Vocation of the Contemporary Journalist

Since I was commissioned by the Chesterton Society to write of the role of the journalist, some

reference should be made to Chesterton's own ideas of journalism. Of course, he was an extremely

unrepresentative journalist. He was a brilliant prose writer and a man of extremely high culture, but also

he was a thoroughly benign and generous personality, although he was anything but naïve. Chesterton

was such an engaging writer that he advised that the best course for a journalist was always to surprise

readers. The example he famously gave in his autobiography was "to write an article for the Sporting

Times and another for the Church Times and put them into the wrong envelopes. Then, if the articles

were accepted and were reasonably intelligent, all the sporting men would go about saying to each

other 'great mistake to suppose there isn't a good case for us; really brainy fellows say so.' And all the

clergymen would go about saying to each other 'Rattling good writing on some of our religious papers;

very witty fellow.' "

While he acknowledged that this was "a little faint and fantastic as a theory," he said it was "the only

theory upon which I can explain my own undeserved survival in the journalistic squabble of the old Fleet

Street." He explained: "I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old Daily News and told them all about

French cafés and Catholic Cathedrals; and they loved it because they had never heard of them before. I

wrote on a robust Labour organ like the old Clarion and defended a Medieval theology and all the things

their readers had never heard of; and their readers did not mind me a bit. What is really the matter,

with almost every paper, is that it is much too full of things suitable to the paper." He judged it unlikely

that others would repeat what he called "my rare and reckless and unscrupulous maneuver; of anyone

waking up to find himself famous as the only funny man on the Methodist Monthly; or the only serious

man on Cocktail Comics."

Chesterton lamented the passage of what he called the old Bohemian life of Fleet Street. "The very

name of Bohemia has faded from the map of London as it has faded from the map of Europe." He was

disappointed that Bohemia ceased to exist and became part of Czechoslovakia. "I went about asking

people in Fleet Street whether this change was to be applied to the metaphorical Bohemia of our own

romantic youth... When Fleet Street grew riotous, would people say "I hate these rowdy

Czechoslovakian parties?"

Chesterton naturally gravitated toward eccentric fellow journalists and in his autobiography, described a

number of them. He wrote of Johnston Stephen that he had said to Chesterton "The only little difficulty

that I have about joining the Catholic Church is that I do not think I believe in God. All the rest of the

Catholic system is so obviously right and so obviously superior to anything else, that I cannot imagine

anyone having any doubt about it." When asked whether the Roman Catholic Church was not corrupt

prior to the Reformation, Stephen replied "How horrible must have been the corruption which could've

tolerated for so long three Catholic priests like John Knox, John Calvin, and Martin Luther." One of his

favorite working colleagues in Fleet Street was a woman who produced melodramatic serials for

weekend publication in the newspapers and on one occasion received a telegram from her editor: "You

have left your hero and heroine tied up in a cavern under the Thames for a week, and they are not

married." Sometimes when writing about people but needing to disguise their identity to avoid the

danger of defamation claims, he attached fantastic names to real characters, such as "Splitcat

Chintzibobs."

Not much more need be said to illustrate the endearing intellectual eccentricity of G.K. Chesterton,

journalist, than the part he played in promoting an exchange involving H.G. Wells. A reader wrote to the

newspaper criticizing Wells' meeting with the black American leader Booker T. Washington. It was

signed "White Man." Wells wrote back subscribing himself " 'The White Man of Bexley,' as if he were a

sort of monster." This led to a letter from "Brown Man" and finally to a letter from "Mauve Man with

Green Spots."

I think this is sufficient to show that Chesterton's genius, so evident in almost all his writing, and an

important part of his eccentricity, makes his journalistic experiences and impressions, while extremely

entertaining, rather unrepresentative.

Chesterton was so oblivious and invulnerable to the biases and shortcomings of the media and was so

firm and well-informed in his own views that he was rarely more than whimsically entertained by the

vagaries of the working press. Through most of his lifetime the British national press was controlled by

only a few famous and assertive proprietors, especially Lord Northcliffe and his brother Lord

Rothermere, Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Astor, and Lord Camrose. These men were a very mixed bag in

terms of their balanced judgment and responsible exercise of the great influence that they enjoyed. As

all of the United Kingdom is in the same time zone and the distances are quite manageable by North

American standards, the London morning newspapers circulated throughout the country and their

owners were all members of the House of Lords and were all very politically involved. The prime

minister at the time that Chesterton died in 1936, Stanley Baldwin, famously referred to Lord

Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook as possessing "power without responsibility, the traditional position

of the harlot."

Rothermere was for a time the head of the League of British Fascists and had been considered a

candidate for the position of king of Hungary, (which was in fact never filled), after World War I.

Beaverbrook was the only one of these newspaper owners to enter politics directly, achieve elective

office and serve in the wartime cabinets in both World Wars. But all of them exercised great influence

over their newspapers, and to a large extent in Chesterton's lifetime, a discussion of the quality of the

press was a discussion of the journalistic ethics and political preferences of the principal newspaper

proprietors. The vast broadening of the media, first with radio, then television, and more recently with

the explosion of the Internet and social media, has altogether decentralized it and made almost

completely obsolete the perspective that Chesterton and his contemporaries had of a British press

effectively controlled by a handful of individuals. The North American newspaper industry was never as

centralized, though it was subject to chain ownership. The United States and Canada span four full time

zones and the regional differences in those countries make them much less homogeneous than the

United Kingdom. In the circumstances of his lifetime, Chesterton could therefore afford the luxury of

focusing on the foibles of the individual journalists while laying the credit or blame for the quality of the

media on its principal proprietors.

Today, throughout the English-speaking world, it is difficult to justify such an amused view of the

peculiarities of the working press as a group as Chesterton so entertainingly expressed about old Fleet

Street, where most of the country's newspaper circulation was generated from a few blocks of offices

and press buildings. The extreme decentralization of press or media influence has transferred much of

the power the proprietors in the industry formerly held to an almost unlimited number of journalists

and commentators, hundreds of whom are prominent personalities in their own right. Where in

Chesterton's time, as my friend Malcolm Muggeridge put it when he was an employee of Lord

Beaverbrook at the Daily Express, he was writing for "a readership of one small elderly man in the

Shires," (his employer), now anyone with a byline or access to the airwaves can create a constituency

and exercise a direct personal influence on segments of opinion. In this era, with the exception of a

couple of individuals such as Rupert Murdoch, it does not much matter to media content what the

chairman of the media companies think. What matters is the groupthink of the bylined or on-air

personalities who most directly influence public opinion.

Some of the perceived problems of the Chesterton era persist and may even have been aggravated.

Separating news, reportage, from the opinion of the journalist, is no more rigorously enforced and

demarcated now than it was 80 or 100 years ago. And whereas in Chesterton's time it was possible to

indulge the eccentricities of journalists and even marvel at them, today it is hard to be quite so

philosophical about the tendency of many journalists to use their positions to manipulate opinion

capriciously. Having employed thousands of journalists over many decades and on four continents, I

have concluded that a very large number of them are fundamentally dissatisfied with being chroniclers

and reporting what others say and do. The fact that no one is much interested in what journalists

themselves think is a frustration that gnaws at the character of a large proportion of the Western press.

Nothing is more important to Western civilization them a free press, and it must generally be true that,

within reason, the greater the variety of choice for public information and general entertainment, the

better. In that sense there has been considerable progress since Chesterton's time, of the overwhelming

influence of the five or six British newspaper proprietors mentioned earlier, some of them of

questionable judgment and even mental stability, and a BBC completely dominated by Lord Reith, an

elitist socialist and a director general just as dominating as the most notorious barons of Fleet Street.

(Reith was certainly successful at the BBC, which he effectively founded, but not in his ambition to rule

the country. In his diary, he referred to Britain's greatest leader at the height of his prestige, in the

greatest crisis in its national history, as "that bloody shit Churchill," a formidable example of the

megalomania of many media chiefs.)

One of the features of this present relatively diversified era is that the traditional national media of our

leading Western countries have lost much of their former credibility, even allowing for the

fragmentation of market that technology and other changes have wrought. It has always been a shock

that so literate and generally informed a public as that of the United Kingdom was so terribly disserved

by the sensationalism, irresponsibility, and nastiness of its largest circulation newspapers. If a yardstick

of press irresponsibility could be established by multiplying circulation by a factor of reckless

sensationalism, no matter how creatively employed, Northcliffe and other members of his family were

contenders in this long term sweepstakes of disservice, but Rupert Murdoch would have to be the

supreme champion, easing in just ahead of Robert Maxwell and Northcliffe. Murdoch has had the

further distinction by these saturnine standards, of transforming the London Times, which for centuries

was one of the most authoritative and respected newspapers in the world, into a tabloid shadow of its

former distinction. Murdoch's News Corporation retains its preeminence at the lower quality end of the

British newspaper market even as the industry shrinks, but is now mainly a television, satellite, cable,

and film company.

In the United States, where, as has been mentioned, centralization of the media, as was inevitable in so

much larger a country then the UK, was always much less pronounced, the most influential national

media never included an authoritative public broadcasting system. The influence exercised by the

principal traditional American media outlets has declined in itself, as with Time Magazine, and generally

as well, because of public disillusionment with the national media's handling of some of the greatest

crises of modern American history.

These have included what is widely regarded as misrepresentation of the Vietnam War, and a continuing

and in historical circles, growing, controversy over the Watergate scandal. A very large section of

contemporary American opinion believes that the national media unjustly accused a very successful and

distinguished administration of crimes of which it is now clear there was no convincing evidence in

respect of President Richard Nixon's own involvement. This I believe is one of the principal reasons why

an immense portion of the traditional following of the American national media has migrated to

individual commentators such as Rush Limbaugh as a source of their information on domestic political

matters.

Though it would require extensive research to substantiate this view in a technically rigorous way, it is

almost certainly true that declining credulity amongst the public in the West is both a response to the

revealed failure of the media to exercise their trust responsibly, and part of a larger process of the

coarsening of life and a rise in cynicism and erosion of traditional institutions and beliefs. All credible

public opinion surveys show that virtually the only occupations that are respected by the majority of the

public are a few of the learned professions, in particular doctors, and up to a point clergymen and

architects, the professional military, and the proverbial average person.

Journalists are no more trusted than the politicians, lawyers, or used car salesman, and there is no

shortage of justification for that general view of them. While journalists profess to regard themselves as

a craft, and some lip service is still paid to the virtuosity of writing and speaking well, standards of

written journalism have deteriorated, like public discourse generally. Most journalistic writing is now

quite mediocre and peer attention is focused on the discovery of stories rather than the presentation of

them. Television and Internet journalism is overwhelmingly a matter of appearance and fluency rather

than elegance of formulation or quality of content. It has fallen upon the occupation of journalism to

bear the greatest burden of the dumbing down of public taste as the triumph of the majority steadily

prevails, and not without some benefit to society generally, over the previous elevation of elites.

In their powers of self-regulation, professional journalistic associations do not remotely resemble

associations in the learned professions such as the bar or the societies of medical doctors. Their

activities consist chiefly in celebrating themselves and distributing commendations among their

membership, frequently on the basis of the criteria of who is most disruptive to the subjects of their

journalistic attention. The most egregious examples of this practice must be the Niagara of awards

conferred by journalistic associations upon their own number over the Watergate affair, a great deal of

which it has now emerged, was fiction, malice, and the nihilistic joy of destroying the president and his

administration.

The fragmentation of the media market has been, on balance, a constructive development. While it has

thrown open the doors of media access and variety to a full range of perspectives and levels of

truthfulness and distinction, it has reduced the influence of over-mighty media personalities, including

the former directors and news chiefs of the three major American television networks. The profusion of

choice, while it his confused many, has in promoting competition, at least encouraged some effort to

raise the standards of public information at the upper end of the media menu, even as the scramble to

dig lower and become more vulgar, unreliable, and defamatory, has also been accentuated.

With all of these changes, the role of the journalists has remained essentially the same since

Chesterton's time. They are the chroniclers who inform the public of newsworthy events and the

activities of the news-making personalities. Conceptually nothing has changed, and certainly the

importance of this process and the importance of the integrity of an independent press have not

declined. It would be impossible to organize society on a democratic basis and be confident of even the

most barely acceptable standards of public governance and behavior without a public as adequately,

however imperfectly, informed as the major Western countries now have.

As unsatisfactory as our media may be, and on balance I do not believe that they deserve even a passing

grade, some indulgence must be shown them because the only avenue to improve media quality is a

more informed and exigent public. And the only way of achieving that goal is in higher standards of

public education. Here the failure of our society has been much more clear and damaging then in the

partial deterioration of media quality. Despite the steadily larger commitment to public resources for

our state-run education systems, the quality of teachers has steadily and alarmingly declined on the

level of basic education in the traditional disciplines of language, arithmetic and general knowledge.

Teachers have rivaled even journalists in putting on the airs of professional associations while

conducting themselves like irresponsible trade unions. In the one occupation as in the other, strikes are

frequent and are resorted to without any apparent concern for the public welfare. Where journalists

have gained no ground in their intermittent pretense to being a profession, teachers have essentially

fumbled their way out of the respect formally tendered to them as not only a profession but in some

measure a learned profession. All comparative studies show that graduates of elementary school and

those who matriculate from secondary school and those who conclude undergraduate programs, are

less well-educated and less competent in the use of language and basic mathematics than preceding

generations. In these circumstances it is very difficult to see how the demand of the public for higher

standards of information and more tasteful levels of entertainment in the media can be expected to be

met. Thus we find ourselves in the invidious position of superimposing upon a decliningly urbane public

a media, (i.e. a mass of journalists and their product), that though its average quality has probably also

declined somewhat, has been mitigated in the negative consequences of that decline by a dilution of the

influence of individual media personalities and by the proliferation of a variety of sources of

information.

There may be a further and larger currant in this cake. It is possible that with the immense flood of

choice to all those who sample the media, a premium will attach to quality. Whereas in earlier times

such as Chesterton's, mediocrity in newspapers did not bring damaging consequences to the propagator

of it because of the absence of competition, at least by present standards, today mediocrity, even

mediocrity in the presentation of sensational news, drives the public into the arms of competitors who,

if not of greater integrity, at least formulate the liberties they take with more originality and the news

with greater professionalism.

And the fragmentation of market also, although this too is very hard to prove with any scientific rigour,

while it does not endow journalists with any greater sense of professional ethics, at least may insulate

them against the dangers of megalomania that so evidently corrupted an inordinate number of the

great media personalities of the past. The media proprietors have more competition than ever and must

always be on guard against complacency or the attitudes of invulnerability. And those media

personalities constantly in the public eye, prominent columnists and commentators in print and

television and Internet, have a much smaller share of the overall market then did the corresponding

people who preceded them a generation and more ago, such as in Chesterton's time, including

Chesterton himself. Today there are comparatively few oracles like Walter Lippmann or Edward R

Murrow, or Walter Cronkite, or even great British media figures like Richard Dimbleby and Malcolm

Muggeridge. Some of those individuals had more restrained egos than others and some of them

possessed greater genuine insight into the world than others, though all were presentationally talented.

Now most news readers present abbreviated summaries and are popular chiefly because they are

attractive women stylishly and even revealingly dressed, who read what has been put in front of them.

The astonishing progress of information technology enables the whole public to be relatively well

acquainted with the most distant parts of the world and what happens there, if they are so minded. The

only pundits, as opposed to mere chroniclers, that can be found in the media now are authorities on

current events and genuine specialists in relatively high brow outlets. No one really has the influence of

a Walter Lippmann today, and that must be considered progress because although Lippmann was

certainly an intelligent man, his opinions were as often mistaken as not, and his influence was at best

neutral.

In summary, the role of the journalist is what it has always been, and it is not better conducted now

than it was in Chesterton's time. There is little hope for improvement but quality is there for those who

seek it and the mediocrity or inadequacy of much of the media is mitigated to some degree by the

reduced market share of every media outlet and of every single journalist. It could be, and could

become, worse.

© 2024 Conrad Black