Publishers: The Newspaper’s Role

“I think it is clear,” said John Hay Whitney, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune and former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, “that though I have worked at journalism, I am here primarily because I am a millionaire.” But it was as a journalist that “Jock” Whitney had been invited to Colby College, in Waterville, Me., to accept Colby’s honorary Elijah Lovejoy fellowship.* And it was very much as a journalist—and publisher—that Whitney spoke.

Something Lost. “It may be,” Whitney said ruefully of the paper he bought five years ago, “that there are worse investments in this country than running a competitive morning newspaper in a busy, bitterly competitive, sophisticated town. But I have never run across one. We are, I think, at a point where to venture into a competitive market requires a great deal of money. And the profit still lies in monopoly situations where, too often, there is more income than excellence. It is proper to ask whether perhaps the newspaper’s day has come and gone and television and newsmagazines are here to bury it.

“We had a presidential campaign remarkable in the volume of its reporting, an election night remarkable in the speed of that reporting. In some instances, there were barely 15 minutes between the close of the polls and the announcement of who won. And who did all this? The newspapers? Hardly. Almost uniformly, using the computers that television brought and the speed that television demanded, the newspapers of this country produced the same morning-after papers they produced a generation ago.

“We seem to have lost something: a spirit of independence, a spirit of our own ferocity, [and this loss] has made us captive to the press release and the gentlemanly code of going to great lengths to avoid embarrassing anyone. There is no reporter who could not produce enough copy simply by collecting what is given away.”

Ferocious Fairness. “But the privileges we claim for ourselves at every step are based on the old conception of ourselves as the public’s watchdog, as the men a little outside our society, measuring it with a pinch of skepticism. If the press conferences become less productive because they are more polite, the fault may be ours. To be fair is not enough any more. We must be ferociously fair.

“Our task is to cut through the junk in the public mind by seeking the order that underlies the clutter of small events; to winnow out of the apparent what is the real; to cede to television and radio the mere repetition of activities and to look behind the bare event for meanings.

“The role we can play every day, if we try, is to take the whole experience of every day and shape it to involve American man. It is our job to interest him in his community and to give his ideas the excitement they should have. These are the excellences of our craft.”

*Named for the Colby graduate who, in 1837 in Alton, Ill., died at the hands of a mob infuriated by his antislavery editorials in the Alton Observer.