by Thomas Leonard
Thomas Leonard, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Power of the Press and News for All.

See Also: The Wall is Heading Back and Chronology of a Crisis

The Los Angeles Times is in good company as it makes its apology for an embarrassing advertising venture. Benjamin Franklin invented the publisher mea culpa on this topic:

I printed it, and received my money; and the advertisement was stuck up round the town as usual. I had not so much curiosity at that time as to inquire the meaning of it, nor did I in the least imagine it would give so much offence. Several good men are very angry with me on this occasion. . . . They therefore declare they will not take any more of my papers, nor have any farther dealings with me. . . . All this is very hard!

In Franklin's lifetime -- and in the century that followed -- journalists expected to be forgiven for relentless commercial drive. Disguised advertisements were common features of news columns in even the best dailies. Historian Gerald Baldasty has identified these in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, as well as the "puffs" and "reading notices" that advertisers forced on journalists with lower standards. If the archives are to be believed, it was the rare publisher who said "No" flatly to what advertisers wanted. Even Horace Greeley trimmed his sails to keep The New York Herald Tribune from colliding with advertising interests.

What has been said about the Los Angeles Times this year seems tame in comparison to the cries against the venal press early in the twentieth century. Art Young's notorious cartoon of 1912 showed a newsroom of whores and a management of whoremasters. In that same decade, Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check devoted 445 pages to the demonstration that the commercial press was a brothel.

 

Art Young, drawing for The Masses, December 1912

With the prostitution model exhausted, press critics thundered about the necessity of a "wall" between "church" (editorial) and "state" (business). Management and editorial in the modern newsroom may not agree on much, but they seem to agree that the other side needs to be set right on where "walls" stand and how "church and state" is to be separated. It is an odd way to think. A wall blocks the vision of people on either side of it. Churches have to raise money.

Historians are not sure when news people began to talk in this peculiar way. The terms are associated with two press titans: Col. Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and Henry R. Luce, founder of Time Inc. In the 1920s they knew that news in print was now far more dependent on advertising than in the days of Franklin, Greeley, or Pulitzer. (In 1880 advertising brought in less than half of newspaper and magazine revenue; that share went to two-thirds in the 1920s and has continued to rise.) McCormick and Luce were publishers of conviction who did not care about their bottom line when they had news they believed Americans deserved.

Journalists' memories of what these publishers stood for are vivid. James D. Squires is one of many old Tribune hands who recall the separate elevators, one for editorial, another for business, that stood for "the hallowed separation between church and state." The World of Time Inc., the official history, reports that the church and state division is "perhaps the most frequently cited" part of Luce's legacy. But there is not much evidence that either man wanted to leave the profession a mantra using "church/state" or "wall."

McCormick collected his thoughts in The Freedom of the Press (1936). He caught threats to editorial independence as small as the "ogle" of an actress that might corrupt his movie critics -- but he said nothing about the business office or pushy advertisers. A massive history of his paper, by Lloyd Wendt, and of the man, by Richard Norton Smith, do not show worry about promiscuous gatherings of employees in Tribune Tower -- or that the colonel used the fabled metaphor.

The Ideas of Henry Luce, his collected writings, does not record these words either. Indeed, I cannot find them directly quoted anywhere in the richly detailed, three-volume, World of Time Inc. Richard Clurman, the best reporter on the fate of Timesmen in the Warner merger, finds nobody able to quote Luce directly as they fought for his hallowed tradition. "Church-State Wall" is an advertising slogan for the generation of McCormick and Luce more than it is cold reporting of their words.

Luce regularly said things that were, by turns, more confounding and more useful. But it is too bad that Luce's plain speaking is not better remembered. "If we have to be subsidized by anybody, we think that the Advertiser presents extremely interesting possibilities," he told his top aides in 1938. Luce's goal was not to compromise "more than a small fraction of our journalistic soul. That small fraction we are frankly willing to sell for a price." Who would protect the editorial side? Here Luce did not place his faith in providence or figures of speech, but rather in his own ability to stand up to corporate America. His boast was that "there is not an advertiser in America who does not realize that Time Inc. is cussedly independent . . . ." When a publisher can say this and be believed, no artful phrase and no apology is required.

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