The Press: The Test of 1940

In the campaign of 1940 Franklin Roosevelt, Harvard-bred, did not rant as Huey Long once did about the “lyin’ newspapers.” He sometimes used a phrase which to him meant virtually the same thing: “the Tory press.” Bitter New Dealers like Harold Ickes had often harangued at “kept newspapers and kept commentators.” Democratic Chairman Edward J. Flynn talked about “dictatorship [of the press] … by the financial interests” (TIME, Oct. 28).

That this enmity between press and government worked both ways was proved last fortnight when Editor & Publisher gave out results of its final campaign survey of newspaper sentiment. Editor & Publisher found 64% of the U. S. daily press (with a combined circulation of 20,709,156) for Republican Nominee Wendell Willkie. For Franklin Roosevelt were only 23% (circulation: 7,552,137). Neutral or undecided were 13%—which meant in many cases normally Democrat papers, which would not declare for a Republican candidate, but had no use for Roosevelt either.

In 1796, when George Washington was preparing to retire, he gave as one of his reasons “a disinclination to be longer buffeted in the public prints by a set of infamous scribblers.” Even Thomas Jefferson, loftiest defender of civil liberties, said, “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.” But the press of 1807 was not the press of 1940. U. S. newspapers in Jefferson’s day were mostly organs of partisan vituperation and vilification owned or subsidized by political leaders. The partisanship of the press in the campaign of 1940 was mostly of another order.

The newspaper publishers expressed their views in their editorial pages, and in their cartoons—notoriously the least influential portion of modern papers. Those publishers who grew heated in their partisanship—and many did in the last week of the campaign—showed their bias in the slant given their headlines and in the relative space and prominence given news favorable and unfavorable to their chosen candidate. Decisions about space, position and headlines can never be anything but matters of editorial discretion. In some cases conscious, in more cases perhaps unconscious bias last week distorted the use of this discretion.

But if many publishers did not use their editorial discretion as well as it would have been used in the best of all possible presses, in one respect the press of 1940 did a notably honest and able job: with few exceptions its news stories gave straightforward and fair reports.

Reporters, like publishers, are subject to bias. The lack of bias in most political stories was partly a tribute to the honesty of the working press. In part it was accountable to the fact that reporters had an opposite bias which canceled out with that of their publishers. (Last week, in Manhattan, pickets marched through Times Square with placards proclaiming that the Times and also the Herald Tribune would be for Roosevelt if they let their employes decide their policies.) But this fact was also a tribute to publishers who were quite willing to tolerate opposite opinions on their staffs.

Deliberately misleading reporting there undoubtedly was in a few newspapers. But in the press as a whole no significant news fact—whichever side it helped or hindered —was suppressed, distorted or made up out of the whole cloth. In the test of 1940 the U. S. press had proved that although still humanly imperfect, it was a civilized and democratic institution.