"Whenever, in the newspaper profession, a man rises up who is original, strong, and bold enough to make his opinions a matter of consequence to the public, there will be personal journalism; and whenever newspapers are conducted only by commonplace individuals whose views are of no consequence to anybody, there will be nothing but impersonal journalism."[1]
There was nothing erratic about Dana personally. The men who knew him not only adniired but loved him. He had none of Greeley's passion for reform and although he was perhaps a more profound student than Godkin he had rather a disdain for the seriousness with which Godkin and his associates viewed life. He was accused of not having a high moral outlook; he retaliated by expressing his abhorrence of sham.
It is a strange thing that this man who had such a genius for journalism should have arrived so late in life, but the answer probably is that he loved his books and loved culture more than he really loved success.
Dana's judgment of personal journalism was more than justified by the career of the men who succeeded the three great personal journalists, Greeley, Raymond and Bennett.
The younger Bennett, as he was called, has but recently died. It is interesting that he made his paper the organ—as far as there could be an organ—of the very people who had so publicly expressed their contempt for his father and the New York Herald. If the paper had a fatal defect as a journal it was this very catering to the vanity of snobocracy. It was the younger Bennett's own weakness. He cluttered the office of the Paris Herald with useless and impoverished nobility and in the desire to make a "gentleman's" paper he treated the news from
- ↑ New York Sun, December 6, 1872.
