"The Social Interpretation of News"
Excerpt from Hughes, Helen MacGill, “The Social Interpretation of News,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 219 (1942)
Excerpted by Aimee-Marie Dorsten
When, as often happens, a reformer or the writer of a textbook on journalism dilates upon “the real news” or “the true news,” he usually has in mind some moralistic conception that no working newspaperman would entertain. The news, to begin with, must be what newspapermen call news. But this is not a matter of simple definition.
THE NEWS AND THE “FACTS”
Lincoln Steffens, recalling his days as market reporter for the New York Evening Post during the panic of 1893, remarks: Of the facts only those that could be written as news stood out. If a leading financier, at the end of a dark day of disaster, sat tight denying something I was sure of, till, worn out, he fell across his desk, weeping and confessing, I picked up, not the hysterical man, but the confession, and that I wrote, without tears, statistically…. The human side of Wall Street was only gossip which made good stories to tell in the city room after the paper went to press or to entertain people at dinner.1
Now, of all possible “facts,” only some can be written as news, for the news is a relative matter. It depends upon the point of view of the reporter who writes it, and the reporter’s point of view emanates from the job itself, from the nature of his assignment, and from the nature of his assignment, and from the character of his newspaper. While the Evening Post reported the panic strictly as business news, the Hearst paper, the Journal, played up the order of facts Steffens had to ignore suicides and defalcations, the bankrupt firms and the ruined families for to every Hearst paper “the human angle,” not the behavior of stocks, is the news. News as the Evening Post saw it was the news that mattered to its readers, while, equally, news in the Journal was the sort of reading matter, and, it seems, the only sort, that would induce the public of the Hearst paper to buy it. As a rule of practice in the news room, the news is whatever is news for “our readers,” and thus the news and the public that wants it are defined in terms of each other.
The natural history of the American newspaper may be summarily stated as a succession of epochs in which the news and news publics, that is to say, unexploited areas of circulation, expanded together; for in the nature of the case, their growth has been complementary.
THE GROWTH OF THE PUBLIC AND THE NEWS
The penny press of the 1830’s, as James Parton said at the time, had first to create itself and then to create its public, for the established newspapers of that day were expensive political organs, beyond the interest, the understanding, and the means of plain people. Benjamin Day, in the New York Sun, introduced a new and humble variety of news, crime and police court reports, written in the vernacular, in direct discourse. He ran this material because, having no money and no influence, he could get nothing else; but it turned out to be just what the “artizan and mechanic, the man of labour and the small merchant” who comprised the new public, appreciated. It demonstrated that the common life of the city, if reported brightly, would induce the ordinary man to buy and read a newspaper. The new reader was already interested in such lore, but heretofore he had learned about it only by way of neighborhood gossip. Within a period of two or three years, thousands of New Yorkers were converted into newspaper buyers. James Gordon Bennett, indeed, by running in his Herald society news, accounts of church assemblies, and dependable Wall Street reports, all new and unheard-of types of news, cultivated a demand for the penny newspaper in more sophisticated levels of society, thereby invading the existing newspaper market. The sixpenny political sheets sold by subscription, but Day brought the newspaper out on the street, to be sold “in competition with cakes and apples” to anyone at all. From that time on, the newspaper, to keep its market, had to be interesting every day.
In the nineties, Pulitzer and more especially Hearst induced large new classes, in particular women and immigrants, to buy newspaper. Foreigners found the news enthralling when put in simple language and illustrated with artists’ drawings; women, who have always been the chief readers of cheap novels and “fireside magazines,” bought the newspaper for its “heart-throb stuff.” The news at this time became the excuse and the occasion for writing true stories of the lives of the individuals who figured in it.
This was the day of the Yellow Press, when Pulitzer and Hearst invented the tricks for advertising the news on the front page—the big type and the sensation headlines—to wrest from each other the fickle public of the streets. But to attract the advertisers, who in the end pay the largest share of the costs of publishing a daily paper, circulation has to be not only large but steady. The Yellow Press cultivated “fans” by introducing features like the comic strips, and special departments such as the women’s page. Sporting news first appeared regularly in the Hearst paper, and it sold newspaper to the public of the Police Gazette, which was the outer fringe of literacy.
Heart-throb stories and sob-sister stuff were forerunners of the “confession stories” which characterized the New York tabloids of the 1920’s and still appear daily. According to promotion material put out for the advertisers, the readers attracted by today’s true stories are the last raw recruits to city life: uprooted country folk and young people from the small towns. Though their conception of the press was perhaps formed by the county weekly and the denominational paper, in their loneliness and confusion they appear to find support and comfort in what Bernarr Macfadden, who once published a tabloid, describes as “simple stories, simply told, about people just like themselves,” More than anything else, the knowledge that they “really happened” endears true stories to the masses.
Finally, news photography, as developed in the picture papers, induced even the dull-witted to buy newspaper.
From the beginning, the motives for expanding the area of news were purely commercial. They still operate. There is probably no unexploited area of circulation left, and the present task of the circulation manager is to compare readers from other dailies, while the news room and the department editors attempt to make newspapers as interesting as the radio programs and more inviting to the advertisers.
In acquiring new markets, the newspaper has undertaken to supply several sorts of news to suit several types of public. Speaking with the wisdom of the serpent, William Randolph Hearst once made a distinction between the interesting and what he called “the merely important” news. The interesting news attracts the mass public; the merely important is addressed to small publics. Generally speaking, every newspaper needs both; but the balance between the elements of its market gives each its peculiar character.
DEPARTMENTALIZED NEWS AND THE SMALL PUBLICS
It has become a convention to classify news on the inside pages of a daily under headings that refer to the readers’ professional concerns and their avocations: sports, amusements, society, business, and so on. In metropolitan papers the offices themselves are corresponding divided into departments, each with a page editor and his staff. A department covers just those “facts” of the day’s news that bear upon the interest of the body of readers who form the public of its page. Relevant advertising appears on the page because it is news to the readers involved. Thus the page, the page editor and his staff, and their constant readers form a select little world of experts and connoisseurs whose attention is focused upon a special selection of news. So much is this the case that there is often correspondents’ column where the specialists- the “fans” if it is an amusement page-converse with the editor and with one another. In a sense, the news may be said to organize or mobilize them.
An evidence of the exclusiveness of the small publics is the language in which much classified news is printed: the case ad fortiorem is the stock-market page, where news is communicated in the form of numerical tables; yet even the sports page, whose public is numerous and on the whole unsophisticated, has a special jargon.
THE NEWS AS AN ASPECT OF ACTION
Within the small publics the news is a commodity so indispensable that it is doubtful whether city life as we know it could go on at all without the news-paper. The ticker tape, the telephone and telegraph, and the radio, as they are, could not, for example, keep the inner circle of the market in touch with itself and the public. The sporting world, where literacy is less appreciated, is as Stanley Walker points out, pathetically dependent upon sports editors, who can make or break an event by their attitude. This implies that for the special publics a paper, to be worth buying, must be accurate and timely, for the news is a phase of action. It bears upon the readers’ professional or leisure-time interests, and much may be at stake.
The news and its public are to be defined in terms of each other because the news informs and directs current action. It is not history, for history is not a live issue; nor is it information in the sense that it can be compiled in guides and handbooks, for it is unfinished. What the news is, is most easily seen in the stock-market page, because there its significance is immediately registered in the moving index of prices. On the basis of the news a broker, for example, unloads stocks or buys heavily, or, while taking no overt action, he qualifies his estimate of certain securities. Thus, within this universe of discourse, the news conveys those current urgent facts which are important to him for the very reason that they determine his professional activity. This is why a man gets into the habit of speaking of “my paper.” And on the newspaper’s side, the dependent reader provides the steady circulation which the advertising manager needs Indeed, that is precisely why the new-paper publishes departmentalized news.
It is characteristics of the small public that its members act with relative intelligence. Because they are experienced in the field, they are able to meet the recurrent crises which the news reports and take them into account as a navigator does the weather bulletin. The meaning of the news to its particular public is to be sought in the behavior that is consequent upon it.
THE BIG PUBLIC
Newspapermen distinguish the classified news from the “big news,” which, as they put it, has “news value.” They mean it is news for the big public: every reader will want to read it first of all, and so it “makes” the front page. In every issue, of all the news the day has to offer, the front page carries whatever will interest the widest number of readers.
The front page, in contrast to the departments on the inside pages, is never devoted to any one subject.2 Big news, is relative, being simply the items that are more widely interesting than all the others. Thus the day’s news items may be said to compete with one another for space on the front page, and once there, for a conspicuous position. Earthquakes and other spectacular “acts of God” are presumed to be invariable big news; yet President Roosevelt’s “Bank Holiday” claimed the streamer headline in Eastern papers, relegating news of a severe earthquake in California to second place. The big news creates general suspense and anxiety because the outcome is not yet known. This, of course, makes it a valuable stimulus to circulation: for nothing sells newspaper like a war of nerves.
The public of big news, since it includes all readers, consists of laymen, or, more exactly, of readers in the non-professional role. Generally speaking, cataclysms of nature, war, and crime are “good copy,” because the ordinary man enjoys reading about them. They make news stories that are nontechnical and universally comprehensible—a perquisite of all big news.
The audience of laymen, however, is not capable of responding as intelligently to the news as the small publics. The biggest news relates events that are unpredictable and unavoidable, and accordingly there are no experts and no right things to be done. The news remains sensational because the reader does not know how to act. Indeed, the big public’s behavior is typically erratic and illogical: after every earthquake, newspaper offices report thousands of telephone calls to ask if there will be another. The big public, to speak exactly, is not a public at all in the sense that the small public is; it is better described as a crowd, for it has no organization whatsoever and no common body of knowledge to discuss.
There is a technical side even to war and earthquakes, though it is known to few persons. But the brief anecdotes that so commonly appear on the front page—to which newspapermen give the name “human-interest stories”—are addressed to the reader merely as a human being, and are universally understandable. They interest the widest possible public. They relate little jokes or tricks of fate, tragedies and ironies, that readers find diverting. Because items with human interest are bright, readable, and popular, they are vulnerable to the newspaper. Though they are actual happenings they are not news, for they do not bear upon action at all, and have no urgency and no importance. The big public responds to them solely by being amused, by retelling them, or by exclaiming “That’s a good one!”
“THE HUMAN ANGLE”
Any event may be written from “the human angle.” A reporter given such an assignment looks for “the facts” in the personal experience of those involved in the news; Hearst and Macfadden call it “heart-throb stuff.” The newspaper man must go beyond observable phenomena and write, as best he can, with a novelist’s intuition and artistry. He must infer sensations and reconstruct motives sympathetically; his assignment approximates an exercise in artistic creation. What he constructs is a version of the news in terms of feeling. The whole gamut of human emotion is more or less familiar to even dull-witted readers, which is why the story with human interest is good copy for the big public.
But by relating occurrences in terms of private feeling, the reporter takes them out of the busy realm of affairs. He diverts attention from practical implications, and the reader digests and appreciates the event as someone’s experience, and the story of it as an end in itself, written for his entertainment like the little human-interest stories. Yet the process is never quite complete; since the happening concerns named persons and places and is recognized as having actually occurred, many readers will take it seriously. There are others who will read it simply as an interesting pastime. For both reporter and reader, the human angle turns the news into something between news and fiction and gives it a marginal character.
“HOT NEWS”
There is, finally, another direction in which the news may be deflected from the world of action. That is as thrillers, or “hot news.” Its native habitat is the tabloid.
Routine news implements the readers’ interest; news written from the human angle engages the big public’s sentiments. Hot news, too, refers the news to the reader themselves, but to their appetites. It stimulates sensation. Since invading the taboos is an obvious method of shocking and exciting, the tabloids are sensational fundamentally because they are picture papers: a photograph is more sensational than a verbal account because no circumlocution mitigates its impact upon the senses. Because the readers grow casehardened, every sensational paper is under pressure to be “hotter,” lest a competitor outstrip it. To enjoy the vicissitudes of real people for the thrill they give might be described as a perversion in the intellectual field, a reversal of means for ends.
THE INSTITUTION AND THE PERSON
All these things are perpetually subject to ethical judgement—so much so that if the press were “better,” it would probably be favored with considerably less public attention. It is somehow assumed that foreign news and business reports make a paper wholesome and respectable, while human-interest stories and thrillers are discreditable.3 The distinction amounts to the hypothesis that to read about things is good, but to read about people is bad. Indefensible though this may be, it gives implicit recognition to one valid circumstance: the departments of the newspaper refer the news to the organized interests of society, that is, to its institutions, while the front page and all accounts with human interest refer it to persons.
The small publics are the best served of all newspaper buyers. Since, as Lippman put it, the reader judges all the dailies of his city as special pleaders for all things he knows, he is always ready to buy the best informed paper, and consequently the competition for circulation causes technical news to be more and more promptly and dependably supplied. Within the newspaper organization the value of news for the small publics is that it brings constant readers and steadies circulation. There is, however, another sense in which it is a stabilizing force.
In the news for the small publics the values are utilitarian and accepted as major premises. The business page, for example, would never make an issue of the profit motive or private property. Moreover, law, tradition, the professional codes, and all the relevant institutions govern conduct and provide the “right” solution of the crises the news reports. And the crises are always detached, involving the reader in an impersonal and eccentric role, which means that his own ego is not under attack, and differences of opinion are not too painful.
The news, told from any technical point of view, refers social change to institutions whose conservative force mitigates and absorbs the shock of new departures.
On the other hand, in reading a story with human interest, not practical interest but the sentiments of the big public come into play. Like fiction, true stories call up moral speculation upon human nature, life, death, and fate, and the problem is typically phrased: “What would I do, were I in this man’s place?” Personal news focuses general attention upon private predicaments which show how hard and undeserved is the impact of doctrine and circumstance.
There is no institution of the mores in any real sense, and no special public, for the mores, as Sumner observed, are not administered. In matters of private life the demos consults itself, not authority.
In the correspondents’ column of the tabloid New York Daily News, the letters are addressed to the editor only by courtesy; actually, the writers cheer or berate other readers for their views on the crime and moral dereliction which the newspaper daily sets before them. Invariably they are ready to take the culprit to their bosom; in the cliché phrases: “society stands indicted,” “more sinned against than sinning,” they voice their protest against the mores, and appeal to “the decent thing” – reaffirming the known fact that human beings acting as friends and intimates countenance conduct they deplore as citizens and taxpayers. The final value is the person.
NEWS AND THE MORAL WORLD
Now this, as Cooley points out, is a social conversation and an exercise in moral reassessment. Indeed, a well-told account of a suicide or a strike may give rise to a widespread re-examination of public morals; for, in the nature of the case, the news signalizes a deviation from the expected, the normal and the traditional, which when told with human interest, is made human and comprehensible. Divorced as it is from action, the story inspires irresponsible, even radical and immoral, reflection. Thereby much is condoned and change grows tolerable. In times of conflicting loyalties and moral uncertainty it reaffirms, as Blumer observes of the movies, the basic core of human sentiments, though the circumstances—such, for example, as life in a great city—are new and baffling.4 The moral office of human interest was expressed in Lincoln’s alleged remark to Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you are the little woman who started this great war!” For eventually the human point of view is an attack upon institutions, and human-interest stories may register the passing of one moral order and the emergence of a new one.
While technical news assumes the merits of the status quo, personal news challenges it.
If, however, the news is reported as a thriller, its force spends itself on nervous center; the public imports of the departure escapes in private physical excitation. One suspects that such news is generally disapproved of not merely because it is vulgar and inquisitive, but because its presence in newspapers means that something like a private vice is sharing with more important matters the dignity of the public prints and the hospitality of what was once called “the palladium of our liberties.”
SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE COLUMNIST
The small publics may know, relatively speaking, how to act, but the tempo of change in these times is too great for most readers, and that explains the popularity of the columnist. Each department in a metropolitan daily has its special commentator who makes sense of the news; in political matters where change is even more perplexing than in industry, the country is bedeviled by rival soothsayers. Even the news itself is becoming indistinguishable from the signed editorial: PM, the Chicago Daily News, and other papers which make a feature of their foreign news coverage, are prone to headline dispatches in terms that represent urgent revelations of world events as the personal experiences and opinions of correspondents. Nothing betrays the public disorientation more convincingly than the columnist, unless it is the polls of opinion.
There are no prophets to interpret personal news. If there is any editorial policy in matters of morality, it is printed—but certainly not popularized—on the editorial page; but the demos elects to be tried by its peers, or, what amounts to the same thing, it confides in referees like the Voice of Experience, whose tactics are to toss the question back to the readers and to arrive empirically at some sort, or more exactly several sorts, of right answer.
The newspaper, because it serves its readers in their diverse capacities, finds itself the common carrier of several moral codes. If they conflict, it is because the reality they regulate is in flux; only a doctrinaire organ like the Daily Worker can reconcile the divergencies, and its task of late has been uncommonly hard. For the newspaper to be inconsistent is, however, a circumstance which, as Nunally Johnson unkindly remarked, is not a new embarrassment to the gentlemen of the press.
Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1931), Vol. 1, p. 186. ↩
PM classifies all news, using categories like “National,” “Labor,” “New York”; but its front page advertises the biggest items by headlines and tells on what pages they are. ↩
For example, Susan M. Kingsbury, and Hornell Hart and associates, Newspapers and the News, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1937. ↩
Herbert Blumer, “Moulding of Mass Behaviour through the Motion Picture,” Publications of the American Sociological Society, XXIX, No. 3 (Aug.1935), 115-27. ↩