I am preparing a paper for a conference next year about the father of investigative journalism, WT Stead.
During my researches, I came across a letter written by Stead about the virtues of newspapers. In 1917, some five years after his death, it was read to lunch guests in Darlington by Arnold S Rowntree, the chairman of the company that published the Northern Echo.
Don't be put off by the heavy-handed and insulting introduction. It is meant to be sympathetic to the plight of the masses (I think)... and the really delightful biblical bit comes right at the end:
"There is something inexpressibly pathetic in the dumbness of the masses of the people. Touch but a hair of the head of the well-to-do and forthwith you have his indignant protests in the columns of The Times.
But the millions who have to suffer the rudest buffers of ill-fortune, the victims of official insolence and the brutality of the better-off, they are as dumb as the horse, which you may scourge to death without it uttering a sound.
Newspapers will never really justify their claims to be the tribunes of the people until every victim of injustice sends in to the editorial sanctum their complaints of the injustice which they suffer.
When men cease to complain of injustice it is as if they sullenly confessed that God was dead. When they neglect to lay their wrongs before their fellows, it is as if they had lost faith in the reality of that collective conscience which Milton finely calls 'God's Secretary.'
For every appeal to the public is a practical confession of the faith that shuts out despair. When there is a prayer there is hope. To give utterance to the inarticulate moan of the voiceless is to let light into a dark place: it is almost equivalent to the enfranchisement of a class.
A newspaper is a daily apostle of fraternity, a messenger who bringeth glad tidings of joy, of a great light that has risen upon those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death."
Incidentally, if anyone wants to say anything about Stead, be my guest.
Source: John S Stephenson
