No School for Scandal
By J.p. Lawrence (Next Section / Previous Section/ Convergence Menu)
A factoid: the famous slogan, “All the news that’s fit toPrint” was actually a placeholder. Two months after taking over the Times, Ochsopened a $100 contest for a better slogan (112). The winning entry: “All theWorld’s News, but Not a School for Scandal.” The editors canned that idea, butthe winner in many ways embodied the spirit of Times.
That model, transmitted from editors on down, was the ideathat a newspaper is defined as a genre of literature to the text that the factsare “pure information,” unframed and untarnished (89). The more details areporter had, the better the story.
This model begets a novel form of communication, writesWalter Benjamin, one whose distinguishing characteristic is its claim to promptverifiability (89). It may not be more exact than other forms of communication,but it sounds more plausible than previous forms. It is, as other observershave written, “decontexualized communication,” an “elaborated code” in whichall is spelled out, with nothing left to subtlety (90). This form is whatSchudson calls the informational model of journalism.
The other model was one embodied by Pulitzer, althoughHearst was louder in beating its drums. This model sees the newspaper asfulfilling what George Herbert Mead describes as an “aesthetic” function (89). Mead,one of the founders of social psychology, wrote that some parts of thenewspaper emphasize “truth value” – the election results or stock marketreports.
The majority of the newspaper, however, is meant to beenjoyed: “The news servesprimarily to create, for readers, satisfying aesthetic experiences which helpthem to interpret their own lives and to relate them to the nation, town orclass to which they belong (Ibid).”
Telling a story, Mead wrote, is the actual and properfunction of a newspaper. “The reporter is generally sent out to get a story,not the facts,” he said. At its best, the newspaper acts as a guide, as ashepherd, as a framer and contextualizer of events. At its worst, the story-model descends to a rabid appeal tomass hysteria.
The Times took great joy in lambasting coverage of theSpanish-American War by the World and the Journal. The Times made sure toadvertise “it does not soil the breakfast cloth like those yellow journalist.This was the “moral war” in favor of decency and against newspapers that“padded news, printed private matters, spread indecent literature, and provedthemselves unreliable (112).”
Should one subscribe to the informational model or the storymodel? Most journalists on the whole give credit to both ideas at once, but readersfollow particular protocols when approaching newspapers that appear to befollowing one model over the other.
For the most part, the educated middle class favors theinformational model, and the middler and lower classes favor the story model(90). The answer to why each class breaks as it does is a topic of some debate,and television studies show a more nuanced view: “highly educated people do notwatch less television, or even “better” television, than the less educated –they simply feel differently about it(117).”
The educated read both the Times and the World. The onlydifference is that they read the World and other story-based, “sensationalist”newspapers with a sense of shame (116). Conversely, the less educated read boththe Times and the World, but reading the Times carried a touch of the upperclass: “it was itself a badge of respectability (117).”
This is the moral dimension to newspaper reading, andperhaps it explains why the Times’ sales thrived as “yellow journalism” was atits peak. This suggests, however, this question: Why did the upper class experiencetrumped the lower classes in the yellow wars of the 1890s, when it was unableto beat back the penny presses of the 1830s?
Works Cited:
Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History ofAmerican Newspapers. New York: Basic, 1978. Print.