In order to differentiate themselves
and collect a steady public most papers have to go outside the field
of general news. They go to the dazzling levels of society, to scandal
and crime, to sports, pictures, actresses, advice to the lovelorn,
highschool notes, women's pages, buyer's pages, cooking receipts,
chess, whist, gardening, comic strips, thundering partisanship, not
because publishers and editors are interested in everything but news,
but because they have to find some way of holding on to that alleged
host of passionately interested readers, who are supposed by some
critics of the press to be clamoring for the truth and nothing but the
truth.
The newspaper editor occupies a strange position. His enterprises
depend upon indirect taxation levied by his advertisers upon his
readers; the patronage of the advertisers depends upon the editor's
skill in holding together an effective group of customers. These
customers deliver judgment according to their private experiences and
their stereotyped expectations, for in the nature of things they have
no independent knowledge of most news they read. If the judgment is
not unfavorable, the editor is at least within range of a circulation
that pays. But in order to secure that circulation, he cannot rely
wholly upon news of the greater environment. He handles that as
interestingly as he can, of course, but the quality of the general
news, especially about public affairs, is not in itself sufficient to
cause very large numbers of readers to discriminate among the dailies.
Pages:
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345