11 March: Boreham on Journalism

The Rationale of Journalism
This is the eleventh of March! It was on this day, in 1702, that the first British daily newspaper made its appearance. Entitled "The Daily Courant," and produced by Master E. Mallet over against the Ditch at Fleet Bridge, the venture struck everybody as very much of a novelty. It consisted of a single page of two columns; and, in its initial issue, the publisher assured his readers that the journal would consist exclusively of news. He would not dare, he assured them, to make any comments of his own, since other people were as well qualified as he was to form their own conclusions. From that day to this, few departments of life can show a more striking process of evolution than that presented to our contemplation by the history of journalism.

Probing to the heart of things, a particularly interesting question arises. How are we to account for our insatiable appetite for news? A man comes home from the office glad to have left the cares of the world behind him. He enjoys a good dinner, and then, surrounded by the members of his family, he settles down to an evening by the fire. And the first thing that he does in the course of his evening's felicity is to open a journal, or listen to the radio, and thus involve himself once more in the whirl of those affairs that, an hour or two earlier, he had found it such a relief to forsake. Or, in the Summer, he goes for his annual holiday. He carefully selects a spot so secluded that nothing of life's fret and fever can possibly disturb the tranquillity of his retirement. Yet, once there, the great event of the day is the arrival of the newspaper. He looks forward to its coming with greater eagerness, and abandons himself to its contents with keener zest, than he has ever done in the ordinary work-a-day life at home.

Ampler Gregarianism Of Humanity
In days of public excitement a man tears open his paper to learn the latest developments of the portentous matter that is agitating the universal mind. In days of unruffled serenity, when everything is as calm as the proverbial millpond and life resolves itself into one prolonged yawn, he vaguely feels that the newspaper may contain a thrill that will invest a humdrum existence with a new glamour of interest, and scans its columns with a curiosity and an avidity peculiar to periods of uneventfulness. But whatever the temper of the time, and whatever the state of society at the moment, man wants his paper and won't be happy till he gets it. One wonders why. Why do the people of the smallest and most remote settlements want the news? Why cannot Diggers Gully be satisfied with Diggers Gully? Why cannot Horseshoe Creek be content with Horseshoe Creek? Why should they bother their heads about the great wide world?

Nothing of the kind is to be seen beyond the bounds of humanity. No creature of the wilds betrays any solicitude concerning the fates or fortunes of other creatures at a distance. But man must have the news, for, unlike all other animals, he is conscious of a life infinitely larger than the life of the individual. He cherishes a gregarianism of an ampler kind than the fields and the forests know. Wolves may go in packs, birds in flocks, and deer in herds; but the life of each of these aggregations is independent of the life of each similar company. The pack binds a few wolves in one, but there is no tie that embraces universal wolfhood. Each man, however, feels that all men belong to him. Each isolated township feels itself to be part and parcel of every distant city. The individual wants the world, and his yearning for the world expresses itself in his everlasting thirst for news.

Life Without, Stimulates Life Within
This ravenous craving is one of the sublimest things about us. It is humanity's master passion. In his classical narrative of the emotion and excitement amidst which he at last found Livingstone, Stanley says that the one thing for which the lost explorer clamoured was the news. Stanley urged him to read his letters. "No, no," cried Livingstone, "the letters can wait a few minutes longer; tell me the news! How's the world getting on?" Then, buried in that dense African jungle, the two men sat for hours, whilst the one told the other of all the elections, the revolutions, the wars, the assassinations, the inventions, and the countless transformations that had overtaken the world whilst the lost man had been buried in the dark continent. Livingstone became a changed man. Fresh tides of vitality rushed into his frame; his haggard face shone with enthusiasm. "You have brought me new life!" he murmured repeatedly.

The incident is extraordinarily revealing. A man wants the world; a geographical fragment will not satisfy them; a hemisphere is not enough. A man may live in a hut or a humpy at the back of the bush, or at the other end of nowhere; but he will hunger for a cluster of far-off continents, and the romance of ten thousand distant islands. Stanley poured the world into the starved soul of Livingstone, and every fibre of his being tingled with new animation. A man's hunger for the world is a pulsation of the infinity, which stirs within us. "Thou hast set the world in their hearts," declares an ancient prophet. "God so loved the world . . .," the best known text in the Bible affirms. That being so, it is small wonder that man, made in his Maker's image, should share the same all-embracing and cosmopolitan passion. Nor, in view of man's rapacity for news, is it any wonder that Dr. Weymouth and all the later translators should have discarded the mediaeval word "gospel" in favour of its modern equivalent "good news." They speak of the good news of the love of God and the redemption of Christ; and that, as Tennyson observed in one of his beautiful love letters to Emily Sellwood, is the latest and greatest and best news of all.

F W Boreham

Image: A page from a recent copy of the Kent Courier, the first paper to which Boreham contributed in about 1877.