Shock Treatment

What's wrong with the editorial page? In Washington last week, 50 top editorial writers, at their first national conference, glumly agreed that a lot of things are wrong. But they all boil down to one fact: fewer & fewer people read it. As Ralph Coghlan, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's once-famed editorial page, put it: "The editorial page has declined to an astonishing degree."

For a kind of shock treatment, the conference called in terrible-tempered H. L. Mencken, who used to be an editorial writer himself (the Baltimore Sun).*

The trouble with editorials, said he, is that editorial writers write too many. They ought to shut up except when they have something to say. And most of them have no business writing editorials. Said Mencken: "We are recruiting editorial writers . . . from reporters who have had trouble with their legs, and from desk men who have had trouble with their spelling."

Editorials could be improved, he thought, by putting editorial writers out on the street. "No editorial writer," said he, "ought to be allowed to sit in an office year after year contemplating his umbilicus. On the big city paper, an editorial writer doesn't know anybody. . . . Let him cover the police court or a good national story. Don't let him become a professor."

Was publisher-domination responsible for the decline of the editorial page? Nonsense, said Mencken, how could it be? "Publishers are people of a backward mentality. [They] sop up their opinions from the men around them."

*Mencken has never liked editorial pages. Said he in 1931: "If I were sole editor and proprietor of a newspaper, which God forbid, I'd start off by abolishing the editorial page as it now stands. It wastes a lot of excellent brain power, and costs a lot more than it is worth."

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