VILLARD'S SEARCHING STUDY OF THE PRESS IN ACTION
Evans, Ernestine
Villard's Searching Study Of The Press In Action THE DISAPPEARING DAILY, by Oswald Garrison Villard. Alfred A. Knopf. $3.50. JEFFERSON AND THE PRESS, by Frank L. Mott. Louisiana Slate University...
...Villard is sufficiently the proprietor to present fairly the dream of the average publisher, bent on the economy (and profit) of having everything under control, and no competitors...
...Garrison, his grandfather, was an idealist before him...
...Villard perceives is that the contemporary press often finds it better business to distract their customers with entertainment—the afternoon journal is the opium of the people—and leaves the complex of government and business without scrupulous examination, and public issues without their proper dramatization for the electorate...
...Young men write things up and often write them vividly, but there is something for young newspaper readers and most certainly for young journalists to examine in an elder's comparative and historical anecdotes...
...Mott (Dean of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri), and Mr...
...And he is much disturbed by the disappearance of variety in the 1,754 newspapers that remain...
...He is deeply offended when those in power write their own publicity script, with B.O...
...None in the past has scalded the Chicago Tribune more than O.G.V., but he rides the Colonel now as he might a life raft, and though he forgives him nothing, adds to his account a place in history as defender of free and licensed speech...
...His profiles of Edwin L. Godkin and William Lloyd Garrison are prejudiced, for it was from these two in great measure that he drew his early and continuing passion for his profession as one of the highest responsible social and political tasks...
...O.G.V...
...Indeed, my skepticism as to everything I see in a newspaper, makes me indifferent whether I ever see one...
...Thomas Jefferson, Mr...
...O.G.V...
...will not have it that, good business man though he was, Frank Knox was fit to run a great public institution like the Chicago Daily News, nor to sit in the Cabinet, and itemizes his charges...
...Louisiana Slate University Press...
...Villard are agreed that the fate of the United States is bound up in the problem of how to obtain an enlightened body of ordinary citizens able to defend themselves against over-centralized government...
...The War" and the attitude of the press toward it is his touchstone...
...He is at his best in describing the Christian Science Monitor, which'will carry no advertisements for tea and coffee, liquors and bleaches, but has only an "academic objection" to the greatest evil on earth, to that "combination of murder, rape, and pillage...
...Canned syndicated peaches are not the same as regional home cooking...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, and writes with nostalgia of Henry Watterson and his Courier-Journal...
...And 24 years later, he was writing to Lafayette: "But the only security of all, is in a free press...
...Newspapers are an integral part of any democratic system, and a proper auxiliary to just government...
...He celebrates the St...
...There are 28 chapters, each one of them a "must" for readers in some area, who need to know who processes their news...
...He is exigent, vastly knowledgable, and passionate in his insistence that the American people examine the contemporary newspaper...
...CHAPTER after chapter, written vigorously and personally—none of your dry, unemotional presentations for O.G.V.—rolls out the portrait gallery of editors, owners, and organizations, and touches censorship here and abroad, now accusing the'press and now the Administration...
...But he knows that monopoly has nearly always presented its own answers and no others to the questions of the day...
...Long after the good fight, was won for the Free Press clause in the Bill of Rights, young Norvell received the contemptuous letter advising him to avoid the journalist's career...
...THE born journalist, the proprietor, and the citizen are mixed in him, and in all three characters for more than 40 years he has been studying, making, and criticizing the Fourth Estate in its relation to a free and humane society...
...He is always the journalist who wants to know in time, and ahead of time, when things happen and why they happen...
...and glamorous act in mind, not a command performance of factual analysis for a sovereign people...
...Some, he implies, default on the English language...
...Yet, in dissent it must be said, the columnists, unsatisfactory as they are, have yet to run their course...
...New enterprises cannot spring from the brain of Minerva, but only from the coffers of the rich: their discontent, or need to have losing propositions among their taxable assets...
...that more than 1,000 towns and cities have only one newspaper, and that in 159 large towns and cities the complete ownership of the local press is in the hands of a single man or group...
...contributes great chunks of Associated Press history—and oddly enough, is appreciative where one might have expected acidity...
...And the technical and financial problem of how a weekly like The Progressive is to grow and command the services of writers and investigators on full time assignments is yet to be solved...
...Our citizens may be deceived for- a while," wrote Thomas JefTerson to Archibald Stuart in 1799, "but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light...
...Other Jefferson statements and letters are not so sanguine...
...The agitation it produces must be submitted to...
...What Mr...
...Thomas Jefferson wanted the people to have "full information of their affairs through the channels of the public papers" and "that these papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people...
...The columnists will not care for this book...
...Reviewed by Ernestine Evans MR, MOTT'S monograph, second in a series published under the auspices of the National Research Council, should be taken as a little academic swig, before the 28-chapter meal provided by Oswald Garrison Villard...
...Standardized features bulk large and mottle the mirror held up to local communities...
...and a paragraph addressed to James Madison (1815) reads: "A truth now and then projecting into the ocean of newspaper lies, serves as a headland to correct our course...
...He discusses the relations between the President and the press, and enriches his comment with comparisons with other Presidents in other crises...
...The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed...
...There is never any indifference in Oswald Garrison Villard...
...The Disappearing Daily, a Chapter in American Newspaper Evolution takes off from the fact that whereas in 1920, there were 2,042 English language journals in the country, today there are only 1,754...
...all dry up the little river of local reportorial and editorial expression...
...In the chapters on the Marshall Field papers, on "Boston, a Journalistic Poor Farm," on "Frank Munsey, Destroyer of Dailies," in his recollections of Pulitzer and the old New York World, in his comparisons of the leadership caliber of Frank Cobb and Walter Lippmaun, he has poured out the vials of his experience...
...Nearly all of the reviews of the present book have taken exception to Villard's respect, heavily qualified as it is, for the Chicago Tribune, and have penalized him for it as if that were all there is in the book...
...Nor is there hope, he thinks, of remedying this, so long as the amount of capital required to acquire even the machinery for printing, is so great...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 37
