Middletown
Excerpt from Lynd, Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1956.
Excerpted by Aimee-Marie Dorsten
Chapter XXVII
“Getting Information”
Mention has been made of the printing of election news and other accounts of group business in the press. Middletown’s dependence upon some such artificial diffusion of information grows at the city grows. The city’s political devices, for instance, assuming as they do first-hand familiarity with collective affairs, candidates, and elected officials grew up in a culture more akin to the Middletown of the eighties, when fewer things were done by the group as a whole, citizens were somewhat less pressed by the competitive urgency of getting a living, and the community’s comings and goings were more exposed. Today, when even a professional politician in Middletown has been known to confuse the “city plan commission” and the “city manager plan,” and the average voter does not know many of the men on a Middletown ballot even by sight, this early assumption of full knowledge by each citizen is an anachronism. Hence the press becomes more and more an essential community necessity in the conduct of group affairs.
Every business man in Middletown wakes in the morning to find a newspaper at his door. Workers, rising and getting to work an hour or two earlier, seldom have time to read papers in the morning, but there no family among those interviewed which did not take either a morning or evening paper or both. It is, however, left to the whim and pursue of the citizen whether he ever reads a newspaper. The local morning paper distributes 8,8451 copies to the 9,200 homes of the city, and the afternoon paper 6,715, plus at least half of an additional 785 sold on street and news-stand.1 In addition, the circulation of out-of-town papers, which, according to the older citizens, was negligible in 1890, now totals 1,200 to 1,500 a day.2
Twenty-three (three out of five) of the thirty-nine business class families giving information on this point and only three of the 122 working class families took an out-of-town paper in addition to one or more local papers, six of the business group and thirty-one of the workers took both morning and evening local paper but no out-of-town paper, ten (one-fourth) of the business group and eighty-nine (three-fourths) of the workers took only one local paper. This may seem an entirely odd bit of data until it is recalled that such differential diffusion is the stuff of which the habitual reactions of the group are to no inconsiderable extent formed. The fuller news content of the large city papers should be borne in mind.3
The ostensible purpose of Middletown’s newspapers is to present an accurate array of the “news.” Nearly two-thirds of the morning paper bought by the great bulk of Middletown families is composed of advertising:4 first, in point of quantity, things to wear, next things to eat, and next things to restore health.5 The rest of the paper, 800-1,000 inches of space daily, is devoted to reading matter of various kinds. About 20 per cent. of this reading matter concerns local happenings, another 10 to 20 per cent. county and state affairs, 25 to 50 national news, 10 international, and the remaining 20-odd per cent. non-geographical features.6 A count for this first week in March 1923, showed 18 per cent. of this reading matter in the leading paper to be devoted to public affairs, 16 per cent. sports, 10 per cent. business, 10 per cent. personal items other than social functions, 8 per cent. police and court news, 6 per cent. social items, 3 per cent. religious, with smaller percentages of space devoted to health, women’s interests, radio, agricultural news, “Eddie” Guest’s daily poem, and other material. As compared with a similar count for 1890, the current paper shows a decrease in news space devote to agriculture, education, and politics, and heavy increases in sports (300 per cent.), women’s news (200 per cent.), business items, and cartoons.7
Middletown is served with some three and a half times as much news in its leading paper each week as it was a generation ago, and much of this news is based upon a more adequate reporting. Only one Middletown paper in 1890 had a daily telegraph service, and the column of Foreign News might contain stray items such as “Pipe ignites clothing—man in London burns to death,” or “Two Berlin policemen killed by bomb.” Today, wireless, radio, the cable service of the Associated Press, and syndicated features, reinforced by pictures, including radio photographs, bring the world do Middletown breakfast tables.8
…And yet, although the purpose of newspapers, as far as the individual citizen and the community as a whole are concerned, is ostensibly to give information, Middletown’s newspapers have three other uses, for a few individuals or limited groups, that sometimes appear to take precedence over keeping the community adequately informed. For politically ambitious individuals or political parties, Middletown’s newspapers serve the purpose of shaping public opinion to their aims; this so-called politically partisan aspect of the press , which colors extensively the news allowed to reach the group, is emphasized by the fact that both dailies belong to the same political party.
To the owners, thanks to the heavy growth of advertising in the past few decades, the newspaper serves an increasingly alluring money-making purpose; in May, 1890, the leading paper carried 108,715 lines of advertising and in October of the same year 101,448 lines, as against 628, 856 lines in the leading paper in May 1923, and 604,292 in October.9 The advertising columns of the press appear to be run on frankly caveat emptor principles. Advertisements of doctors and nostrums condemned by the health experts of the community, as noted in Chapter XXV, as well as dubious offers of building lots in remote states and advertisements for “girls” for models, the latter condemned by the juvenile court and social welfare agencies, appear regularly. Or the credulity of a large section of the population is exploited in such an advertising and circulation-getting scheme as the one in which an individual calling himself “Rajah Raboid” is introduced to the community as “America’s Greatest Master Mind,” “The only man in the world who can tell people what they are thinking of without having them write it down”; the citizens were asked to send in “questions pertaining to your life—love, courtship, marriage, business, etc…and watch the paper daily for your answers.” Various groups in the community oppose different types of advertising, but there are few exceptions to the rule that if a man’s money is good, his advertisement appears.
The growing profit in controlling the agencies of news diffusion has developed yet another use of the press—that of buttressing the interests of the business class who buy advertising; more than ever before it is the business class advertisers who are the supporters of the newspapers, rather than the rank and file of readers of the paper.10 It is largely taken for granted in Middletown that the newspapers, while giving information to the reading public as best they may, must not do it in any way that will offend their chief supporters. Independence of editorial comment happens to be in tough inverse to the ratio to the amount of advertising carried. The leading paper rarely says anything editorially calculated to offend local business men; the weaker paper “takes a stand” editorially from time to time on such matters as opposition to child labor; while the third paper, the four-page weekly Democratic sheet, carries no advertising except such political advertising as must legally be given to a rival paper, and habitually comments freely and vociferously on local affairs.
This third paper, in reflecting the editor’s personality, is much more in line with the leading papers of 1890 than are the two current dailies. Then, an editor was a person of local authority like the judge and minister, and he did not hesitate to express thumping opinions on any and every subject. In the midst of a front-page column of news, he would appear to comment, “It is a known fact that the Herald [a rival sheet] can print more plain lies than have not even a semblance of truth than any other sheet ever known.” Today, neither daily is personally edited by its owner, both owners live permanently in distant cities, although one of them maintains a technical citizenship in Middletown for political reasons, and the leading paper is a member of a national syndicate of papers, with most of its editorials written by a central editorial board in another city. It is symptomatic of the change that has occurred that the habit of citizens’ “writing to the paper” has decreased heavily.
Not only advertising and editorial comment but the actual news presented is not unaffected by Middletown’s dominant interests. It is generally recognized in Middletown that adverse news about prominent business class families is frequently treated differently, even to the point of being suppressed entirely, than news about less prominent people. The following from an editorial in the small outlawed weekly, while reflecting obvious bias and animus, nevertheless describes a condition generally recognized locally as containing a large measure of truth:
DISCRIMINATION
“Three youths belonging to important people in [Middletown] were recently arrested with booze on their persons, but no mention of the matter was made in the two daily newspapers. They never do. Watch the daily newspapers here and you will generally see the word ‘laborer’ following the names of those who are exposed as violators of the liquor laws. We hope the day will come when it will be a criminal offense for newspapers to protect higher-ups and ruin the reputations of those without influence…When youths belonging to the families of the elect get in a jam with liquor they even escape without paying fines and their names are kept from the public.”
It is usually safe to predict that in any given controversy the two leading papers may be expected to support the United States, in any cause, the business class rather than the working class, the Republican party against any other, but especially against any “radical” party.
In some cases, as has been pointed out in regard to pre-election information, partisan politics, official mishandling of public works, violation of the pure food law, and other aspects of the city’s business, the influencing and handling of news by extraneous factors amounts actually to misrepresenting or withholding it…
Here, then, is a community of nearly 40,000 individuals, founded upon the two principles that one adult’s judgment is as good as another’s and that ignorance is no excuse for incompetency, and increasingly dependent upon information furnished by it daily press. But despite the assumptions of the adequacy of the information each citizen, it is left to the adequacy of the information of each citizen, it is left to the whim and economic status of the individual whether he shall see a paper at all, obstructions, political, economic, and personal, are thrown at many points in the way of the newspapers’ gathering and publishing from one day to the next the facts needed by the citizens to carry on a democratic form of government, and the information upon which both individuals and the community depend is left to the outcome of the resulting battle royale…
Of the 6,900 inches of news space in Middletown’s leading papers in the first week of March, 1923, 21 per cent. was syndicated or signed news material of a more or less nationally standardized type (Associated Press, David Lawrence, etc.), 5 per cent. was nationally standardized news pictorial matter (not including cartoons), 16 per cent. national features of the Dorothy Dix and “Eddie” Guest sort, 1 per cent. filler material clipped from national magazines, and the remaining 57 per cent. was locally written copy.
Figures for the morning paper are for April 15, 1924. An additional 316 copies are sold on news-stands and the street, probably most of them to transients. Afternoon figures are an average for February, 1924. ↩
These include an average of 800 copies of one paper, from the state capital and 125 of another, eight copies of the New York Times (thirty-nine on Sunday), 170 copies of the Chicago Tribune (800 on Sunday), sixty-three Chicago American, forty-two Christian Science Monitor, sixty Cincinnati Enquirer (240 on Sunday), one New York World, fourteen Detroit Free Press (61 on Sunday), four Cleveland News-Leader (21 on Sunday), etc. ↩
This differential diffusion from outside sources becomes even more significant when combined with periodical subscriptions: a third of the 122 working class families interviewed take one or more newspapers but neither subscribe to nor buy regularly any periodical, as against none of the business class group interviewed; an additional one in ten of the former and again none of the latter take only a women’s periodical or periodicals in addition to one or more newspapers. Cf. Ch. XVII on periodical reading. ↩
Sixty-three per cent. of Middletown’s local morning paper and 47 per cent. of the afternoon paper during the first week in March, 1923, were composed of advertising, as against 63 per cent. and 43 per cent. respectively of the two leading papers for the corresponding week of 1890. ↩
See Table XXII for a complete distribution of the advertising contents of the leading Middletown papers for October 1890 and 1923. ↩
The ratio of news content of Middletown’s papers from a geographical point of view was not altered greatly since 1890. See Table XXIII. ↩
See Table XXIV. These figures are based on counts for the same weeks as Table XXIII. Counts for single weeks cannot be taken as indicating more than general tendencies. Since, however, the week in 1924 was characterized by no unusual occurrences likely to distort the picture, and since a second week was counted in 1890 as a check, the contrasts indicated probably represent roughly actual shifts. ↩
Just how much of the world reaches Middletown, however, may be gauged very roughly from a comparison of the front pages of Middletown’s leading paper and of the Christian Science Monitor containing the news of the French recognition of the Soviet Government in October, 1924 the Monitor appearing in the afternoon before the Middletown morning issue. Whereas the Monitor ran a two-column headline over its front-page, three-fourths columns despatch, the Middletown paper carried this piece of news in a three-inch note at the bottom of its first page. The other major headlines in the Monitor that day were: “Want Invited to be Premier” (Pekin); “Tax Law Policy is Vital Topics Before Cabinet” (Washington): “Anglo-Turkish Dispute Before League Council” (London); “Vocational Survey Clarifies Economic Status of Women” (signed story of a report just issued by the Bureau of Vocational Information in New York); “War Mothers of World May Outlaw War” (interview with Indianapolis head of War Mothers); “Tory Plot Seen in Alleged Red Note to Britain” (London); “New Movement Toward Russia Pleases Borah” (Washington). “‘Little Rody’ Blasts Hopes of Democrats” (Providence); “Davis’s Speech is Assailed buy Organ of Klan” (Atlanta); : “4,000 at [neighboring small city] Hear [a Republican]” (state); “Davis Cheered by New York Negroes” (New York); “Coolidge Rests Sure of Result” (Washington); “Hughes Scores Third Party Aim” (Chicago); in addition a four-inch cut and caption showed the new president of the national society of surgeons, and a one-half-column-across-three-column cut depicted certain national figures under the caption, “Baring of Income Tax Secrets Embarrasses Notables.” ↩
See Table XXII. IN 1890 the papers appeared only six days a week, while in 1923, a Sunday edition was published. ↩
The receipts from advertising, as reported by the United States census of the publishing business covering newspapers and periodicals, were $793,-898,584 in the year 1923. This was more than twice the figure for returns from subscriptions and sales ($361,178,329). ↩