Fading Yellow?

A city editor of a sensational paper whips up his rewrite men like a dance director badgering a troop of chorus girls. "Write this story over again," he growls. "And put some menace into it. Give it some bated breath! Get excited! How can you expect the readers to get excited if you don't get excited yourself?" Last week Walter Lippmann, able, scholarly editor of the New York World, predicted an early disappearance of bated-breath or "yellow" journalism for the reason that the collective public palate cannot long remain unjaded. "When everything is dramatic, nothing after a while is dramatic." Editor Lippmann, famed author and a co-founder of The New Republic, was lecturing at Yale University as third speaker in the journalism lecture-series established with $100,000 by Chain-Publisher Paul Block.*

Editor Lippmann (who joined the World ten years ago this month) said of the present-day curiosity-serving press: "[It] has had as its central motive the immediate satisfaction of the largest number of people. . . . [It] escaped . . . the tutelage of government, fell under the tutelage of the masses." No defense for the yellow newspaper and the tabloid could Editor Lippmann find on the ground that "it gives the public what it wants." Rather he saw its only justification in that it gave the U. S. a press "freer from hidden control than any in the world." At the same time he judged that it was slowly, surely destroying itself and making way for a new, informative journalism. Said he: "The object [of the yellow paper] is not to report events in their due relationships. ... It selects from the events of the day those aspects which most immediately engage attention, and in place of the effort to see life steadily and whole it sees life dramatically, episodically. . . . This is highly effective --for a while. But the method soon exhausts itself. . . . When everything is new and startling, the human mind just ceases to be startled. . . . The realization begins to dawn [on readers] that they have not been getting the news but a species of romantic fiction which they can get much better out of the movies and the magazines. . . . "As time goes on, therefore, one of two things happens to the popular commercial press. If its owners lack foresight and energy . . . the newspaper gradually fails. If ... they understand the nature of the process I am describing, they gradually transform the paper itself making it more and more sober, less and less sensational, increasingly reliable and comprehensive."

* First lecturer was Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick (Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Liberty). Second was President Stanley Resor of J. Walter Thompson Co. (advertising).

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