BEING AT odds with publishers/owners is an all-too-common predicament among editors. Including presumptive editors like me who strongly adhere to the dictum: “Publish first, truth always, be damned later.”
Owners have their corporate interests to preserve, protect and promote which, in many cases, are at variance with the editor’s fundamental duty to publish Truth, no matter the cost.
No way is this more articulated than in Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers by James D. Squires, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune: “The marriage of corporations and journalism is an unnatural, unhappy union. The best journalists are naturally sceptical individuals with a healthy disrespect for authority, pomposity and ruling classes. They understand and appreciate the ideal of democracy that one man’s vote and voice are as important as another’s. And they have a well-honed apparatus for detecting two staples of the corporate culture – bullshit and insincerity.”
You will know who wears the pants in that unnatural, unhappy union by a cursory browse of the pages of a newspaper: the owner when his photographs and news about the most banal of his activities pepper the pages, page one not excluded – yes, there are publishers who simply love to publish themselves; when his business companies crowd legitimate news out of the pages, in effect reducing his paper to nothing more than a company journal.
In such set-up, even the best editors could only do their worst. As the great Arthur Krock, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, once “Dean of Washington newsmen,” wrote thus: “A hired journalism, however zealous, however loyal, however entrusted, however brilliant, cannot be great because it speaks through the mist of subordination.”
The editor having the upper hand? When the publisher subordinates his interests to the “sanctity of the desk.”
As in the early days of journalism, newspapers are published to 1) indulge the whims and caprices of the publisher; 2) promote his businesses; and 3) serve the political causes he espouses. Civic duty is a thoroughly alien entity to the greater number of publishers.
To paraphrase from memory what I read somewhere, the title of the material I cannot immediately recall: If you told that kind of publisher that he had a duty to the public to print the news objectively and accurately, he would have asked what kind of duty some other kinds of businessmen had. His newspaper being a business enterprise, news to him would be the same as cars to a Levy Laus, or house and lot to a Nestor Mangio, or tocino and longanisa to a Lolita Hizon, even halo-halo and pancit luglug to a Razon.
News being no more than a commodity to sell, a product to be packaged and presented in whatever way that will be most appealing to his customers and thus will bring him most profit. Even at the expense of integrity.
But commercial viability and editorial integrity are not mutually exclusive.
This is best exemplified in The New York Times, unarguably the number one newspaper in the world.
A well-known lore: At the time of World War II, faced with newsprint rationing, the Ochs and Sulzberger families who owned The New York Times chose to print news over advertising, thereby sacrificing much-needed revenues that the latter offered. This act singularly established their paper’s moral ascendancy over all other newspapers in the America.
With The New York Times emerging – and remaining until today – as the most influential newspaper in the USA, if not in the whole world, that decision of the owners proved to be good business too. High-mindedness returned better profits in the long run, so the moral lesson of The New York Times story instructs us.
Perhaps, our publishers read that same story. Hence their express policy of editorial integrity first, profitability second.
On this the fourth year of Punto! my gratitude to my publishers for putting up with my prejudices even when they do not always share them.
Owners have their corporate interests to preserve, protect and promote which, in many cases, are at variance with the editor’s fundamental duty to publish Truth, no matter the cost.
No way is this more articulated than in Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers by James D. Squires, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune: “The marriage of corporations and journalism is an unnatural, unhappy union. The best journalists are naturally sceptical individuals with a healthy disrespect for authority, pomposity and ruling classes. They understand and appreciate the ideal of democracy that one man’s vote and voice are as important as another’s. And they have a well-honed apparatus for detecting two staples of the corporate culture – bullshit and insincerity.”
You will know who wears the pants in that unnatural, unhappy union by a cursory browse of the pages of a newspaper: the owner when his photographs and news about the most banal of his activities pepper the pages, page one not excluded – yes, there are publishers who simply love to publish themselves; when his business companies crowd legitimate news out of the pages, in effect reducing his paper to nothing more than a company journal.
In such set-up, even the best editors could only do their worst. As the great Arthur Krock, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, once “Dean of Washington newsmen,” wrote thus: “A hired journalism, however zealous, however loyal, however entrusted, however brilliant, cannot be great because it speaks through the mist of subordination.”
The editor having the upper hand? When the publisher subordinates his interests to the “sanctity of the desk.”
As in the early days of journalism, newspapers are published to 1) indulge the whims and caprices of the publisher; 2) promote his businesses; and 3) serve the political causes he espouses. Civic duty is a thoroughly alien entity to the greater number of publishers.
To paraphrase from memory what I read somewhere, the title of the material I cannot immediately recall: If you told that kind of publisher that he had a duty to the public to print the news objectively and accurately, he would have asked what kind of duty some other kinds of businessmen had. His newspaper being a business enterprise, news to him would be the same as cars to a Levy Laus, or house and lot to a Nestor Mangio, or tocino and longanisa to a Lolita Hizon, even halo-halo and pancit luglug to a Razon.
News being no more than a commodity to sell, a product to be packaged and presented in whatever way that will be most appealing to his customers and thus will bring him most profit. Even at the expense of integrity.
But commercial viability and editorial integrity are not mutually exclusive.
This is best exemplified in The New York Times, unarguably the number one newspaper in the world.
A well-known lore: At the time of World War II, faced with newsprint rationing, the Ochs and Sulzberger families who owned The New York Times chose to print news over advertising, thereby sacrificing much-needed revenues that the latter offered. This act singularly established their paper’s moral ascendancy over all other newspapers in the America.
With The New York Times emerging – and remaining until today – as the most influential newspaper in the USA, if not in the whole world, that decision of the owners proved to be good business too. High-mindedness returned better profits in the long run, so the moral lesson of The New York Times story instructs us.
Perhaps, our publishers read that same story. Hence their express policy of editorial integrity first, profitability second.
On this the fourth year of Punto! my gratitude to my publishers for putting up with my prejudices even when they do not always share them.
