Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

by Unknown

  It may be that the present system, with no modifications and no experiments, can survive. Perhaps the money-making machine has some kind of built-in perpetual motion, but I do not think so. To a very considerable extent the media of mass communications in a given country reflect the political, economic, and social climate in which they flourish. That is the reason ours differ from the British and French, or the Russian and Chinese. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

  I do not advocate that we turn television into a twenty-seven-inch wailing wall, where longhairs constantly moan about the state of our culture and our defense. But I would just like to see it reflect occasionally the hard, unyielding realities of the world in which we live. I would like to see it done inside the existing framework, and I would like to see the doing of it redound to the credit of those who finance and program it. Measure the results by Nielsen, Trendex, or Silex—it doesn’t matter. The main thing is to try. The responsibility can be easily placed, in spite of all the mouthings about giving the public what it wants. It rests on big business, and on big television, and it rests at the top. Responsibility is not something that can be assigned or delegated. And it promises its own reward: good business and good television.

  Perhaps no one will do anything about it. I have ventured to outline it against a background of criticism that may have been too harsh only because I could think of nothing better. Someone once said—I think it was Max Eastman—that “that publisher serves his advertiser best who best serves his readers.” I cannot believe that radio and television, or the corporations that finance the programs, are serving well or truly their viewers or listeners, or themselves.

  I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.

  We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small fraction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure—exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.

  To those who say people wouldn’t look; they wouldn’t be interested; they’re too complacent, indifferent, and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse, and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

  This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance, and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

  Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, “When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

  Playwright-Journalist-Diplomat Clare Boothe Luce Criticizes the American Press

  “A large, unmeasurable percentage of the total editorial space in American newspapers is concerned not with public affairs or matters of stately importance. It is devoted instead to entertainment, titillation, amusement, voyeurism, and tripe.”

  She enjoyed both sides of the public eye: journalist and diplomat, playwright and politician. Clare Boothe Luce began her varied career as a magazine editor, working for Vogue and Vanity Fair in the early thirties. In 1935, she married Henry Robinson Luce, the publisher who cofounded Time magazine and later started Fortune and Life. As a writer, she gained fame for work that ranged from Broadway plays to wartime reporting from Indochina. As a politician, she served as a Republican congresswoman in the forties, and she was appointed ambassador to Italy a decade later.

  She was a popular speaker and dinner companion because she laced her conversation with anecdotes about her friends, most of whom were world famous; her imitation of Winston Churchill was hilarious. Converted to Catholicism by Bishop Fulton Sheen, she became a force in conservative politics, ridiculing Henry Wallace’s foreign policy in 1943 as “globaloney.” Mrs. Luce made use of her wide-ranging interests and background in addressing other journalists: “What’s Wrong with the American Press?” was her speech to the Women’s National Press Club on April 21, 1960.

  In this speech, even as she commends daily American newspapers as “the best press in the world,” Mrs. Luce lectures journalists on the failures of journalism to meet its “commercial challenge.” She offers examples of “the debasement of popular taste” and forcefully uses rhetorical questions in persistent parallel to argue against that pressure (“Should the American press bow to it? Accept it? Cater to it? Foster it?”). Although feminists would quarrel with the notions of “masculine superiority” in the peroration, the speech primarily emphasizes balance, particularly in the closing duality of “the promise of success and the promise of enlightenment.”

  ***

  I AM HAPPY and flattered to be a guest of honor on this always exciting and challenging occasion. But looking over this audience tonight, I am less happy than you might think and more challenged than you could know. I stand here at this rostrum invited to throw rocks at you. You have asked me to tell you what’s wrong with you—the American press. The subject not only is of great national significance but also has, one should say, infinite possibilities—and infinite perils to the rock thrower.

  For the banquet speaker who criticizes the weaknesses and pretensions, or exposes the follies and sins, of his listeners—even at their invitation—does not generally evoke an enthusiastic—no less a friendly—response. The delicate art of giving an audience hell is always one best left to the Billy Grahams and the Bishop Sheens.

  But you are an audience of journalists. There is no audience anywhere who should be more bored—indeed, more revolted—by a speaker who tried to fawn on it, butter it up, exaggerate its virtues, play down its faults, and who would more quickly see through any attempt to do so. I ask you only to remember that I am not a volunteer for this subject tonight. You asked for it!

  For what is good journalism all about? On a working, finite level it is the effort to achieve illuminating candor in print and to strip away cant. It is the effort to do this not only in matters of state, diplomacy, and politics but also in every smaller aspect of life that touches the public interest or engages proper public curiosity. It is the effort to explain everything from a summit conference to why the moon looks larger coming over the horizon than it does when it has fully risen in the heavens. It is the effort, too, to describe the lives of men—and women—big and small, close at hand or thousands of miles away, familiar in their behavior or unfamiliar in their idiosyncrasies. It is—to use the big word—the pursuit of and the effort to state the truth.

  No audience knows better than an audience of journalists that the pursuit of the truth, and the articulation of it, is the most delicate, hazardous, exacting, and inexact of tasks. Consequently, no audience is more forgiving (I hope) to the speaker who fails or stumbles in his own pursuit of it. The only failure this audience could never excuse in any speaker would be the failure to try to tell the truth, as he sees it, about his subject.

  In my perilous but earnest effort to do so here tonight, I must begin by saying that if there is much that is wrong with the
American press, there is also much that is right with it.

  I know, then, that you will bear with me, much as it may go against your professional grain, if I ask you to accept some of the good with the bad—even though it may not make such good copy for your newspapers.

  For the plain fact is that the U.S. daily press today is not inspiringly good; it is just far and away the best press in the world.

  To begin with, its news-gathering, news-printing, news-dissemination techniques and capacities are without rivals on the globe.

  The deserving American journalist himself enjoys a far more elevated status than his foreign counterpart anywhere. And this, not only because Americans passionately believe that a free press is vital to the preservation of our form of democracy, but because the average American journalist has, on the record, shown himself to be less venal, less corrupt, and more responsible than the average journalist of many foreign lands.

  No capital under the sun has a press corps that is better equipped, and more eager to get the news, the news behind the news, and the news ahead of the news, the inside—outside—topside—bottomside news, than the Washington press corps.

  I must add only half-jokingly that if the nation’s dailies are overwhelmingly pro-Republican in their editorial policy, then the Washington press corps is a large corrective for this political imbalance. Not because Washington reporters are all Democrats. Rather because they place on the administration in power their white-hot spotlight of curiosity and exposure. So that no one—Republican or Democrat—can sit complacently in office in this capital unobserved by the men and women of the press who provide the news and information that can make or break an elected or appointed officeholder.

  Certainly no press corps contains more journalists of competence and distinction, zeal and dedication. What minds regularly tap more “reliable sources” in government, politics, diplomacy? What breasts guard and unguard more “high level” confidences more jealously? What hearts struggle more conscientiously and painfully to determine to what extent truth telling, or shall we say “leaking,” will serve or unserve the public interest? What typewriters send out more facts, figures, statistics, views, and opinions about great public questions and great public figures?

  And in what other country of the world are there so many great newspapers? Who could seriously challenge the preeminence among the *big-city quality press of the New York Times? Where in the world is there a “provincial” newspaper (I use the term only in its technical sense) greater than, to take only one outstanding example, the Milwaukee Journal? Even the biggest and splashiest of the foreign English-language press, the London Daily Mirror, cannot touch in popular journalism the New York Daily News. (And since we are talking in superlatives—good and bad—is there a worse paper in England, Japan, France, or India than the New York Sunday Enquirer?)

  While the range between the best and the worst is very wide, America’s some eighteen hundred newspapers nevertheless average out a higher quality, variety, and volume of information than any other press in the world.

  Certainly no other press has greater freedom, more freely granted by the people, to find the news and to print it as it finds it. The American press need not be caught in the subtle toils of subsidies by groups or interests. It does not have to fight government newsprint allocations—that overt or covert censorship exercised in many so-called free countries. Except as the American press is guided by the profit motive, which is in turn guided by the public demand for its papers, it is an unguided press.

  All this is what is right with the American press. And the result of this situation is that our people have more ways to be well informed about issues and events near and far than any people in the world. And they are, by and large, better informed.

  But now let us come to the question of the evening: “What is wrong with the American press?” We cannot answer this question unless we will voluntarily abandon our relative measurement of it against the press of other countries. We must measure it, in absolute terms, against its own highest ideal of freedom, responsibility, and—let us not forget—success.

  It is easy to point to many instances in which the American press—especially its individual members—tend to abuse their freedom and shirk their responsibility.

  For example, one could note that nowadays the banner of press freedom is more often raised in matters of printing crime, sex, and scandal stories than it is in matters of printing the truth about great national figures, policies, and issues. Or that too many members of the working press uncritically pass on—even if they do not personally swallow—too much high-level government and political cant, tripe, and public relations; or that there are too many journalists who seem willing to sell their birthright of candor and truth in order to become White House pets, party pets, corporation pets, Pentagon or State Department or trade union or governor’s mansion pets; who wistfully yearn after gray eminency, or blatantly strive for publicity for themselves, on lecture platforms or political rostrums.

  While agreeing with most journalists that people are not as much interested in the issues as they should be, one could at the same time note that neither are many journalists. One could mention that such journalists seem to have forgotten that men, not names alone, make news, and that men are made by the clarity with which they state issues, and the resolution with which they face them. One could express the hope that more journalists would encourage rather than avoid controversy and argument, remembering that controversy and argument are not the enemies of democracy but its friends. One could wish for fewer journalist prodigies of the well-written factual story, and more gifted talents for drawing explanations from the facts, or that working pressmen would be more creative in reporting the news, or that they would reflect less in themselves of what in this decade they have so roundly condemned in American leadership: apathy, cynicism, lukewarmness, and acceptance of the status quo about everything, from juvenile delinquency to nuclear destruction. One could pray, above all, for journalists who cared less about ideologies and more about ideas.

  But such criticisms and complaints—important as they may be—cover only one area of the American press. It is, alas, a relatively small area. A large, unmeasurable percentage of the total editorial space in American newspapers is concerned not with public affairs or matters of stately importance. It is devoted instead to entertainment, titillation, amusement, voyeurism, and tripe.

  The average American newspaper reader wants news, but he wants lots of things from his newspaper besides news: he wants the sports page, the comics, fashion, homemaking, advice-to-the-lovelorn, do-it-yourself psychiatry, gossip columns, medical, cooking, and decorating features, TV, movie, and theater coverage, Hollywood personality stories, Broadway and society prattle, church columns, comics, bridge columns, crossword puzzles, big-money contests. Above all, he wants news that concerns not a bit the public weal but that people just find “interesting” reading.

  I confess to enjoying much of this myself. And I do not mean to suggest that every newspaper must read like the London Times. But the plain fact is that we are witnessing in America what Professor William Ernest Hocking and others have called the debasement of popular taste.

  Is it necessary? An editor of my acquaintance was asked recently whether the new circulation rise of his increasingly wild-eyed newspaper was being achieved at the expense of good journalism. He replied, “But you don’t understand; our first journalistic need is to survive.” I submit that a survival achieved by horribly debasing the journalistic coin is short-lived. The newspaper that engages in mindless, untalented sensationalism gets caught up in the headlong momentum it creates in its readers’ appetites. It cannot continue satisfying the voracious appetites it is building. Such journalism may suddenly burn brightly with success; but it will surely burn briefly.

  We have the familiar example of television closely at hand. The American press has rightly deplored the drivel, duplicity, and demeaning programming that has marked much of television�
��s commercial trust. A critic, of course, need not necessarily always have clean hands. The press is right to flail what is wrong in television, just as it is obliged to recognize the great service television has provided in areas where its public affairs, news, and good programs have succeeded in adding something new and enriching to American life.

  But if the press criticizes what is wrong in television without recognizing the moral for itself, it will have missed a valuable and highly visible opportunity for self-improvement.

  The double charge against the American press may thus be stated: its failure to inform the public better than it does is the evasion of its responsibility; its failure to educate and elevate the public taste rather than following that taste like a blind, wallowing dinosaur is an abuse of its freedom.

  In view of the river of information which flows daily from the typewriters of American correspondents at home and abroad, why are the American people not better informed? Whose fault is it? At first glance it would seem to be the fault of the publishers, and especially editors. But the publisher or editor who does not give his readers plenty of what they want is going to lose circulation to a competitor who does. Or if he has a news monopoly in his city, and feels too free to shortchange them on these things, he is going to lose circulation as his reader slack is taken up by the radio, the TV, and the magazines.