Blame It On Steinski

Death of the Sun; E.B. White on vanishing newspapers

This is going to be one of those posts where I have to do a lot of explaining. Please hang in there.

The man

E.B. White was one of the greatest writers in the English language (Mt. Vernon, New York REPRESENT!). He wrote principally for the New Yorker magazine, when it was one of the best magazines in the English language. He also wrote, among other things, Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Elements Of Style. White is no longer with us, and the real New Yorker magazine vanished the day Tina Brown became the editor. Whatever. This is excerpted from The Second Tree From The Corner, a book of White’s short pieces. Many of these were New Yorker editorials, hence the first person plural form.

White makes reference to two characters – Archy, and Freddy the rat – both of whom appeared in a  cosmic series of stories known as Archy and Mehitabel, written by Don Marquis. Archy was a cockroach who communicated in blank verse, which he typed by leaping from the top of a manual typewriter and landing on his head on the desired key; Mehitabel was an alley cat with loose morals. They were pals.

Marquis’s stories of these two became world-famous (although maybe not so famous, or why would I feel the need to go into this long explanation?) through publication in the original New York Sun, a newspaper from WAY back in the day; a day so far back that New York City had several morning and evening newspapers. Imagine that.

Frank Munsey was an early wheeler-dealer in the world of publishing (among other talents), and was an advocate of shutting down newspapers and merging or eliminating them (think an earlier, rougher version of Rupert Murdoch or Si Newhouse).

Now that we’ve gotten most of the confusing details out of the way, here’s the piece of White’s I wanted to highlight:

Death of the Sun

The death of the Sun, and the obsequies, reminded us of the death of Freddy the rat. Freddy was a celebrated inhabitant of the Sun office, a hated contemporary of Archy’s. When Freddy died (following an encounter with a tarantula), they dropped him off the fire escape into an alley, with military honors. That is about what happens when a newspaper dies. Frank Munsey put it into words, and so did the tarantula. The tarantula kept taunting Freddy. “Where I step,” he said, “a weed dies.” Munsey said it a little more elegantly. “The New York evening-newspaper field,” he said in 1924, “is now in good shape through the elimination of an oversupply of evening newspapers. These evening newspapers have been eliminated as individual entities from New York journalism by myself alone.” Where I step, a rag dies.

The first duty of a newspaper is to stay alive. And the most important single fact about any newspaper is that it differs from the next newspaper and is owned by a different man, or group of men. This fact (the fact of difference) transcends a newspaper’s greatness, a newspaper’s honesty, a newspaper’s liveliness, or any other quality. The health of the country deteriorates every time a newspaper dies of strangulation or is wiped out in a mercy killing. The solemn fact of the absorption of the Sun by Scripps-Howard is not that we lose a conservative paper, or a funny paper, but that we lose a paper – one voice in the choir.

The final statement os the Sun’s publisher was written in such expensive language as almost to explain the demise of his sheet. Mr. Dewart said. “Mounting costs of production, unaccompanied by commensurate increases in advertising revenue, have made such course inevitable.” That kind of prose takes a heap of newsprint, plenty of typesetting. Archy could have said it quicker, and cheaper.

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