Declining Standard of Newspaper and Magazines.

I suggested earlier that it would he a mistake to regard the cultural struggle now going on as a straight fight between, say, what The ‘limes and the picture-dailies represent. To wish that a majority of the population will ever read The times is to wish that the human beings were constitutionally different, and is to fall into an intellectual snobbery. The ahihiy to read the decent weeklies is not a sine qua non of the the good life. It seems unlikely it any tune, and is certainly not likely in any period which those of us now alive are likely to know dial a majority in any class will have strongly intellectual pursuits. There are other ways of being in the truth. The strongest objection to the more trivial popular extcriainrnenls is not that they prevent their readers from becoming highbrow, hut ihat they make it harder for people without an intellectual bent to become wise in their own way.

The fact that changes in English society over the last fifty years have greatly increased the opportunities for further education available to the few people who will seek it has, therefore little direct compensatory bearing on the fact that concurrent changes are bringing about an increased trivialisation in productions for the majority. Most readers of a popular modern newspaper/magazine are unlikely ever to read a ‘quality’ paper but they used to read an old style weekly which was in some respects better than their newspaper / magazine. The new-style popular publications fail not because they are poor substitutes for The Times but because they are only bloodless imitations of what they purport to be, because they are pallid but slicked-up extensions even on nineteenth-century sensationalism, and a considerable decline from the sinewy sensationalism of Elizabethan vernacular writers. They can be accused (as can all else for which they stand as example : the thin bonhomie of many television programmes, the popular film, much in commercial radio) not of failing to be highbrow, but of not being truly concrete and personal.

The real battle is not between a standard newspaper read by a small class of people and offering intellectual fare on the one hand and a picture-daily read by the masses and doling out popular but cheap entertainment on the other, for at no time the readers of one can become those of the other. There is no need for it either. What is at stake is good sense and not intelleetualism. Increased opportunities for education have not brought about a corresponding decrease in newspapers and magazines of poor taste and low or no worth The fall in standards is all the more regrettable because they fail to transmit and spread even sensationalism of a superior order - as was in evidence in their nineteenth century counterparts or in vernacular writing in the Elizabethan period.