A Lecture from a Dead Man: What Joseph Pulitzer Would Think of the American Press in 2013.

Because I’m one of about three people in the country who actually cares or knows anything about Joseph Pulitzer, the visionary genius who more or less singlehandedly created the modern American press—and because, irrepressible show-off that I am, a published a few articles about him—I’m occasionally asked to speak about him.

These aren’t big or important venues. Mostly they’re small retiree groups from churches and synagogues, groups of the kind of elderly people who read things like the Missouri Historical Society’s journal. But I’m always glad to do it. They’re nice people and they ask interesting questions, like the one I was asked at the most recent gathering: “What would Pulitzer have thought of the state of the media today?”

My immediate answer was, “Not much.” But a longer answer is probably in order. Joseph Pulitzer was one of the most demanding men who ever lived. He literally drove himself into an early grave, and expected no less of his employees, his papers, and his family. He was a martinet of the first water, constantly hectoring, badgering, cajoling, noodging, and demanding improvement—not perfection, but improvement—from everyone with whom he came into contact.

The American media is, in large part, his creation. Part of his genius was an almost uncanny sense of what would appeal to the reader—what would grab their interest and keep them coming back for more. He was probably the greatest huckster in our history, a carnival barker with the soul of a philosopher-king.

And although it sounds like a truism today, he genuinely wanted everyone to read the paper and came up with tricks and tips to reel the public in and keep them there. He realized that new labor laws were giving the working class at least one day off a week, so he created the Sunday Magazine—lighter and more interesting fare that people could read at their leisure. He stuck in games and puzzles and comics to snag the kids. He added sections on fashion and housekeeping to rope in women. Although he thought sports was a waste of time, he created the sports page because he knew people would read it.

Because ever-growing numbers of New Yorkers were recent immigrants, he made the paper easier to read. Simplified the style. Increased the font size and the headline size. And went crazy with the illustrations, which were so good and so evocative that you didn’t even have to be able to read to get the gist of the day’s news—you could get it from just looking at the pictures.

By creating a paper that cut across all lines—age, race, gender, class, creed, native born/immigrant, level of education, etc.—he created a truly People’s Paper which addressed issues of interest to all New Yorkers. And in doing so, he laid the foundations for the creation of a national media—one that all Americans would read, watch, or listen to, and which would serve as a sort of forum for the dissemination of information, and discussion of issues, of interest to all Americans.

So, considering it is, in many ways, his creation, the thought of what he’d say if he could see the current state of the American media is daunting.

In my self-appointed role as The Guy Who Thinks He Knows What Mr. Pulitzer Would Think, I’m confident when I say that, as regards the current state of the American news media, I don’t think he’s spinning in his grave. I think he’s doing triple axels in it. Frankly, I’m surprised he hasn’t drilled himself out of there by now, brushed off the grave-dust, and started haranguing at the top of his harsh, shrill voice. I think Joseph Pulitzer would be deeply disappointed in the American press for three major reasons.

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First off, he’d be appalled at the extent to which the press is controlled by corporations. In 2013, 90% of the American media is controlled by six corporations: GE, Newscorp, Disney, Viacom, Time/Warner, and CBS. Think about that. Six executives control what 277 million Americans see, hear, and read. Do you think any of these six guys have any interest beyond financial in controlling what goes into your head?

This is what Pulitzer feared the most, and the thing against which he fought hardest—that the flow of information would be controlled by interests which have something to gain by controlling it. Pulitzer himself went to lengths that would be considered absurd today to keep both himself and his newspapers free of any kind of entanglements—personal, political, or financial—that could potentially have compromised his ability to report the news.

He was terrified of debt, for example. When he bought his papers, he paid cash—when he built his buildings, he did so with cash. After the New York World built its new building on Park Row in Manhattan—it was, for about five minutes, the tallest building in the country—the World’s headlines trumpeted, “Tallest Building In The World, And Not A Penny In Debt.” This wasn’t just boasting about the proprietor’s financial acumen (which was substantial)—it was reassuring his public that he hadn’t sold his soul to build a new building, and that no lender would have any leverage on him.  

Including leverage from himself. He once pulled an editor aside, and said, “Boy, as you know, I am a large owner of stocks. If ever I order you to write a story favoring one of those companies, or withdraw one that might damage one of those companies, you are to disregard that order and remind me of this conversation.” He never had to, of course... but I find it very telling that Pulitzer held his papers’ independence to be so sacrosanct that he didn’t trust even himself with its safekeeping.

Joseph Pulitzer was no socialist. He understood, probably better than anyone before or since, that a newspaper is, first and foremost, a business, and that before it can do anything else, it has to make a profit. And he understood that newspapers are bought and sold. He didn’t found either of his papers, he bought both of them. But I think it’s fair to say that he would have regarded the sale of a newspaper to a corporate interest, which is accountable only to its bottom line and shareholders and which has absolutely no interest in either reporting the news or protecting the public, as a rank betrayal of the public trust.

But that’s precisely what’s happened.

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Secondly, he’d be shocked at the extent to which the media has allowed itself to become the willing patsy of the United States Government.

I don’t know whether it’s more reflective of the government’s increasing stranglehold over all aspects of our lives, or whether it’s laziness on the part of the press, but the government is now an absolutely integral part of the news process, which shouldn’t have happened.

Pulitzer conceived of the press as the independent Fourth Branch of government, the Oversight Branch. Supported entirely by its own revenue generation, whether through ad sales or subscriptions, the Press, protected by the First Amendment and the Power of Public Opinion, is there to hold the government in check—a responsibility it abdicated when it became reliant on the government for its information. This puts the press in an extremely precarious position. If you’re not in the government’s good graces, then you’re out in the cold, cut off from precious information, and scooped by your competition. Ask Helen Thomas. After the legendary AP reporter asked one too many awkward questions of the Bush Administration, she was banished from press briefings. A disgraceful act—she deserved better treatment than that, and it should have sent up red flags across the nation. An administration with nothing to hide doesn’t send reporters to Siberia. But too little noticed at the time.

I’m thinking specifically of the New York Times, which, in spite of its status as the Paper of Record, has, under the leadership of Arthur O. “Pinch” Sulzberger, has taken some very serious missteps. Take the Valerie Plame case, for example. When the Bush Administration, on orders from Dick Cheney, outed her as a spy because her husband, Joe Wilson, told the truth about Iraq, the Times, on information from a government informant, published the story--and then fell all over itself to protect its secret sources, even to the extent of letting the main reporter on the story, Judith Miller, sit in jail for a month for contempt of court, with Pinch crowing, “We will not reveal our sources! We must protect our friends within the government!”

Which is all very noble and heroic, but misguided. Because, as Mr. Pulitzer said, that “A newspaper should have no friends.”

Why it shouldn't ought to be obvious. When you become dependent upon the government for your information, you have, ipso facto, allowed the government to control the flow of information.

If you think that sounds like paranoia or conspiracy theory, think about this. In late August of 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office “leaked” a story about weapons of mass destruction buildup in Iraq. Of course there was no leak. The story was placed there with Cheney’s full foreknowledge. It might even have been his idea. But the New York Times ran it on the front page on September 9, 2002, as some great expose, quoting “anonymous Administration officials.”

That very same day, Cheney himself appeared on “Meet The Press,” and said, “There's a story in the New York Times this morning... I don't want to talk about obviously specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that, in fact, he [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire... the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly-enriched uranium which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb."

In short, he cited a story that his office had placed there as justification for our government’s horrific actions in Iraq—a war crime far greater in scope and size than anything Saddam had ever done, or ever would do. 

Like him or loathe him, you have to admit that this was a masterstroke on Cheney’s part to achieve policy aims. And the Times looked like (hell, didn’t look like, was) a complete patsy.

This simply would not have happened on a Pulitzer paper, precisely because of Pulitzer’s dictum: “A newspaper should have no friends.” The government is not your friend, and no one in it can be expected to be. There may be leaks. There may be whistleblowers. And perhaps you can get some good information out of them from time to time... but when you are dependent upon the government for your information, then they control it.

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Finally, Joseph Pulitzer would be disgusted by the press’s incessant whining that no one’s reading them.

This is true, actually. Newspaper circulation is at historic lows—it’s below pre-World War II numbers. In 2009, Bloomberg reported that the decline of daily average circulation for 395 papers nationwide had doubled in a six-month period—and the numbers have only continued to go down. Newspaper management and other industry apologists blame competition from television, the Internet, and general lack of interest in the news, but as a friend of mine who writes for the AP put it, “Newspapers sleepwalked through the 90’s.” Assuming that they’d always be there, as they always had, they ignored the trends and woke up, Rip Van Winkle-like, to find themselves irrelevant.

But one can almost hear Old Man Pulitzer’s throaty Eastern European gutturals screaming from beyond the grave, “Well, if no one’s reading you, then goddammit, find a way to make them. You want to talk competition? I got people to read the paper when they worked twelve hour days, six days a week!”

As a dedicated newspaper reader since the age of seven, a one-time aspiring journalist, editor of my high-school paper, staff writer on my college paper, a working writer, a freelance magazine writer, and a longtime observer of the industry, I can tell newspapers what the problem is and it’s not competition. It’s content.

Pick up the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—a battered, flickering shadow of a ghost of the magnificent paper that it used to be—and you’ll realize immediately why people don’t read the paper any more. It’s because there’s nothing there worth reading. It’s boring, more than 70% of the news on Section A comes from the wire, and the rest of it is bra ads. Which are, admittedly, fun to look at, but again, I can see better porn online. The rest of it is either ersatz or flat. Newspapers became irrelevant not because of competition from screens, but because of their own lassitude.

But newspapers reacted in a predictably stupid way to the plunge in revenue. They gutted staff--the very writers that actually write the stuff worth reading--and got rid of the elements that, back in the day, roped readers in in the first place. The comics page—the home and cradle of our greatest American art form—is a joke and a disgrace, still limping by on the same old “my wife, she’s such a bitch” yuks of Hagar the Horrible, the "Sarge, he's such a jackass" yuks of Beetle Bailey, and the three-frame antics of a fat cat. The great strips, like “Peanuts,” “Bloom County,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” and “The Far Side,” are gone—and with the comics page being ever shrunken and the future of newspapers themselves questionable, we will not see their like again. And many of them responded by raising prices to offset falling revenues--which, as any two-bit business major can tell you, is the last thing you should do.

Essentially, newspapers give us no reason to read them. Which is too bad, because we need them.

News on the ‘Net is bites and clips. You can absorb the headlines, but there’s no time and no space for the in-depth analysis that newspapers, as a medium, can provide. People simply don’t like to read the amount of material that good journalism requires online. It hurts the eyes. Online news isn’t journalism. It’s trivia. Online journalism and print journalism is the difference between multiple choice and an essay question.

And this is a tragedy, not merely for the newspaper industry, but for our democracy. A working democracy requires an informed and knowledgeable public. Pulitzer, who fled a repressive regime in Europe, knew this better than anyone. It’s why he worked so hard at what he did. He cherished liberty, and he knew that the price of it, as Jefferson had said, was eternal vigilance: a service that only the press can provide.

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together," the old man wrote. "An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. Look around and tell me Joseph Pulitzer wasn’t a prophet.