democrat of Tennessee, had exposed an alleged attempt to deceive Congress by a man who said he spoke (or |lie United Stales Chamber of Commerce...
...Harmon Nichols, who joined the American Trucking Association, says: "It wasn't only the money with me and, I think, the others...
...And not only duller, but less accurate, less thorough and less fair...
...The depressing part of all this is that there seems little chance of improvement...
...A veteran of 21 years with INS, he was making about $8,200 a year when he asked for a raise and was turned down...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 44
