The Press: A Monopoly of Quality

As owner of one of the most successful newspaper monopolies in the U.S., Minneapolis Star and Tribune Publisher John Cowles has never been the slightest bit defensive about his papers’ unchallenged position. Last week, before the annual convention of the national journalism fraternity, Sigma Delta Chi, Publisher Cowles not only argued that monopoly papers are among the best in the U.S.; they are also partly responsible for the fact that sensationalism in the U.S. press is becoming a less and less salable commodity (see below). Said Cowles: “As the best papers have grown, the poorer papers, the marginal papers, have, to everybody’s benefit, gradually died out . . . Those newspapers that are not in hotly competitive fields are moreover better able to resist the pressure to sensationalize the news, to play up the cheap sex story that will sell more copies than another that may be of far more importance and significance.”

Publisher Cowles is not worried about critics who “make the completely erroneous assumption” that in cities where there is a newspaper monopoly the paper is the “sole source from which the public gets its news and information and ideas. There are, of course, dozens of other sources—TV, radio, newsmagazines, labor papers, community papers, outside dailies, etc.—that also provide information and ideas. And if a monopoly newspaper is really bad, then it won’t last long as a monopoly. New competition by abler and more socially minded newspapermen will displace and supersede it.” Some of the best papers in the U.S., says he, have no competition in their morning or evening local field, e.g., St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Milwaukee Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post, Miami Herald.

By examining the circulation losses and gains that U.S. newspapers have experienced in the past seven years, says Cowles, anyone can chart the decline of profitable newspaper sensationalism. Newspapers, says he, have realized that complete and fair news coverage builds circulation. With few exceptions, those newspapers that “have had the heaviest circulation losses are not papers that regard full and fair news presentation as their primary function and reason for existence . . . Because of the rapidly rising educational level of the American public and its steadily widening range of interests, those newspapers that were built largely on the formula of sex and crime sensationalism plus entertainment features no longer adequately satisfy all the interests which the reader wants satisfied.”