Slanting the News

by MICHAEL BRADSHAW

1

IN summing up the results of an informal poll of newspaper readers on the freedom of the press, conducted recently by a group of editors, the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors quoted a number of typical answers to show that the public is hopelessly confused about the subject.

A bartender said, “It [a free press] is the most, damn vital thing in our whole setup, I don’t think there is anything more valuable to pure democracy.” A banker said, “I don’t understand so much talk about freedom of the press. The papers seem to print anything they want to but certain war news.” A broker said, “Some newspapers seem to get license and free speech all mixed up. I think a certain kind of freedom should be limited.” A restaurant owner said, “Sure it would be nice to have — but you don’t have it.”

It all seemed very confusing — so confusing that the editors of the Bulletin asked, “Is it just possible that editors, fully aware of their obligation to protect the constitutional guarantee [of a free press], have failed in the corollary task of enlightening and educating the public on the subject?”

But the confusion was only confounded when the American Society of Newspaper Editors met in Washington a few weeks later and the members themselves got to talking about a free press. David Lawrence, editor of the United States News, proposed a new constitutional amendment to protect the freedom of the press, because “in almost every case in which the First Amendment was invoked as a protection in recent years against labor legislation, for example, the decision has invariably been against the validity of such a contention.” Erwin D. Canham of the Christian Science Monitor, on the other hand, asserted that whether the press remains free depends on the newspapers themselves. And when the society voted on a resolution declaring that “the enforced ‘maintenance of membership’ clause in labor union contracts applying to news and editorial employees is . . . repugnant to a basic principle of free American journalism,” it was sustained only by the very close vote of 48 to 47.

This division would seem to indicate that the editors of our newspapers are as confused about what a free press means as their readers, but that is not necessarily the case. To underst and that vote, one must review the controversy of recent years and see what all the tumult and the shouting is about.

Back in the early days of the New Deal, when the National Recovery Act was the chief bone of public contention, the American Newspaper Publishers Association sent Elisha Hanson, its chief counsel, before the Supreme Court. He was to try to give the Jeffersonian Bill of Rights a Hamiltonian twist by contending that the First Amendment to the Constitution gives newspaper owners the right to work their employees longer than other workers and pay them less. Undeterred by one rebuff, Mr. Hanson has been trotting back t here ever since to argue that what may be fair and reasonable and lawful for others should never be applied to men engaged in newspaper work, either as employer or as employee.

Though Jehovah’s Witnesses have had considerably more success in arguing the cause of a free press before the Supreme Court than Air. Hanson, who never manages to get to first base, he continues to collect his fees from those publishers who accept his contention that the freedom of the press is supposed to be an extra drawer in their cash registers. Led by him, they have been howling to high heaven that the country is going to the dogs, and the free press is going out the window, simply because they have to comply with the Wage and Hour Law and bargain collectively with their employees, the same as anybody else.

There are some notable exceptions, to be sure — usually among publishers who spend as much time in t he editorial room as they do in the business office. But just as it is hard for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, so is it difficult for a publisher to contemplate that free-press clause without trying to collect on it. President Lynwood I, Noyes opened the last convention of the American Newspaper Publishers Association by calling upon the publishers to keep uppermost in mind their responsibility as the guardians of our constitutional liberties, and ended by denouncing a ruling of the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, which held that editorial workers are entitled to overtime pay, too. As long as high ideals are put on a dollars and cents basis, it’s fairly simple to figure out what a man has uppermost in his mind.

On the other side of the fence, the American Newspaper Guild has contributed to the confusion by trying to create the impression that a free press should mean more money for less work. While it remained a craft union of editorial workers, the Guild held aloft the traditions of the profession, even if it didn’t get many contracts for its members. But when it swung over to the CIO and set out to round up the workers in other departments of the newspaper, it began to fight fire with fire and lost that objectivity which is essential to good reporting. Whatever their justification, too many newspapermen have hit below the belt by smearing their papers with false charges which they never would have made if they had had to submit their copy to a self-respecting city editor. Our newspapers may be bad enough, but with a few notorious exceptions they are models of truth, fairness, and decency, compared with most of our labor papers.

Between the cry of “ Wolf! Wolf! ” on the part of the publishers, and “Shame! Shame!” on the part of the Guild, the free press has been discredited most by those who have the greatest stake in preserving it. Perhaps that is why 47 of the editors, on the border line between employer and employee, opposed that resolution, passed by the 48, declaring that a maintenance of membership clause is “ repugnant to a basic principle of free American journalism.” At a time when men are fighting and dying for democratic principles, they may be getting tired of a sham battle. They know perfectly well that the freedom of the press has been used so often as a smoke screen to mask economic selfishness that a basic right of free people is being worn threadbare.

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THE reading public, of course, are not interested in a clash inside the newspaper office. It concerns them only as it confirms the opinion of those who say they can’t believe what they read in the newspapers. “The big fellow’s tell the papers what they want them to know,” said a police officer in the poll mentioned earlier. “Must be rich to get a square deal from newspapers,” said a soldier. “You know dam well that they’s a bunch of guys who tell all these papers what to print,” said a punch press operator. How much truth is there in these views held by 26 per cent of the persons interviewed?

As every newspaperman knows, there is more than almost any publisher will admit. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. They may not know’ what went on at Teheran, but some of them will know what actually happened on the picket line, or in the accident, or at the city hall. And when they see the story played up or played down in the paper, presented fairly or slanted, they can figure out what went on in the newspaper office.

On my first newspaper, for instance, I was city editor when we had trouble with the mayor’s wife. She was a temperamental woman; and when the automobile she was driving collided with another car, she drove away in a huff without stopping to give her name as required by law. But someone got her number, reported it to the police, and we printed the story in our morning paper.

The next day, the afternoon newspaper owned by the same company published an entirely different version of the same trivial accident, omitting the fact that the mayor’s wife had driven off without stopping. After our morning staff reported for work, who should walk into the city room and go into a huddle with the police reporter but the publisher. Naturally we listened as he tried to explain the story to the reporter who had covered it. He wanted a little correction run the next morning, saying that the mayor’s wife hadn’t driven off. “But how can I say she didn’t when she did?” the reporter asked as innocently as you please. To give the publisher due credit, he did, on that occasion, have the grace to blush and walk back into his counting office.

Another time, after the war had brought a horde of new workers to an industrial city in Ohio, our paper planned a series of stories showing how overcrowded housing conditions had created a serious health problem. We had a string of pictures of houses in which twenty, thirty, or forty persons lived, and we actually published one or two of them before a delegation from the real-estate board called on us. The most outspoken delegate said frankly that, if we published any more of the pictures, he thought the real-estate board ought to boycott our advertising columns; the others talked mostly about what a reflection they were on our beautiful city. And, for one reason or the other, we cut our exposure of deplorable conditions very, very short.

On the same paper, in 1940, it was decided that the Gallup Poll was showing too much strength for President Roosevelt. Forthwith, we subscribed to another poll, whose name I have forgotten. (It was that sort of poll.) All went moderately well for a time, because the figures were rather hazy and could be interpreted in any way one chose. But a day or two before the election, the thing went haywire. The poll-taker came out with the flat prediction that Mr. Roosevelt would be re-elected, which wasn’t what he was hired to do at all. Just to show him what was what, our editor dropped his poll and his prediction in the wastebasket. But after Mr. Roosevelt was re-elected, we actually ran the postmortem of our poll-taker, recounting how he had picked the winner — and left it up to our readers to figure out why they never saw his final prediction.

Or take the time the publisher handed me an editorial clipped from the Hearst papers, denouncing grade labeling as Communistic, and suggested that we run a piece along the same line. I was leaving that paper as soon as I could, anyway, so I wrote him his editorial with my tongue in my cheek. Using the same flimsy argument Hearst had used, and some of the same bombastic language, I even acknowledged the source of the quotations. When the editorial appeared in our paper, the quotation marks were still there but the Hearst name had been deleted. Either the publisher or the editor was quite willing to crib from the Hearst press, but he was evidently ashamed to have our readers know what we were doing.

Such stories could go on endlessly, and any newspaperman could add his own, but they give a onesided picture of a newspaper office. My second newspaper happened to be Josephus Daniels’s News and Observer, which is deservedly called “the Old Reliable” because it prints the news without fear or favor. I had been on its state desk only a few nights — having moved from a paper which didn’t like a strike story cluttered up with unnecessary facts — when a man called up from a near-by town to say that he had a real news story which his hometown paper wouldn’t print, and that if we would print it he would buy a thousand copies of our paper. Being new on the job, I asked the city editor about it. “If it’s news,” he said, “we’ll run it because it is news. If it isn’t, we won’t.” While I was there, that’s how the News and Observer was run. From what I heard, that’s the way it has always been run.

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WHEN I went to Danville, Virginia, as editor of the Register, I agreed absolutely with Paul Bellamy, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who said recently, “Almost every schoolboy knows what freedom of the press is, and almost everyone knows when it is being kicked around.” The only trouble is that too many schoolboys who know what freedom of the press Is when they go to work on newspapers get kicked around quite a bit before they become “experienced ” newspapermen.

But that was to come later. “If it’s news, print if; if it isn’t, don’t,” was the way I started out in Danville; and as long as Buddy James, the owner of the paper, lived, we ran it that way. When the CIO moved into that cotton-mill town, back in 1937, we ran the story as the second lead on our front page. It was live news, it was hot news, but it was not exclusive news because it circulated by word of mouth as soon as the sign went up in a Main Street office building.

Everybody was talking about it, so why shouldn’t we handle it just as we would any other story of intense public interest? We did, and followed it up with a lead editorial saying that if the workers wanted to join the union they had a legal right to, and that if they didn’t want to they didn’t have to, which is how I interpreted the Wagner Act until the N LRB and the WLB gave it a meaning of their own. Still having a schoolboy’s faith in the freedom of the press, I didn’t dream that we were doing what probably no other newspaper in the country would have done — handling that sort of story as straight and locally important news. But we didn’t lose a line of advertising and, naturally, we attracted readers.

It was in Danville that the owner of the secondlargest department store learned the difference between news and advertising. He called up one night to raise hell because the afternoon paper, owned by the same company, had printed a story about a refrigerator which blew up and injured a customer. “What was wrong with it?” I asked, wanting to make sure we got the facts straight in our own story the next morning. “None of your- business,” he stormed. “I don’t want to see another word about it.” But without bothering to call up the publisher or the advertising manager, we ran a story telling exactly what had happened, and that, as the expression goes, was that.

After Buddy James died, and a bank took over the paper, and I was fired for printing a story which told how a cop beat up a moronic kid (our lawyer said he never liked to plead the truth in a libel action, and he was probably the best judge of his own abilities), that advertising manager, who sometimes viewed with alarm such goings-on, admitted that the simple policy of printing the news had done the paper more good — from his strictly financial point of view—than all the truckling he had ever seen.

At a time when the American people are internationally-minded, these incidents picked at random from everyday newspaper life may appear to be pretty small potatoes in a discussion of one of the Four Freedoms. One of our more inspiring wartime slogans has been “Freedom Is Made Up of Simple Things.” That holds true for the freedom of the press. Newspaper readers don’t care particularly whether the first news of a Cairo conference is broken by Reuters or the Associated Press, and they will accept without much question the dispatches telling what happened at Casablanca, Moscow, and Teheran. But when it comes to what happened in their back yard, that is different. They have a pretty good idea of what is going on in their home town; and if a newspaper suppresses or distorts or slants such news, they don’t have to see the public relations director of a corporation sitting in the editor’s chair censoring a strike story to know that there’s dirty work afoot.

If the freedom of the press is in any danger in this country today, the menace lies in the fact that our newspapers have lost the confidence of their readers through such tactics as I have described here in the briefest detail. Much has been said lately about the threat of bureaucratic control, but only once in my twelve years on a half-dozen newspapers have I known government officials to try to interfere with the handling of the news. That was early in the war when the Dayton Herald exposed abominable inefficiency at Wright Field. The commanding general protested, and the FBI wanted to know where we got our information. Both shut up promptly when we cited an Ohio statute which protects the sources of newspaper information.

On the other hand, half of the publishers I’ve worked for were more inclined to test a ticklish story by asking “Should we print it?” than by asking “Is it true?” And don’t think for one moment that the readers don’t know it when they are being spoon-fed by men who set themselves up as judges of what the public is entitled to know.

Although the power of the press has been abused by men who think their ownership of newspapers gives them the right to manipulate the news to their own advantage, and the freedom of the press has been defamed by men who would turn it into a special economic privilege, the American people still believe in a free press. They have to, of course, because they believe in democracy. The one is dependent on the other. But more than that, they realize that it takes all kinds of newspapers, as well as people, to make a world. Some newspapers have betrayed their trust. More have played it safe. Others have redeemed the lot of them by serving the public interest as a newspaper can do when it throw’s the spotlight of truth on the ways of the world.

As Mr. Canham said, whether the press remains free depends on the newspapers themselves. In the final analysis, the Bill of Rights, which guarantees a free press, means only what the American people want it to mean. Under democracy, public opinion, though it may be hedged about with legal barriers, remains the court of final resort . If our newspapers can’t hold their own in that forum, which they are supposed to dominate, then something is radically wrong with their case or their presentation of it. It is up to them, not their lawyers, to find out what the trouble is and to do something about it.

In Sydney, Australia, all four daily newspapers were suspended some weeks ago by the Alinister of Information for violating a censorship order they considered outrageous. All one day the city went without its newspapers. Whereupon a great crowd of citizens, led by university students, marched through the streets to the newspaper offices, shouting, “Down with tyranny. Give us back democracy.” The next day the courts stepped in, the Minister of Information backed down, and the newspapers were published.

If, by any chance, anything of that sort were ever attempted in this country, our newspapers, loo, would have to look beyond the courts, and the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, to the support of the American people. In that dire event, it might not be a bad idea for the people to emulate the Parable of the Talents, restoring freedom tenfold to those newspapers which have used it wisely, and taking it away from those which buried it.