Editors Live and Learn

» How dependable is our press treatment of war news? Editor White finds it vastly better informed, more alert, than in the days of the First World War. T. H. Thomas (page 60) contends that overoptimism in headlines and news selection is damaging the credibility of the wartime newspaper.

by WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

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THIS spring I was one of a dozen newspapermen looking over the editorials of one hundred American newspapers. We were awarding a prize to the newspaper that had the most intelligent outlook on the world today. It was a difficult job to make that award. For all over this country newspapers, large and small, from the country weekly to the metropolitan daily, are discussing world politics with an intelligence that could not have been imagined twenty-five years ago when we entered the First World War. The intelligence of this editorial discussion is not all on one side. Isolationist editorials bolster their opinions by facts and figures that indicate a wide knowledge of the world today. Editors whose opinions have an international slant also present their case and draw their conclusions with a conception of facts and a sense of balance that only a few newspapers used in their discussions in the second decade of this century. One is amazed at the change the quarter of a century has brought in the range of information and kind of intelligence that the American press reveals in its editorial opinion today. Also the reporting is of a quality so good that it really differs not in degree but in kind from the reporting of the last World War. The American people therefore, in so far as the newspapers lead them, are under better, more dependable

leadership in the matter of foreign affairs than ever they were before.

Just now foreign affairs are major issues in American politics. But twenty-five or thirty years ago foreign affairs should have been a major issue in our politics, for we were about to enter the First World War. It was not a world war. It was a European war with certain African and Asiatic annexes, sideshows, and minor commitments. But the so-called First World War did mark our country’s complete abandonment of isolation. We had turned our backs slightly on isolation when we conquered the Philippines and took over Puerto Rico and Guam and Midway and Marshall Islands. Then we were only standing sideways and looking askance at isolation. We tried to go completely isolationist by rejecting the adoption of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The events of the twenties made it clear to most men that when we rejected the Covenant of the League of Nations we did not isolate ourselves. We merely curtailed our power and still remained, because we were the world’s creditor, in the midst of the international brawling.

The American press began to understand the truth about our international involvement when we found ourselves lending billions to build up Germany, to bolster Continental credit, and to support the British pound. When Britain went off the gold standard, the American press received a major shock. Editors, who ten years before had been clamoring for isolation, were writing able editorials about our new creditor position and our new duties. Fumblingly, blindly, the American newspapers groped their way to the truth: that in a world shrunk by the airplane, the radio, the longdistance telephone, the five-day liner to Europe, and by the solidarity of world credit, centering not in London but in Wall Street, economic isolation is merely a demagogue’s phrase full of sound and fury but ending in nothing.

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I can no better illustrate what has happened to the American press than by a short reminiscence. I was one of the reporters who covered the Peace Conference in Paris which made the Versailles Treaty and wrote the Covenant of the League of Nations. I filed three days a week a cable story to fifty American newspapers, gathered together by a powerful syndicate in New York. In Paris I was one of nearly a hundred American reporters. Some of them filed daily stories by cable, some filed three a week as I did, some sent two a week, others filed weekly. But all of us were busy. All of us were well-trained newspapermen.

We had as our interpreter Ray Stannard Baker, who saw President Wilson every day. Press conferences were held by Colonel House with those who filed daily cables. We all went to press conferences held by the British, two or three times a week. We met Lord Robert Cecil, Lloyd George, Philip Kerr, and others who were close to the British end of the story. We also had access to the French. They entertained us with their most adroit and obvious liars, and nobody believed anything he heard at a French press conference. Every American reporter who used the cable had access to some person on the American delegation who was fairly close to President Wilson. For instance, I often walked in the afternoon with Colonel House, along the Seine, when we would talk over the day’s doings. I should have been informed. Ray Stannard Baker was my dear friend. We lived at the same hotel, ate breakfast together, and loafed and talked together. He was not reserved. Arthur Krock, of the New York Times, was then in Paris for the New York World. He had a better “leak” than I had, and should have been able to report the story of the Treaty and the Covenant as it was formed.

Yet, while each of us reported the facts of the conference from day to day, we all missed the truth. Only one man in the American reportorial galaxy gave the world the truth, though I am sure we all honestly tried. But Frank Simonds had been through the war, at the front. He knew the French. He knew European politics. One day he wired his papers: —

“The Versailles treaty is wrecked. The League of Nations is doomed!”

I remember now that we all wrangled with him about it — we reporters who met around the Hotel Crillon. But he held his ground. He told us that when it was decided — as we knew that it was decided—to get along without a military arm of the League, that organization would fail by the domination of the British-French alliance; and when they decided to keep Russia and Germany out of the League, it was obvious that the Peace Treaty, quite apart from the Covenant of the League, was merely an attempt at balance-of-power politics. Looking back twentyfive years, it seems obvious. Yet none of us believed it then.

Not that we hailed the League of Nations as the political savior of Western civilization. Reportorial opinion was fairly well divided about it among the correspondents at Paris who were reporting the news that year to the United States. But we just did not know — none of us except Frank Simonds and possibly Oswald Garrison Villard and Lewis Gannett—what was going on in the larger sense. We could report the facts but we could not correlate the facts so that we could come at the truth and tell it.

But President Wilson did not know the truth, all of it. For he was a newcomer in European politics. He had to feel his way. He made certain compromises. Any man in the democratic process must make compromises. But the compromises Mr. Wilson made were not vital compromises. Nevertheless, when the American press told the people about these compromises, his enemies in the United States said: —

“Aha, the British are fooling him. The French are cheating him!”

Which was not true. President Wilson did his best — his honest, his very human best. And he made a good start down the path to world political unity. As a matter of fact, he made too much of political unity and did not provide for enough opportunity to establish economic unity.

So when we all came home from Paris, we news gatherers, with the government’s economic, political, social, geographical experts and other four-eyed cattle, we found the country rising in wrath against the Treaty and the League. The funny part, looking back over those years, was that people were wrathy at Wilson and the League for the wrong things. One real weakness of the League was its lack of power to discipline recalcitrant members. Yet its enemies read into the League Covenant gnashing, flashing teeth which gleamed in fancy like those in the mouth of a tiger. As a matter of fact, America was fooled out of the League by a set of rubber teeth that didn’t and couldn’t chew anything.

Editorials on the League question in the United States were sadly uninformed. Newspaper editorial writers, who on the whole represent the best elements of the American popular mind, just didn’t grasp the real truth. And newspaper leadership failed. It failed because, even though it had the facts, it could not disseminate the truth. The threatening specter of those rubber teeth was too horrendous for American newspapers.

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Today it is different. No one can know or remotely guess what kind of treaties will follow the peace. No one can say what our attitude will be toward any treaty. Of course the isolationist group will demand that we pull out of Europe, skedaddle from Asia, ignore Africa, and hide behind a skyscraping tariff wall either at home or around this hemisphere. Others — international group — will want a “union now” with England, and still others will stand with Mr. Hoover, who, as I read his recent book, believes in a cooling-off period of two years after the surrender of the Nazis and the Japanese — a cooling-off period in which the victorious Allies will make temporary boundaries and regional divisions of the world and police them while the conquered people set up such forms of democratic government as each region is capable of maintaining. After that, the Hoover plan — again as I read it in his book — is for the establishment of a place of conciliation and arbitration where economic wrongs, chiefly regional, may be set right — and after that, with God be the rest!

These and probably other plausible prospectuses for peace will be discussed at whatever peace table is established. The conclusion of the whole business will be submitted to the voters of the United States. Naturally, debate will follow — probably furious debate, acrimonious, maybe savage. For the United States cannot walk out into this world leadership without some sacrifice. It is a question whether or not the sacrifice will be greater if we try to lead the world than it will be if we attempt to isolate ourselves and ignore the world. There is the cud for our national ruminations. But the hopeful thing about the whole business is the broader intelligence the citizens of our Republic have about European affairs than they had in 1919. The American press with all its faults — such obvious shortcomings — is still a free press.

Of course, in the debate that will follow this armistice, American newspapers will take a leading part. They have lost none of their real power and dignity as leaders, however citizens may differ with the press at election time. An election is only one of the many weapons of democracy. An election is only one of a large number of ways in which public sentiment registers itself. The newspapers were not able to defeat Franklin Roosevelt for a third term. Yet in matters of domestic policy he has not always had his way with his countrymen. In the home field, newspaper opposition has curbed Mr. Roosevelt time and again. Newspaper leadership has rallied popular opinion in the recent sixteen months, influencing the Congress rather definitely away from the course in domestic affairs laid down by their elected leaders. Moreover, newspaper opinion has been on the whole with the President in the realm of his foreign policy.

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I must not close this article leaving the reader with the impression that, because I believe that in this particular phase of American journalism the newspaper editorial writers have been fair and wise, I therefore believe American journalism is flawless. It has many weaknesses. Indeed I think it may fairly be said that the faults of journalism in the United States are the faults of the citizens thereof.

We the newspapers and we the people, the middle-class vocal section of our Republic, the leaders, are too keenly sensitive about the rights of an invested dollar. Perhaps that dollar has been invested with real social sensibility. Perhaps that dollar has been invested with cupidity and has been accumulated by questionable social practices even though those practices are legal. The American people and the American press are too likely to say “Board’s a play!” and let it go at that. The public and journalism in this country follow too blindly what might be called country club and chamber of commerce leadership, which is good at times and in spots, but not sacrosanct because it is not infallible.

However, in the matter of foreign policy, the country club and chamber of commerce ownership of at least the metropolitan press allows the editorial writer, or the group that controls the editorial page, and to an extent the newsroom, considerable leeway in reporting and discussing foreign affairs. The average American owner and publisher is a property-minded man. But it reflects great credit upon him at the country club and in the chamber of commerce if his pals and acquaintances compliment him for the intelligence of his editorial policy. And because there is more agreement about our foreign policy just now than about any other question before the house, the publisher is likely to hear kindly things about the editorial attitude of his paper on foreign affairs eit her on the isolationist or the international side of the pending question. Naturally the publisher, who often knows little and cares less about matters outside of the business office of his newspaper, feels the same warm glow around his heart when he hears his editors praised that he would feel if his horse won the regional Derby or Preakness prize, or if the old bull, the leader of his herd at his country place had come home with blue ribbons from the State Fair. So those in charge of the editorial page have much more freedom in discussing foreign policy — or have had — than they have in matters of domestic concern.

It is much easier for an editorial writer, for instance, to denounce Hitler or the Japanese than it is for the editorial writer to denounce either the policy of the CIO or the attitude of the National Manufacturers Association. At the country club and in the chamber of commerce, organized labor and organized capital are extremely hot potatoes. There, in the area of economic and industrial controversies, the men who play around with the publishers have views, definite views, even fighting prejudices. So the editorial writers on a considerable proportion, if not a majority, of the daily newspapers in the United States are often, though not always, channeled in their thinking and their writing. It is not, as the public presumes, that the advertisers control the press. Rather the men who own the stock and/or bonds of stores or industrial concerns which advertise, and their bankers and their elderly chairmen of the many industrial boards, form a pool of local public opinion in which the publisher moves, breathes, and disports himself with the other upper-middle-class porpoises. And despite even that atmosphere American newspaper readers one way or another, through their newspapers, do finally get the truth even about controversial industrial matters — strikes for instance, labor arbitration, and other affairs of current interest along the front of our national economic battle line.

My contention in this article is that, despite the handicap which our press has in printing and commenting freely upon controversial domestic matters, in the foreign field during the last ten years the people have had as much of the truth as much of the time as they could take. For, after all, truth is a medicine which must be administered in broken doses — homeopathic doses.

So I feel justified in venturing a guess that, when it comes to discussing the peace treaty, American newspapers will not be without influence. The precious thing is that this time they will not be without knowledge, without some sense of the fundamental verities in the world situation. The best proof that we are going straight as we follow the path of our international opportunity is that the American newspapers today, their editors-in-chief, the editorial writers, the managing editors, the Washington reporters, their foreign correspondents, the columnists, all big ones and little ones, as a whole understand the world situation. They have had a quarter of a century of education.

As I read those editorials submitted for a national editorial prize, I was greatly heartened by what I read. Arthur Krock, sitting beside me as we had often sat side by side trying rather vainly to tell the truth at Paris in 1918, looked over those editorials of 1942 and remarked, as I had, the change, the enlightened change, that has come into the American press when it discusses world affairs. I doubt that the people of our country will ever be fooled again by a league with rubber teeth.