Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (106 page)

There used to be an old phrase in this country, employed when someone talked too much. It was: “Go hire a hall.” Under this proposal the sponsor would have hired the hall; he has bought the time; the local station operator,
no matter how indifferent, is going to carry the program—he has to. Then it’s up to the networks to fill the hall. I am not here talking about editorializing but about straightaway exposition as direct, unadorned, and impartial as falliable human beings can make it. Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information. Let us dream to the extent of saying that on a given Sunday night the time normally occupied by Ed Sullivan is given over to a clinical survey of the state of American education, and a week or two later the time normally used by Steve Allen is devoted to a thoroughgoing study of American policy in the Middle East. Would the corporate image of their respective sponsors be damaged? Would the stockholders rise up in their wrath and complain? Would anything happen other than that a few million people would have received a little illumination on subjects that may well determine the future of this country, and therefore the future of the corporations?…

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.

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.