Closed-Mind Journalism

The men who put out the nation's magazines gathered last week to take a cool look at their collective product. They expected some selfcriticism, and they got it. It came from Harper's able Editor Frederick Lewis Allen, whose credentials include a quarter of a century with the best U.S. monthlies (Century, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's). At a Manhattan meeting of the National Publishers Association, he spread the blame three ways:

1) Readers. ". . . There is the obvious fact that for every reader who really knows how to read and also consciously wants to buy ideas, there are ten who simply want to be amused. . . ."

2) Publishers. "The danger is that . . . practically all the magazines on the stands will either not discuss [public] issues at all, or will do it with blinders on--each magazine expressing its own special view, whatever this may be, and not acquainting its readers with any other views . . . the traffic in fresh ideas has therefore been dependent largely upon a handful of magazines which were liberal in the best sense --by which I mean that they assumed that there might be more than one side to a question, that new ideas were not necessarily poisonous, and that open-mindedness was a virtue.

"The journalist of the closed mind . . . knows in advance which side he is on, and engages the correspondent or accepts the article that will give aid and comfort to that side. Forsaking the obligation to illuminate, he turns on the heat. The result is inevitable: the other side fights back. The blood pressure of the community rises. And what we tend to have in our journalism is not a town meeting in which unexpected opinions and fresh solutions and ingenious compromises have a hearing, but a pitched battle of propagandas. . . . A certain amount of this sort of partisan journalism may be a good thing ... I am not arguing for tepidity, but for variety."

3) Writers. "So pervasive has the new tradition of the closed mind become in journalism that there are many topics on which it is hard, today, to get even a reasonably fair-minded article. I should like, for instance, to know whether or not there is truth in the reports that during the war the control of American industry has become more concentrated than before. This is the sort of thing that we ought to know about. But I feel in my bones that most of the journalists who might be competent to deal with it would regard themselves as bound by conscience to make the picture either as black or as white as possible: either to show that those glorious creatures, our industrial leaders, are fashioning for us a system ever more perfect, or else that those horrid predators, the millionaires, are fastening upon us the chains of fascism."

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