Freedom of the Press
by
[Bobbs-Merrill, $2.75]
A YOUNG Negro, on hearing the story of the farmer who, when he saw his first giraffe, said, ‘There ain’t no such animal,’remarked, ‘And there he was, looking at him all the time.’
The newspaper man, reading George Seldes’s Freedom of the Press, is in a similar unhappy position. He knows from his own experience that the American press is not the foul thing Mr. Seldes’s bill of particulars makes it appear. Yet the layman, pointing to Mr. Seldes’s evidence, can say, ‘ But there you are, looking at it all the time.’
It is unfortunate, therefore, that the book will probably influence the wrong persons. Professional critics of things as they are, academicians, educators, scientists, clergymen, and laymen generally will read it and find therein fresh inspiration for the popular practice of slamming the newspapers. The many unrepentant Bourbons among our newspaper publishers, on the other hand, will doubtless ignore it.
Mr. Seldes, who speaks with the authority of long service as reporter and foreign correspondent, is one of our modern muckrakers. As he points out, there is plenty of muck to rake. Mr. Seldes reports that throughout his newspaper career ’there was censorship, there was suppression of news, there was distortion and there was coloring of news, there was always an attempt by someone to mislead the public, and these thing I should like to explain.’ He begins with personal experiences illuminating this distortion and suppression; details endless examples of corruption coming from patent medicines, oil, the utilities, propaganda, politics, and business generally, through advertising; looks critically into the sources of our news, not sparing the Associated Press or even the New York Times; and ends by describing present efforts to free the press from the Bourbons.
While the ‘district-attorney tone’ of the book in no way invalidates the argument, it lessens its chances in quarters where it would do the most good. Nor does the book entirely live up to the intention of objective reporting announced in the beginning. The colors in which Mr. Seldes paints the American Newspaper Guild, for example, do not appear accurate to a noncombatant who attended its first national convention and who reads the Guild Reporter. Mr. Seldes quotes with approval the caustic remarks of President Roosevelt’s executive order launching the newspaper code, but neglects to add that within a week the publishers in effect made the President eat his — or rather General Johnson’s — words.
So, too, in telling the story of the famous Battle of the Free Press of 1933—1934, Mr. Seldes does not make it clear, I think, that there was fighting on two wholly different fronts which both sides did their best to confuse: one was the economic front, typified by the newsboy child-labor fracas, which revealed the Bourbons’ thirst for profits; the other was the ethical front revolving about the publishers’ demand for a free-press clause in the code, which was so obviously just that it should have been conceded by the Administration without fuss in the beginning. The rights of the famous victory depend upon which of these two fronts one happens to be discussing.
All these things should be remembered by those of Mr. Seldes’s readers who particularly enjoy spitting in the face of the press. Nevertheless those newspaper men who remain in the Fourth Estate, unattached to Bourbon or Bolshevik alike, and who are justly proud of their calling, will find in Mr. Seldes’s chamber of horrors exhibits with which they are all too familiar. It is a sorry spectacle, and a true one. One turns from it wishing that Mr. Seldes had told more of the other aspects of the press than are included in his roll of honor and his passing references throughout the book.
HERBERT BRUCKER