Month: December 2008

formation and structure of public opinion

Those interested in the history of journalism should stop obsessing about Walter Lippmann and his ponderous, abstract ruminations in his book Public Opinion (1922).  Unbiased reporting of public opinion in the U.S. began as a business plan for a new magazine that reprinted quotations from other news sources.

The weekly Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Summary of the Public Press on all Important Current Topics first issued in Washington, D.C. on April 15, 1886.  It compiled short excerpts from newspapers, periodicals, public speeches, and other public documents of timely interest (see example page). Public Opinion presented itself as serving an important public function, and it positioned itself as a high-status periodical.  Most high-status periodicals about this time cost 25-35 cents per issue.[1] Public Opinion, however, cost only 10 cents for a single issue or $3 for a year’s subscription to the weekly.  A major cost advantage for Public Opinion was its acquiring of content for free from other periodicals.

Public Opinion’s claim to be unbiased was central to its value added.  On its first non-advertising page, Public Opinion declared that its purpose was “to impartially reflect public opinion.”  It stated that it would print excerpts “without bias toward any political party, commercial enterprise, religious sect, or contending influences.”  With each excerpt, it listed the source, along with a categorization of the source’s political orientation, e.g. Harper’s Weekly (Ind.), Indianapolis Journal (Rep.), N.Y. World (Dem.). The claim to be unbiased and impartial gave aggregate value to the collection of excerpts.  Without a claim to be unbiased and impartial, a collection of excerpts would just be an awkward and disconnected way for a periodical to express its viewpoint.  With its distinctive claim of impartiality and unbiasedness, Public Opinion came to be one of the most important weeklies in the U.S. between 1885 and 1905.[2]

Public Opinion had no personal voice.  The publication described its publisher as the Public Opinion Company.  It provided a company address, but did not list specific persons as the company’s officers. The publication did not indicate the real person of its publisher and editor.  Having no personal identification helped to support the publication’s claim to being unbiased.

The founder and editor of Public Opinion was Frank Presbrey. He was a leader in the early advertising industry.  From 1878-1879, Presbrey served as publicity person for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.  From 1879 to 1886 he served as the advertising manager for two different newspapers.  He worked as founder, publisher, and editor of Public Opinion from 1886 to 1894. By the mid-1890s, Presbrey was writing promotional booklets.  In 1896, he founded an advertising agency, The Frank Presbrey Co.  The Frank Presbrey Co. became a leading Manhattan-based advertising agency.  Among other activities, it developed special-purpose marketing magazines and placed steamship, railroad, resort, hotel, and travel advertising.[3]

To Far Away Vacation Lands exemplifies Presbrey’s style as an author of promotional booklets.  The text spans thirty-two pages with multiple high-quality photoengravings per page.  In 1896 it appeared as an article in Harper’s Magazine.  Subsequently nearly a half million copies of it were published as a separate booklet made of fine paper.[4]  The booklet has Frank Presbrey’s name under the title, but it does not provide a formal, specific indication of corporate sponsorship. In this way it differs from Presbrey’s booklet The Land of the Sky (distributed between 1888 and 1895), which describes scenery on the line of the Western North Carolina Railroad.  That booklet states on the front cover, “Compliments Pass. Dept. Southern Railway.”  A textual indication of sponsorship of To Far Way Vacation Lands appears on the second page of the text:

the great ocean steamships of modern days, such as those of the North German Lloyd fleet, are so luxurious and so replete with all the comforts and conveniences of life, that to spend a week upon one is like putting up at the Waldorf or some palatial hotel.

The second page contains two subsequent complimentary references to the North German Lloyd Steamship Company. By the last page of the pamphlet, a reader who considered the booklet’s sponsorship could hardly doubt that it was the North German Lloyd Steamship Company. References on the last page of the booklet demonstrate the objective soft-sell:

The lines which the North German Lloyd S.S. Company maintain between Bremen and India, Australia, China, and Japan are as near perfect as money and experience can make them. … [final sentence in the booklet] If you cross on any one of the superb express steamers of the North German Lloyd or on any one of the stately ships of the German Mediterranean Service, you will be sure to have a delightful voyage “To Far-Away Vacation Lands.”[5]

Unlike Presbrey’s Public Opinion, To Far Away Vacation Lands did not explicitly and vigorously assert that it provided an impartial and unbiased viewpoint.  Claiming to offer an impartial and unbiased view wouldn’t provide a good business model for narrowly focused travel booklets.

Presbrey was more successful with corporate promotional ventures than with his own Public Opinion Company.  Newspaper and periodical publishers, educators, judges, and clergy praised Public Opinion.  However, Public Opinion, which began every issue with three full pages of advertising, never achieved sufficient circulation to be a significant business success.  Presbrey sold his ownership of Public Opinion when he left it in 1894.[6]

Presbrey subsequently produced many booklets that combined information and company-sponsored advocacy.  Acadia and Thereabouts (1895) promoted travel to Nova Scotia.  The Plant System, which offered passenger rail service to Nova Scotia and also ran hotels, apparently sponsored the booklet.  The Plant System also sponsored Florida, Cuba, & Jamaica (1897?), which promoted travel to its titular locations.  Presbrey’s Glimpses of colonial days (1897) promoted travel to Virginia.  Old Dominion Steamship Company sponsored it.  The city of Buffalo (1895) touted the city in which Presbrey was born, A Summer paradise touted travel to the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, and To the Orient in search of rugs (1895) apparently promoted New York rug-sellers.  Presbrey’s weightest nineteenth-century work was The Southland: an exposition of the present resources and development of the South (1898). This was a 190-page book filled with facts documenting the economic potential of the South.  It had many photoengravings as well as a detailed route-map of the Southern Railway and its connections. A dedication standing alone on a prefatory page declared:

This volume is dedicated to the people of the South by the Southern Railway Company, whose interests are identical with those of the states traversed by its lines.

The Second Vice-President of the Southern Railway, which of course sponsored the book, immediately upon its publication sent a gift copy to the library of the University of California at Berkeley.   This copy of that important historical book remains in that university library today.

Presbrey’s most widely known work is a 648-page historical account of the development of advertising. Entitled The history and development of advertising, it was published in the first half of 1929.[7]  The book is a rich source of facts and examples from advertising history. The viewpoint is strongly biased toward the social importance and moral value of advertising. The preface declares:

That advertising has been a substantial factor in the upbuilding of prosperity and in widening the horizon and increasing the happiness of the masses is beyond discussion. … A nation is just as enterprising and prosperous as is its advertising. … It is hoped that the history and development of advertising will prove interesting and inspirational not only to the men and women employed in it but [also] to those who recognize its potency for advancement and development.

Presbrey’s history of advertising begins with Babylon:

We owe our knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics to an advertisement. … [the Rosetta stone] advertised Ptolemy as the true Son of the Sun, the Father of the Moon, and the Keeper of the Happiness of men.

In his history, the forerunners of advertisers were the heroes of the Middle Ages:

When it came to pulling Europe out of the Dark Ages it was business men, the class of men who today are the advertisers, who did it.  Formation by them of the Hanseatic League in the thirteenth century gave us the beginning of modern civilization. [8]

About five months after Presbrey’s The history and development of advertising was published, the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 occurred.  Over the next four years, GDP fell 46% and advertising expenditure dropped 54%. Presbrey died in 1936. Hence he did not live to see the world climb out of the Great Depression. He of course also never got to see Google’s search-advertising business foster world-wide development and dissemination of knowledge, satisfy billions of persons’ specific information needs, and create huge economic value.

After decades of business success, unbiased reporting appears to be failing as a business model. Nonetheless, it has been astonishingly successful as a noble ideal.

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Notes:

[1] In 1893, “the two most prestigious ‘quality’ [U.S.] magazines, Century and Harper’s, sold for 35 cents a copy. Their competitors, Scribner’s, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly and Cosmopolitan, cost 25 cents.” In mid-1880s Ladies Home Journal rapidly gained circulation at 10 cents a copy. See David Reed (1997), The popular magazine in Britain and the United States, 1880-1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) p. 66.

[2]  Frank Luther Mott (1938), A History of American Magazines (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) v. 4, p. 64. The Literary Digest, a weekly formed in 1890 upon a model similar to Public Opinion, merged with Public Opinion in 1906. By the 1920s, only the Saturday Evening Post surpassed the Literary Digest in circulation. The Literary Digest failed in 1938. Its circulation had been decline from the early 1930s and it  badly missed in its prediction of the 1936 presidential election.

[3] Biographical material on Frank Presbrey include the entry for him in Joseph Waite Presby (1918), William Presbrey, of London, England, and Taunton, Mass., and His Descendants, 1690-1918 (Tuttle Company); a short biography in Printers’ Ink, Feb. 23, 1921, p. 126; and a profile in Pearson’s Magazine, v. 26, n. 6 (Dec., 1911) pp. 771-4.  Presbrey has been inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame.  Presbrey helped to develop the Boy Scouts’ Boys’ Life magazine and received the Scouts’ highest award,  the Silver Buffalo Award.  Presbrey died on Oct. 10, 1936 at age 81.

[4] See Presbrey, Frank (1929), History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday) pp. 432-3.

[5]  I found To Far Away Vacation Lands, and Acadia and Thereabouts, and The Land of the Sky in the Library of Congress’s collection. Information on the other titles is from WorldCat entry meta-data.

[6] Mott (1938) p. 650.

[7] A copy in the Library of Congress is stamped JUN 15 1929.

[8] Presbrey (1929) p. 22.  Previous quote from id. pp. 2-3.

raising ordinary men’s social value in ancient Jerusalem

About 2750 years ago in Jerusalem, a public policy analyst reportedly delivered to the elite male governmental rulers a message understood to be from God:

“What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?” says the Lord GOD of hosts.  The LORD said: “Because the daughters of Jerusalem are haughty and walk with outstretched necks, glancing wantonly with their eyes, mincing along as they go, tinkling with their feet; the Lord will smite with scabs the heads of the daughters of Jerusalem, and the LORD will make them naked with their genitals exposed. In that day the Lord will take away the finery of the anklets, the headbands, and the crescents; the pendants, the bracelets, and the scarfs; the headdresses, the armlets, the sashes, the perfume boxes, and the amulets; the signet rings and nose rings; the festal robes, the mantles, the cloaks, and the handbags; the garments of gauze, the linen garments, the turbans, and the veils.  Instead of perfume there will be stench; and instead of a sash, a rope; and instead of well-set hair, baldness; and instead of a rich robe, a girding of sackcloth; instead of beauty, shame.  Your men shall fall by the sword and your mighty male warriors die in battle.  And Jerusalem’s gates shall lament and mourn; ravaged, Jerusalem shall be knocked to the ground.  And seven women shall take hold of one man in that day, saying, ‘We will eat our own bread and wear our own clothes, only let us be called by your name; take away our disgrace.'”[1]

In prosperous times, some mighty men apparently provided some women in Jerusalem with fine jewelry and rich clothing.  When six out of seven men had been killed fighting for Jerusalem, ordinary men’s mate value rose significantly.[2] Men were no longer required to provide even basic goods to a wife.  Providing the social status of a wife (a new name) and being an instrument for producing children (“take away our disgrace”) was sufficient for a woman to want a man.

A societal catastrophe isn’t a good way to raise the value of ordinary men.

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Read more:

Notes:

[1] Isaiah 3:15-4:1. The English is my translation, which is similar to the copyrighted New Revised Standard version.  The Hebrew and many English translations freely available at BlueLetterBible have informed my translation.  In the spirit of biblical charity, I freely offer my translation to all as part of the public domain.  Apart from the long list of luxuries, the text has the line parallelism characteristic of biblical poetry.  That shift between poetry and prose contributes to the meaning.  But because the narrow column for quoted text on this blog breaks the line structure and obscures the lineation, I’ve organized the whole passage in prose style.

[2] Isaiah’s call to prophesy is reported in the Book of Isaiah to have been the year that King Uzziah died, which was probably 742 BGC. Jerusalem was relatively prosperous under Uzziah and Judah’s next king, Jotham. But under the subsequent king, Ahaz, the northern kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Aram (Damascus) besieged Jerusalem. The second part of the quoted text may indicate conditions during such a siege.

psychodrama: Twelfth Night at the Shakespeare Theatre

Twelfth Night, a Shakespearean popular favorite, brings happiness to everyone except a most austere Puritan.  The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Twelfth Night delivers laughter, fine acting, and beautiful poetry on its way to the concluding three marriages.  That a person carried along in this drama might be left with a vague awareness of more doesn’t subtract from its pleasure.

The first two scenes set the tone of the production.  In the first, the self-sensitive Orsino, a duke of deliria, extravagantly plays his own love.  Christopher Innvar as Orsino nicely builds to the end of the scene when Orsino, a self-consciously manly man, thrills to a high charge of erotic receptivity. The Duke might have “sweet beds of flowers” and “bowers” in his court’s gardens.  But here the audience cannot doubt that these are women’s bodily “sweet perfections” within his own mind.

In the second scene, Viola, ashore after a ship-wreck, converses with the ship’s captain. Director Rebecca Bayla Taichman chose not to have other sailors with the captain. Consistent with that choice, Viola (Samantha Soule) and the captain (Todd Scofield) meet each other as friends.  This relation contrasts effectively with the social formality of the preceding court scene.  This scene, however, could have indicated shipmates’ struggles both against the sea and for oneself amidst the sinking crowd.  It could have highlighted an exchange between a mercenary captain and a shrewdly manipulative Viola. But this Twelfth Night prioritizes inner structures over outer ones.

The set and various metatheatrical gestures suggest an enveloping psychological drama.  Set Designer Riccardo Hernandez has filled the stage with a gleaming, cresting wave that sweeps up a stone edifice. The wave and the acting space as a whole are enclosed on three sides with flat panels painted with huge, red roses on a black background.  These roses, Taichman mentioned in a panel discussion, came to her in a dream.  To accent particular emotions, rose petals waft down from above or tango dancers appear, move across the set, and disappear.  Highlighting the fictionality of the action, Sir Andrew at one point admonishes the orchestra to quell its dueling music, and Malvolio breaks the story-world to brush off the “hidden” group watching him respond to the letter that he thinks is from Olivia.  In the concluding scene, Viola/Cesario visibly suppresses laughter at the entrance of the disheveled and distraught Malvolio.  Fabian remarks of the plot against Malvolio, “If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”  Twelfth Night as a whole is an improbable fiction. From its brief, beginning image of Viola hanging upside-down high in black space, this production suggests that the drama is really psychological.

Veanne Cox brilliantly projects Olivia’s inward turmoil.  My favorite moment in her acting was at the end of Act I.  Having fallen in love with Orsino’s messenger Cesario, Olivia soliloquizes, “Even so quickly may one catch the plague?”  She ominously draws out the “g” in “plague.”  Then, three lines later, she triumphantly and madly decrees, “let it be!”  A plague in London in 1593 closed all the theaters and killed perhaps 10,000 persons.  When Twelfth Night was first performed about 1601, the plague remained a real and constant fear.  Low characters call for plagues indiscriminately: “A plague o’ these pickle-herring!”  For Countess Olivia, only a supreme love could be figured so finely with the horror of plague.

This production obscures the imaginative relation between Maria and Olivia.  Nancy Robinette, who is not short, plays Maria, who in various ways is described as short. This minor issue of physical stature is easily finessed. A major issue, at least according to one sadly neglected but profoundly insightful analysis, is Maria’s conceptual size. Cesario’s meeting with Olivia is effected by Olivia saying to Malvolio, “Let him approach. Call in my gentlewoman.”  Malvolio exits, Maria enters, and then Cesario enters.  Cesario then queries, “The honorable lady of the house, which is she?” Like many other editors and directors, Taichman blunts Cesario’s doubling of Maria and Olivia by adding three other attendants to the tableau that Cesario sees. No textual warrant exists for these attendants.  More importantly, Cesario’s inability to distinguish between Maria and Olivia is a crucial, status-shaking starting point for these two characters divergent trajectories in the conceptual space of will and epiphany.  Maria continually asserts her will to increasingly vicious ends.  She receives no place in the final scene. Olivia, broken in sorrow, becomes in the end the fool’s “good madonna.”  That is a figure of psychological drama quieted and emptied, replaced with a personalized but cosmic order.

Washington, D.C. playgoers know that Floyd King rules as a fool.  He’s in fine fooling in this production.  Rich Foucheux plays a funny but narrow Sir Toby.  Tom Story delivers a brilliant, rollicking, outlandish Sir Andrew.  He repeatedly drew audible responses from the audience.  King’s fool makes good fun with both of them, as well as with Ted van Griethuysen in the role of Malvolio.  The fool connects different scenes and contrasting characters in a way that complements the concluding marriages.  Despite being a raspy, floppy fool, King sings clearly and beautifully.  If it turns out that he is also a strong dancer, the Shakespeare Theatre Company should fear that he might head off to New York to seek a more lucrative career in Broadway musicals.

In this production, the madness of love seems to be not much more than the typical cases of a urban psychotherapist.  The matches that end the play are unpropitious for enduring, healthful, joyful love.  Characters jump each other with a groping, desperately kissing love that reminds me of high school.  Orsino disrobes Viola/Cesario with a boy’s wrap-top fantasy (yup, I’ve thought of it).  One might say that they are adults regressing.  But most persons consider psychoanalysis to be at best an odd form of story-comfort and at worst an absurd fraud.  Floyd King exquisitely times a closing gesture for the fool, a gesture that echoes similar gestures throughout the play.  Sometimes a meal is just a meal.  Interests and desires, however, may not always be this small.

The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Twelfth Night displays the restless heart in everyone.  It makes for a fine night’s entertainment.

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Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, directed by Rebecca Bayla Taichman, is playing at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harmon Hall from December 2, 2008 to January 4, 2009. The production, which the McCarter Theater is co-sponsoring, will be performed in Princeton, New Jersey, at the Matthews Theater from March 9 to March 29, 2009.  This review is based on the performance on December 5.