THE NEWSPAPER, THE PARTY AND THE PEOPLE
By BOB SWAYZE
Copy Editor, Oregon Journal
[Mr. Swayze writes from the point of view gained in more than twenty years’ work on newspapers, large and small, in various parts of the country. He knows newspaper work from both the reporter’s and the editor’s particular slant—if there is any difference—and he has here analyzed the findings of his years of observation, so far as they affect the relation of the hard-shelled party newspaper to the people. Not every newspaperman will agree with Mr. Swayze’s opinion in toto; but perhaps most of them have done some thinking along the same line as he.]
LET this article begin with a flat statement, which it shall be my purpose to attempt to prove. That statement is this: During twenty years of
an active career in the newspaper field the thing which impresses me most is the tremendous loss of respect which the party newspaper has suffered in its
standing with the public.
I have seen this feeling grow from incipient doubt and through later indifference up to its present state of an utter lack of confidence—a state approximating secret and silent contempt and satirically expressed in the stinging phrase, “just newspaper talk.”
Twenty years ago that term was never heard. Today it is a tenant of almost every tongue, and is shamefully reflected in the party newspaper’s inability to influence public opinion. We newspaper men do not like to make the admission, but the bare, cold fact stares at us, nevertheless, that the influence of the press has come to be so negligible that it carries little or no weight with the thinking populace.
Touch With People Lost
Bond elections, legislation and office-seekers are not nowadays, as they used to be, swept into official acceptance by the bellicose thunderings of a party organ, but by the psychology of the multitude—a nebulous but none the less powerful factor which permeates, creates and guides modern thought despite flippant and superficial currents on the surface.
Because of its total blindness to the larger and more permanent virtues as distinguished from its full-eyed recognition of partisan issues and fleeting shibboleths, the press has lost communion with the spirit of most of the people. It is still a sort of “holy writ” for the subnormal, or illiterate poor, who do not and can not think, and the super-normal, or overly rich, who do not wish to be bothered with the luxury of thinking for themselves. But with the vast multitude between these two classes—a multitude which is at once the bulwark of the government and the mainstay of civilization—it has degenerated into an object of mere curiosity, to be picked up frivolously and as often thrown down in sickened disgust.
Let a few incidents be cited to prove the opening statement in this article.
When the Papers Failed
The first incident goes back to 1910, I believe, when Miles Poindexter was a candidate for United States senator from Washington. He was then labeled a “Progressive Republican.” His opponents were John L. Wilson, a former United States Senator, and Thomas Burke, a wealthy and distinguished lawyer of Seattle. Both were Republican stand-patters of the standpattest variety. Wil-
