Newspaper Responsibility; Function of Press in Campaign Like Last One
(Continued from page 12)
Democratic paper, bang the G. O. P.; damn the radicals; curse the profiteers; excoriate the professional politicians. In short, swing all the dead lions you can find around by the tail, but if you find a real live lion, with teeth in his head and a hungry look in his eye, don't bother him; walk into your cyclone cellar and masticate the soporific slogan of M. Coue.
TIMES HAVE CHANGED
That, I believe, is the real explanation of the editorial silence in Oregon the past year. It wasn't fear, it was restraint; it wasn't pusillanimity, it was prudence. In a word, it was good business, and mixing in the mess was poor business.
I think I can see. if not a sound reason for this at least a reasonable explanation of it. Americans are prone to go to extremes. Newspaper men are not exceptions. There was a time when the newspaper man had to be a sort of ink slinging plug-ugly. A six-shooter and vial of vitriol were as necessary in the editorial sanctum as a pair of scissors and a paste pot. If the editor wasn't committing editorial assault and battery on some fellow citizen, he had to be rolling in the gutter with his competitor. The editor of the old school not only had to be fearless, he had to be fearful. To conduct his business as other men conducted theirs was to be namby-pamby.
Fortunately this primitive frontier view was finally abandoned. The newspaper man refused to degenerate into either a town bully or a village scold.
He came to take a sane business-like view of his profession and decided that he was entitled to as peaceful, self respecting a living as any one else.
This change marks a decided advance in the dignity and usefulness of the profession. But the pendulum as usual had to swing too far. From one extreme of continual scrapping, indulgence in abusive and irrelevant personalities, fighting for fighting's sake, the newspaper world as a whole finally inclined to the other extreme, scrapped its war clubs altogether, and settled down to a self-satisfied non-combative basis. The editorial thunder was stilled; the click of the cash register started to take its place.
In short, the newspaper business as a whole became less and less a profession, more and more a business; less and less cencerned with public service and more and more concerned with private profit. This applies particularly to metropolitan journalism, but the tendency has not, as I see it, been absent in the small town and rural fields.
FIGHTING EDITOR GONE
And with this transition from a profession to a business came, as a natural consequence, the decadence of the editorial.
A vital, forceful, clear-cut editorial in Oregon today is the exception. There are more syndicated editorial services being sold in this country now than ever before in history. The militant editor as a type has abdicated; the Pollyanna space-filler and the business manager are in control.
There is only one country newspaper editor in Oregon, I believe, who spends—or did spend before Uncle Sam rewarded him—his entire time writing editorials. That is considerable time. I have an idea most of us spend about half an hour, provided proof reading, writing heads and editing telegraph don't happen to interfere. But I have about come to the conclusion that that one editor is the only one who has the right idea. He takes the job seriously. Well, who will take it seriously if he doesn't? And who will say it should not be taken seriously?
The editorial is really the mind and soul of the newspaper. It is what the newspaper is. And every community
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