Times, thus summed up the remarkable editorial change in
policy of these papers:
A number of the leading newspapers of the country which had sup- ported Cleveland in his three contests repudiated the Chicago platform and its candidate, and they stood in the forefront of American jour- nalism. Not one of them ever had conference or communication with the McKinley leaders, or received or proposed any terms for their sup- port, or ever sought, accepted, or desired favors from the McKinley administration. Some of them suffered pecuniary sacrifice, but they per- formed a heroic duty, and it was the inspiration they gave to the con- servative Democratic sentiment of the country that made McKinley President by an overwhelming majority.
This opposition of the press undoubtedly explains the criticism which Mr. Bryan later showered upon newspapers in general and those of New York State in particular. The New York World in explaining its own course said, "Never before in a Presidential campaign had the leading newspaper of either party declined to support the ticket and platform presented by the politicians, not only without loss of power and prestige, but actually with a gain in both."
Yet it was to this New York newspaper that Grover Cleveland once said he owed his election to the Presidency.
JOURNALISM DURING WAR WITH SPAIN
In the war with Spain, the American war correspondent reached his highest development. Arthur Brisbane has told what it meant to report that conflict in the American press. It meant, to quote his own words:
To cover the field of possible action in advance from Manila to Porto Rico; to place the right man in the right place, select the man through intuition; to secure boats and arrange telegraphic facilities; to get the news into the office first, into the newspaper first, on the street and all over the country first; to sift the kernel of fact from the mass of rumors; to exercise discretion and reasonable conservatism without falling be- hind in the great fight for news priority and supremacy; to meet the problems of circulation grown suddenly to be vastly in excess of the mechanical facilities; and with the weaker papers to meet with limited capital the problem of expense unlimited, to make mental re- source replace the hard money sinews of the newspaper war reporter.
