Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (107 page)

While agreeing with most journalists that people are not as much interested in the issues as they should be, one could at the same time note that neither are many journalists. One could mention that such journalists seem to have forgotten that
men, not names
alone, make news, and that men are made by the clarity with which they state issues, and the resolution with which they face them. One could express the hope that more journalists would encourage rather than avoid controversy and argument, remembering that controversy and argument are not the enemies of democracy but its friends. One could wish for fewer journalist prodigies of the well-written factual story, and more gifted talents for drawing explanations from the facts, or that working pressmen would be more creative in reporting the news, or that they would reflect less in themselves of what in this decade they have so roundly condemned in American leadership: apathy, cynicism, lukewarmness, and acceptance of the status quo about everything, from juvenile delinquency to nuclear destruction. One could pray, above all, for journalists who cared less about ideologies and more about ideas.

But such criticisms and complaints—important as they may be—cover only one area of the American press. It is, alas, a relatively small area. A large, unmeasurable percentage of the total editorial space in American newspapers is concerned not with public affairs or matters of stately importance. It is devoted instead to entertainment, titillation, amusement, voyeurism, and tripe.

The average American newspaper reader wants news, but he wants lots of things from his newspaper besides news: he wants the sports page, the comics, fashion, homemaking, advice-to-the-lovelorn, do-it-yourself psychiatry, gossip columns, medical, cooking, and decorating features, TV, movie, and theater coverage, Hollywood personality stories, Broadway and society prattle, church columns, comics, bridge columns, crossword puzzles, big-money contests. Above all, he wants news that concerns not a bit the public weal but that people just find “interesting” reading.

I confess to enjoying much of this myself. And I do not mean to suggest that every newspaper must read like the London
Times
. But the plain fact is that we are witnessing in America what Professor William Ernest Hocking and others have called the debasement of popular taste.

Is it necessary? An editor of my acquaintance was asked recently whether the new circulation rise of his increasingly wild-eyed newspaper was being achieved at the expense of good journalism. He replied, “But you don’t understand; our first journalistic need is to survive.” I submit that a survival achieved by horribly debasing the journalistic coin is short-lived. The newspaper that engages in mindless, untalented sensationalism
gets caught up in the headlong momentum it creates in its readers’ appetites. It cannot continue satisfying the voracious appetites it is building. Such journalism may suddenly burn brightly with success; but it will surely burn briefly.

We have the familiar example of television closely at hand. The American press has rightly deplored the drivel, duplicity, and demeaning programming that has marked much of television’s commercial trust. A critic, of course, need not necessarily always have clean hands. The press is right to flail what is wrong in television, just as it is obliged to recognize the great service television has provided in areas where its public affairs, news, and good programs have succeeded in adding something new and enriching to American life.

But if the press criticizes what is wrong in television without recognizing the moral for itself, it will have missed a valuable and highly visible opportunity for self-improvement.

The double charge against the American press may thus be stated: its failure to inform the public better than it does is the evasion of its responsibility; its failure to educate and elevate the public taste rather than following that taste like a blind, wallowing dinosaur is an abuse of its freedom.

In view of the river of information which flows daily from the typewriters of American correspondents at home and abroad, why are the American people not better informed? Whose fault is it? At first glance it would seem to be the fault of the publishers, and especially editors. But the publisher or editor who does not give his readers plenty of what they want is going to lose circulation to a competitor who does. Or if he has a news monopoly in his city, and feels too free to shortchange them on these things, he is going to lose circulation as his reader slack is taken up by the radio, the TV, and the magazines.

Add that even the news the reader wants in most cities, especially the smaller cities throughout the United States, is primarily local news. He remains, even as you and I, more interested in the news of his neighbors, his community, and his city than he is in the news out of Washington, Paris, or Rome.

Can we quarrel with this? We cannot. The Declaration of Independence itself set the pattern of the American way, and with it American reading habits. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were to be man’s prime and legitimate goals.

Perhaps the history of our country would have been better—and happier—if “the pursuit of truth, information, and enlightenment” had been his third great goal. But that was not the way our founding fathers saw things. And that is not the way the American public sees them now.

The fact is that while “man” is a rational animal,
all
men and
all
women are not preeminently rational, logical, and thoughtful in their approach to life. They do not thirst, above all, for knowledge and information about the great domestic and international issues, even though these issues may profoundly affect not only their pocketbooks but their very lives.

Today, as yesterday, people are primarily moved in their choice of reading by their daily emotions, their personal, immediate, existential prejudices, biases, ambitions, desires, and—as we know too well in the Freudian age—by many subconscious yearnings and desires, and irrational hates and fears.

Very well then: let us accept the fact.

Should the American press bow to it? Accept it? Cater to it? Foster it?

What else (the cynical and sophisticated will ask) is there to do?

The American press, no less than the TV and radio, is big business. It is now, as never before, a mass medium. As big business, it faces daily vast problems of costliness and competition. As a mass medium, it cannot handle these problems without seeking to satisfy the public’s feelings, desires, and wants. It publishes in the noisiest and most distracted age in our history. It seems doomed to satisfy endlessly the tastes of the nation—pluralistic, pragmatic, emotional, sensuous, and predominantly irrational. By its big-business mass media nature it seems compelled to seek ever more and more to saturate the mass markets, to soak the common-denominator reader-sponge with what it wants.

Certainly we must face this fact: if the American press, as a mass medium, has formed the minds of America, the mass has also formed the medium. There is action, reaction, and interaction going on ceaselessly between the newspaper-buying public and the editors. What is wrong with the American press is what is in part wrong with American society.

Is this, then, to exonerate the American press for its failures to give the American people more tasteful and more illuminating reading matter? Can the American press seek to be excused from responsibility for public lack of information as TV and radio often do, on the grounds that, after all, “we have to give the people what they want or we will go out of business”?

No. Not without abdicating its own American birthright, it cannot. The responsibility
is
fixed on the American press. Falling directly and clearly on publisher and editor, this responsibility is inbuilt into the freedom of the press itself. The freedom guaranteed by the Constitution under the First Amendment carries this responsibility with it.

“Freedom,” as Clemenceau said, “is nothing in the world but the opportunity for self-discipline”—that is to say, voluntarily to assume responsibility.

There are many valiant publishers, editors, and journalists in America who have made and are making courageous attempts to give readers a little more of what they should have, and a little less of what they want—or, as is more often true, what they only think they want, because they have no real knowledge of what is available to them. America owes these publishers and editors and journalists an incomparable debt of gratitude.

What is really wrong with the American press is that there are not enough such publishers and editors. There is hardly an editor in this room who could not—if he passionately would—give every day, every year, a little more honest, creative effort to his readers on the great issues which face us—the issues which, in the years to come, must spell peace or disaster for our democracy. A beginning would be to try courageously, which is to say consistently, to keep such news (however brief) on the front page, playing it in some proportion to its real importance. For a newspaper, which relegates to the back pages news which is vital to the citizenry as a whole, in favor of sensational, “circulation building” headlines about ephemeral stories of crime, lust, sex, and scandal, is actively participating in the debasement of public taste and intelligence. Such a newspaper, more especially its editor, is not only breaking faith with the highest of democratic journalism, he is betraying his nation. And, you may be surprised to hear me say, he may even be courting commercial failure.

For there is enough in American life in these exciting sixties to keep interested and absorbed many of the readers who have been written off as impossible to reach except through cheap sensationalism. The commercial challenge is not to achieve success by reaching backward into cliché-ridden ideas, stories, and situations. It is rather to recognize that uniquely now in this country there is natural and self-propelled drive toward a better life, more sustaining and relevant interests. There is, in sum, an infinity of new subjects that make exciting, inviting, and important exploration for the American press.

There can be no doubt that honorable and patriotic publishers and devoted and dedicated editors can increase little by little, in season and out, the public’s appetite for better information. There can also be no doubt that they can also decrease, little by little, in the rest of their papers the type of stories which appeals to the worst in human nature by catering to the lowest-common-denominator taste in morals and ethics.

Teddy Roosevelt once said that a good journalist should be part Saint Paul and part Saint Vitus.

A good editor today must be part Santa Claus, part Saint Valentine, part Saint Thomas (the doubter), part Saint Paul, and certainly he must
be part Saint Jude. Saint Jude, as you know, is the patron saint of those who ask for the impossible.

It is not impossible to ask that the American press begin to reverse its present trend, which Dean Ed Barrett of the Columbia School of Journalism calls “giving the public too much froth because too few want substance.” If this trend is not reversed (which it can be only by your determined effort), the American press will increasingly become the creature, rather than the creator, of man’s tastes. It will become a passive, yielding, and, curiously, an effeminate press. And twixt the ads for the newest gas range, and the firmest girdle, the cheapest vacuum cleaner, and the best buy in Easter bonnets; twixt the sports page, the fashion page, the teenage columns, the children’s comics; twixt the goo, glop, and glamour handouts on Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor, and above all twixt the headlines on the sexiest murders, and the type of political editorializing which sees the great presidential issues of the day as being between the case of the “boyish forelock” versus the “tricky ski-jump nose,” the press will lose its masculine prerogative, which is to educate, inform, engage the interest of, and guide the minds of free men and women in a great democracy.

As I know that the American Society of Newspaper Editors holds hard to the belief in masculine superiority in the realm of the intellect, and could only view with horror the picture of the fourth estate as the “kept man” of the emotional masses, I—for one—am certain this will not happen.

Let us watch then, with hope, for the signs of a new, vigorous, masculine leadership in the American press. For if you fail, must not America also fail in its great and unique mission, which is also yours: to lead the world towards life, liberty, and the pursuit of enlightenment—so that it may achieve happiness? It is that goal which the American press must seize afresh—creatively, purposefully, energetically, and with a zeal that holds a double promise: the promise of success and the promise of enlightenment.

On May 9, 1961, soon after President John F. Kennedy appointed Adlai Stevenson’s law partner, Newton Minow, to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the Chicago lawyer stunned the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in Washington with a denunciation of its stewardship of the public’s airwaves. When he was finished, a broadcaster told him, “That was the worst speech I ever heard in my whole life.” Trying to be kind, the head of the NAB, LeRoy Collins, assured the speaker, “That man has no mind of his own. He just repeats everything he hears.”

The phrase that helped make the speech memorable borrowed the title of a well-known poem by T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” punched up with a short adjective that added to the picture of desolation. Thirty years afterward, Minow told a media group, “The 1961 speech is remembered for two words—but not the two I intended to be remembered. The words we tried to advance were ‘public interest.’” In that Kennedy-era slap in the industry’s face, Minow had asked, “What do we mean by ‘the public interest’? Some say the public interest is merely what interests the public. I disagree.” Three decades later, Minow clung to his Kennedy cadences and added, “To me the public interest meant, and still means, that we should constantly ask, ‘What can television do for our country?’”