WHY I WROTE "THE CLARION"

...The criticism to which I submit with the easiest complacency is that of being an "impracticable idealist...

...Here were men to whom the handling of that mercurial commodity, the news of the day, would seem to be as alien as foreign diplomacy, merchants who controlled the local prints through the money paid by them for advertising, politicians whose names are seldom seen in political news, the mighty politicians of finance, marking their trail in all—but —invisible lines across the news of a whole nation by virtue of a "pull" more subtle and far-reaching than any mere partisan influence...

...That is what a small but growing number of newspapers are coming to be...

...In this light it became infinitely more interesting to me than before...

...It must not be inferred, however, that this pressure from without is always effective...

...SELDOM does an individual find opportunity to "talk back" to the newspapers...

...To that I may give answer in the words of my practical idealist of the Clarion office, McGuire Ellis, declaring what a newspaper may be: "A teacher and a preacher...

...The local newspapers, and many that were not local, held me up to contumely as a malignant slanderer of the fair fame of the profession—and then kindly proved my main point of attack by unanimously perverting and distorting my speech...

...As I look at the question, there's a contract of honor between a newspaper and its subscribers...

...It was to tell a story not about a newspaper man but about a newspaper...

...There I pointed out certain of the influences which tend to taint news, and also the responsibility of the press for the fraudulent advertising which is the reproach of the modern daily...

...In that conflict lies the vivid drama of journalism...

...that and the organ of its expression, the daily newspaper...

...wire-pulling merchants, advertising agents (a class astonishingly informed as to the inside workings of journalism), business managers of newspapers who honestly believed in their own right to control news policies in the interests of the till and often made good their claims...

...Moreover not one of them presented honestly my most specific charge, that they accepted money for swindling their own readers through fake medical and financial advertisements...

...No other phase of modern enterprise has so taken hold upon my mind and imagination as the daily newspaper...

...but which once in a while is illumined by the craftsmanship of such a writer as Jesse Lynch Williams or the late David Graham Phillips, and then becomes a true study of the strange psychology of the journalistic type...

...I saw it through the eyes of those who make use of it for their great or petty purposes, by a species of control and influence hidden from the general public, and often from the newspaper worker himself...

...The sight was bewildering...

...and always and everywhere the type of newspaper idealist whom I have endeavored to present in my novel, striving courageously, though often blindly against the outside control which tends to vitiate journalistic standards...

...It is an attack not upon journalism but upon the elements which corrupt journalism, nine-tenths of which operate from outside the newspaper offices...

...Invariably it is met and not infrequently overcome by a counter-pressure from within, the disciplined instinct of the trained newspaperman to get and present the vital facts of the news as truly and justly as he may...

...it was a reporter's story...

...others important and influential city dailies—maintaining a high standard of independence and honor, giving the news honestly and fairly as they saw it and resisting, against what pressure only the insider in journalism can know, all attempts to control their policies from without Some of these, honest though they were in their news and editorial functions published wholly indefensible advertisements of cancer or consumption cures, "blue sky" mining offers, fraudulent financial opportunities and the like...

...A force to tear down and to build up...

...When I had determined to my own satisfaction that a newspaper could be run as honestly as a church—and, note well, it is called upon to meet such temptations as no church of today ever encounters, and perhaps as no other institution encounters,—when I saw newspapers being thus conducted, when I had talked with editors and owners who believed in news (only a lesser name for truth) as the devotee believes in his creed, and with advertising men who would no more print a fraudulent advertisement than pass a lead dollar, then I had the "why" of The Clarion in clear impress upon my brain...

...Tacitly the newspaper says to the subscriber 'For two cents a day I agree to furnish you with the news of your town, state, nation and the outside world, selected to the best of my ability, and presented without fear or favor.' On this basis, if the newspaper fakes its news, if it distorts facts, or if it suppresses them, it is playing false with its subscribers...

...manufacturers of fraudulent goods in whose behalf editors used their power in legislatures to shut off the enactment of laws adverse to their "business interests...

...It is sanding its sugar, and selling shoddy for all-wool...

...If it were not so I could never have written The Clarion...

...Almost without exception they have disclaimed knowledge of or belief in such journalistic conditions as them have fallen into the tempting and amusing inferential error of declaring them specifically "untrue of Buffalo" or of Syracuse, neither of which communities did I have in mind as prototype of my city of "Worthington...

...I have put the simple principle of daily journal-Ism as I see it in the mouth of my young editor...

...Finally, a few newspapers abuse the novel as constituting an attack on American journalism, failing wholly to perceive, as one of the veteran newspaper owners of New York state wrote me, that "it is calculated to help every decent, self-respecting paper wherever published...

...It is, in essence, a declaration of the faith that is in me, the faith that a newspaper can prosper against the pressure of adverse circumstance and influence by sticking to its primal concern of telling the news straightly...

...Scattered here and there about the country I found publications— many of them small, struggling country journals...

...But here I am challenged on the ground of knowledge and of truth...

...AT FIRST—and that goes back more than twenty years—my newspaper story was not a newspaper story at all...

...Now Rochester papers are not notably worse than those of other cities...

...even little social strategists pulling the wires of family or • club or church connections to gloss over some malfeasance or suppress some unpleasant item on behalf of a friend—all these striving to hamper or stimulate or manipulate that complicated news-machine which is the educator and informant of nine-tenths of the American people...

...Criticism of the artistic merit or demerit of a novel I conceive to be unanswerable...

...FOR ten years I made up that savings account to which I have referred above...

...My ambition then was to produce that species of fiction which crops up periodically in the magazines, usually so ineptly done that the very term "newspaper story" has come to be a synonym for cheap and artificial romanticism...

...quack doctors, ward politicians, public utility magnates, newspaper proprietors, editors, financial reporters, one multi-millionaire known throughout the country for his conscienceless manipulation of politics but little known for his equally potent control of parts of the press...

...But it is somewhat disconcerting to find honest and clean papers resenting my modest plea for higher standards as a slur upon the entire profession...

...I should no more expect the dishonest editor to like the truth about dishonest newspapers than I should expect a patent medicine quack to approve my presentation of old Dr...

...MEANWHILE I had not failed to see the other side of the question...

...Surtaine, proprietor of Certina...

...Naturally, therefore, when I began to write fiction I realized that some day I should attempt a newspaper story, and with that purpose in the background I began to amass a savings account of facts, impressions, points of view, creeds and policies culled from many sources and always bearing on the one main point, the enormously complex and intricate composition of that commodity by which we all live, more or less, and which we call the news...

...Then I left reporting and began to see the newspaper as it really is...

...Some years ago I tried out my material in a lecture delivered at Rochester, New York...

...The response was instant and gratifying...

...For this reason I may be pardoned if I say a word here in reply to the reviewers who have fallen foul of The Clarion, not in their function as reviewers but as critics of the truth of the conditions which I have presented...

...Being at that time a reporter myself I saw only that limited and distorted image of the great news mechanism which is visible from the inside of a city room...

...My job suddenly clarified before my eyes...

...bankers whose fiat blotted out columns of type as surely as any Russian censorship because their loans were necessary to the maintenance of the papers...

...There was special incentive in the fact that, so far as I know, no other American writer has ever entered upon this field of fiction, excepting Joseph Medill Patterson who gave to one phase of it a stage setting and produced an intense and profoundly significant play...

...Others sneer at the book as generally setting forth a status which does not and could not exist in any American city...

...If I had hit the bull's-eye there I knew that I should not be wide of the target elsewhere...

...A few were clean and straight in every department—and successful on that basis...

...And I submit that, after ten years of active newspaper work followed by more than ten years of study of the newspaper problem in almost every part of the United States, I may claim at least a parity of knowledge with the average office-bound reviewer, while, as regards the fidelity of the picture, there is not one essential incident in the newspaper part of the novel, which I cannot parallel and support by reference to actual occurrences...

...My contributors were of many sorts...

...I aspired to give a true picture of the newspaper, with its unreckonable, irresponsible power, in its relation to its environment There, in a few words is the "why" of The Clarion...

...In those days my plots were all about magnificent scoops by impossible journalistic heroes, romantic adventures of cub reporters wherein they beat out the veterans of the trade, detective achievements performed by journalistic sleuths, and so on...

...To rip this old town wide open and remould it nearer to the heart's desire...

...JOURNALISM, then, was not the simple and direct profession which I, in my reportorial simplicity had believed it, a mill receiving its daily supply of facts and grinding out therefrom its regular grist of news...

...And I sat down to write it...

...That's what a newspaper might be, and ought to be, and could be, by God in Heaven, if the right man ever had a free hand at it...

...Rather it was too often the implement of outside and hidden forces striving to make use of it for purposes alien to its proper business, the purveying of news to the public...