younger journal to advocate with his pencil the candidate he had tattooed."[1]
How far then does the editor control the policy of the press, how far is it controlled by the owner?[2] The question, as has been seen, is a persistent one and no question connected with the press has been answered with more sweeping generalizations than this. Yet in this, as in every other question connected with the press, no one answer fits all cases. Editors and editorials differ in different countries, they differ at different times in the same country, and an editor does not always agree with himself.
In France the article de fond is often an expression of opinion by a well-known man and his views do not necessarily correspond with those of the paper itself,—the paper is perhaps most often read from an intellectual curiosity to see what the editor or a special writer may say on a somewhat academic question.
But in Germany "the fear of the law is the one great plague of the German editor's life," wrote Dawson in 1901. "So frequent are prosecutions of editors that many newspapers are compelled to maintain on their staffs what are known as 'sitting editors' whose special function it is to serve in prison the terms of detention that may be awarded for a too liberal exercise of the critical faculty."[3] The government does not own the press, but both editors and owners have in the past yielded to its superior power.
A volume would be needed to show how in England the editor and the editorial have changed from the days when Defoe was playing a double part and while openly in the employ of Mist, an ardent Jacobite, he was secretly in the service of the Government
- ↑ B. Matthews, "American Comic Journalism," Bookman, November, 1918, 48: 282–287.
- ↑ Bliss Perry gives an interesting sidelight on the opinion of publishers on this point in his account of the relations between the first publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, and "the editor who was never the editor," but who was alluded to by the head of the firm "in comfortable proprietary phrase" as "our literary man."—Atlantic Monthly, November, 1907, 100: 658–678; Park Street Papers, pp. 203–277.
- ↑ W. H. Dawson, German Life in Town and Country, chap. XIII, "The Newspaper and its Readers."
E. Poole, in "The Sitting Editor and the Russian Police," characterizes the custom as a trick common for decades from St. Petersburg to Siberia.—World To-Day, May, 1906, 10: 509–510; F. C. Trench, "The Russian Journalistic Press," Blackwood's, July, 1890, 148: 115–126.
