Dollarocracy (32 page)

The political and media landscape began to change in the final third of the nineteenth century, in the era following the Civil War that saw the rise of manufacturing and the transition of America from an agrarian economy to the industrial economy that would characterize much of the twentieth century. The population exploded, cities grew from outposts to metropolitan centers, advertising rapidly became a major economic force, and printing costs plummeted; newspapers truly became a ubiquitous mass medium. Printing subsidies ended, and postal subsidies became far less important as daily newspapers were distributed increasingly by their own circulation networks. This was an extraordinarily competitive market—with new entrants routinely appearing, other papers falling by the wayside, and chain ownership being all but nonexistent—typified by numerous daily newspapers in any cities of consequence and often ten or more daily newspapers in major cities. Newspaper publishing was booming and in the process becoming very lucrative.

Newspaper journalism in this period remained stridently partisan, and all newspapers were identified by party affiliation. Election coverage would invariably focus almost exclusively on the party's candidates and neglect altogether the opposition. To some extent, the partisan status was a carryover from earlier years, and Americans expected their newspapers to be active political agents. In the late nineteenth century, most Americans explicitly identified with a specific political party. As Kaplan put it, in this period “partisan identification was so pervasive that political independents were likened to some impossible third sex, a hermaphrodite species.”
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Newspapers needed to do the same to attract readers. Moreover, in markets where no newspaper had more than a sliver of the total population, each newspaper was wise to distinguish itself by adopting a partisan stance. Newspapers played a critical role in maintaining and even extending the high voter turnout rates until the end of the nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, 78.5 percent of eligible voters participated in presidential elections, 84 percent if the South is excluded. In 1896, arguably the most sharply defined election in American history because of the brief Populist takeover of the Democratic Party's national ticket under William Jennings Bryan, fully 95 percent of Michigan's eligible voters went to the polls.
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Beneath the surface, however, important changes in American politics and journalism were taking place that would undermine partisan journalism and eventually turn the news on its head. By the 1870s and 1880s, the two main parties had dropped their relatively strong and distinct ideological identities and become increasingly amorphous. Much as C. B. Macpherson argued, this was accompanied by both parties being increasingly comfortable with the big business domination of the emerging industrial political economy. Much of the distinction between the parties was geographical, traditional, ethnic, and familial—much like the religion a person inherited—but the parties hardly took consistent and sharply defined antagonistic positions on the central issues of the day.

This was a period marked by growing inequality and levels of corruption comparable to what the United States is experiencing today. Consequently, the new pressure in American politics in this period and going forward came primarily from social movements, such as the Populists, the labor movement, suffragists, and the Progressive movement, that existed outside the two entrenched
parties, which pretty much had a lock on the electoral system. In the case of the Progressives, they infiltrated each of the parties, depending upon geographical location. These movements got short shrift in the daily newspaper press, and they relied as much as possible on their own newspapers and magazines to make their cases. The postal subsidies proved essential for their survival, especially as the emerging advertising-based newspaper economics was hardly conducive to anticorporate and prolabor politics.

At the same time, daily newspaper publishers began to emphasize nonpartisan political news, and so the percentage of the stories outside of editorials that could be considered explicitly partisan fell sharply. In the late nineteenth century, newspapers still rallied the troops for elections, but the intervening political coverage diminished, to be replaced by nonpolitical news. The sort of policy coverage that had been routine through midcentury fell by the wayside. “The reading public had become relevant only as the voting public, and not as a participant in political opinion formation,” Kaplan noted. “Into this gap between party and public, corporate interests were able to enter and exercise their influence over governmental decision-making.”
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In some cases, profit-hungry publishers found that sensationalism, what came to be called “yellow journalism,” was a lucrative course. Bribery of journalists, favoritism toward advertisers, and assorted unethical practices were not uncommon. Most importantly, by the 1890s newspaper markets began to shift from being competitive to being oligopolistic, even monopolistic, markets. Although revenues and population continued to increase sharply, the overall number of newspapers began to stagnate and then fall. “The stronger papers are becoming stronger and the weaker papers are having a hard time to exist,” one newspaper executive observed in 1902.
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Newspapers began to serve a larger and larger portion of their community's population—with much less fear of new competition than had been the case—and had considerable power as a result.

In addition, the great chains of Pulitzer, Hearst, and Scripps were being formed almost overnight. The new publishing giants no longer had any need to be closely tied to political parties; in fact as local newspapers grew more monopolistic, partisanship could antagonize part of the market and undermine their commercial prospects. Yet many publishers continued to use their now-monopolistic power to advocate for their political viewpoints, which were
generally conservative, probusiness, and antilabor.
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The great progressive Robert La Follette devoted a chapter of his book on political philosophy to the crisis of the press. “Money power,” he wrote, “controls the newspaper press . . . wherever news items bear in any way upon the control of government by business, the news is colored.”
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La Follette argued:

           
Except for the subserviency of most of the metropolitan newspapers, the great corporate interests would never have ventured into the impudent, lawless consolidation of business, for the suppression of competition, the control of markets, production and prices.

                
Except for this monstrous crime, 65 percent of all the wealth of this country would not now be centralized in the hands of two percent of all the people. And we might today be industrially and commercially a free people, enjoying the blessings of a real democracy.
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So frustrated was La Follette that he forged his own publication, initially
La Follette's Weekly
, now
The Progressive
, with the stated purpose of “winning back for the people the complete power over government—national, state, and municipal—which has been lost to them.”
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La Follette and his kind were raging against the dying of the light, and they would fight with some success during what was known as the Progressive Era. But the forces arrayed against them were more financially powerful and more determined to consolidate the power of the press for the purpose of consolidating the power of the economy in the service of what would come in 2011 and 2012 to be known as “the 1 Percent.”

The reshaping of American journalism as a steady defender of a corporate-defined and -dominated status quo did not happen immediately. These changes never play out with that sort of precision. But the arc of history was bending in the direction La Follette and other Progressives feared, toward a place where the press was no longer inclined to attack the politically and economically powerful with the “merciless severity” that Teddy Roosevelt declared in 1906 to be an “urgent necessity.”
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A crisis in journalism lasted from the 1890s until the 1920s. Party-driven journalism had disintegrated, the increasingly lucrative and powerful newspaper
magnates ruled their independent empires and exercised considerable political power, and the pursuit of profit sometimes led to an incredible, even appalling, journalism. Mounting public anger and dissatisfaction with the journalism of this era produced what became the first great existential crisis for journalism.
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The problem at its core was that a relatively small number of very powerful newspaper owners dominated their communities and states, and a handful of them had national empires. Market economics was pushing toward more concentration and ever less competition. As even the publisher of the Scripps-owned
Detroit News
argued, in private, in 1913, the corrosive influence of commercial ownership and the pursuit of profit were such that the rational democratic solution would be to have municipal ownership of newspapers.
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In view of the explicitly political nature of newspapers in American history, this was not as absurd a notion as it may appear today. Scripps, always the most working-class-oriented of the major chains, even launched an ad-less daily newspaper in the 1910s, because it saw how commercialism undermined the integrity of the news.
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By 1912, three of the four candidates for president—Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eugene Debs, all but President William Howard Taft—made the irresponsibility and corruption of the daily press a theme of their campaigns. The world of newspapers had turned upside down in three decades.

The major newspaper owners were able to repel any serious threat to their survival, and to do so, they promoted a new sense of journalism, one that saw the press as independent of politics, neutral in stance, and there to provide the facts necessary for citizens to understand the world and participate effectively as citizens. Put crudely, publishers gave up their direct personal control over news content that had been the hallmark of American journalism to create a product that would have legitimacy and allow the increasingly monopolistic commercial system, already generating lovely profits, to remain in place. The more visionary owners, like Joseph Pulitzer, argued that journalists needed to be educated at universities, and that there needed to be a “Chinese Wall” between the newsroom and the business offices. In this way, readers could trust that they were getting straight news that was not playing favorites for owners, advertisers, politicians, or the editors and reporters themselves. There were no schools of journalism in 1900; by the 1920s nearly all of the major schools had been established across the nation. In 1922, the American Society
of Newspaper Editors was established and formally adopted its professional code of ethics for reporters forthwith.

For press owners, professionalism was the solution to their problem. As Edward Scripps explained it, once readers “did not care what the editor's views were . . . when it came to news one paper was as good as a dozen.”
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If trained journalists were striving to present an objective report, monopoly would no longer be a pressing concern. Moreover, all attention to understanding news coverage would focus on editors and reporters as the decisive players; publishers and advertisers would drift into the background. This was a striking shift in American journalism. For the first century of the Republic, the vast majority of papers were owned and edited by the same person and the newspaper reflected the owner's partisan viewpoint. Knowing the owner meant knowing the paper.

Americans today often regard independent, nonpartisan, factually accurate reporting conducted by commercial enterprises as the ideal form of democratic journalism, for understandable reasons. But accomplishing such a system without having significant problems proved to be impossible. Scarce resources needed to be deployed, and some topics would therefore receive coverage and others would not. There was no neutral value-free code or algorithm that could make that decision; it would, in the end, be determined by values. And the process of generating professional journalism was done under commercial auspices, where the commitment to professional standards was tempered by commercial considerations. This is not to say that some forms of news cannot be more neutral than others, only that all news has a set of values and assumptions that drive it and determine the broad contours of what is covered, how it is covered, and what is not covered.

The values that would drive professional journalism were determined and occasionally fought over by publishers, editors, and journalists for the first half of the twentieth century. There was a strong reform impulse, attached to the Progressive Era and muckraking, which believed journalism should “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” This was nonpartisan journalism, and it held politicians of all parties to the same standard, but it was hardly value free. This type of journalism was embraced by the Newspaper Guild (the union for reporters) when it was founded in the 1930s. To protect the integrity of the news, leading elements of the guild wanted to effectively prohibit
owners and advertisers from having any influence over the newsroom. Some publishers embraced the spirit of the reform approach—if not their formal banishment from controlling their newsrooms—but the vast majority found the notion of a truly independent journalism far too controversial and adversarial toward the power structure, of which they were most indubitably a part.

The professional journalism that emerged in the 1920s and crystallized by midcentury moved decisively in an establishment direction, where it remains to this day.
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To take the controversy away from story selection, and to maintain neutrality, political coverage was based primarily on what people in power—official sources—said and did. When they debated an issue, or when they had no particular interest in an issue, it was fair game for journalism. When they agreed on an issue, it was considered inappropriate and “ideological” for a journalist to raise questions challenging the elite consensus, except on the rarest of occasions—as, for instance, when a handful of southern editors such as Hazel Brannon Smith questioned the segregationist consensus in states such as Mississippi.
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We remember dissenting and dissident editors such as Smith not only because of their courage, but also because of their rarity. For the most part, however, a premium was placed on achieving factual accuracy and on not tilting the coverage toward challenging the powerful and questioning the basic infrastructure of an often corrupt and dysfunctional status quo. So it was that one of the greatest journalists of the age, I. F. Stone, had to create his own small publications to raise big questions about the health risks posed by cigarettes, the military-industrial complex, and McCarthyism. In 2008, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University announced plans to award an annual “I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence,” but in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was in his prime, Stone could not get his writing published in major American newspapers and was given no forum on broadcast television.
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