Mark Twain asks for "help"

Did the New York Sun point to the future?

You have to wonder exactly how far Mark Twain’s razor-sharp tongue was in his cheek when he sat down with the editor of the New York Sun one afternoon some years ago and asked for his “help”

In an 1870 piece called “Interviewing The Interviewer” - released in “Who Is Mark Twain?” a small book of previously unpublished pieces from 2009 - he includes this wry gem of a set-up sentence, likely with a twinkle in his eye and a puff of his cigar:

“A high and noble thing it is to be the chief editor of a great metropolitan two-cent journal and mould the opinions of the washer-women and achieve the applause of the bone and sinew of the back streets and the cellars. And when that editor is gifted with the endowment which we term Genius (Ed. note: Notice his Capital “G') verily his position is almost godlike. I felt insignificant in the company of Charles A. Dana - and who wouldn’t?”

News? TMZ catches New England Patriots’ coach Mike Vrabel shopping over the weekend.

By then the author of what was the best-selling book of his lifetime “Innocents Abroad,” Twain was becoming a well-known writer. But, deviously perhaps, he took a genuflecting pose before Dana and asked for his “help.”

“…being a journalist in a small way myself…(I) beg, at the fountain-head of American journalism for a few little drops of that wisdom which has enabled you to confer splendor upon a profession which groped in darkness till your Sun flamed above its horizon.”

Either Dana hadn’t read “Innocents Abroad” or was so full of self-importance - (ah, to think of my previous newspaper editors who would fit that description) - he wasn’t really listening. He was ready, however, to pontificate.

“My son, unto none but you would I reveal the secret. You have paid me the homage which the envious multitude of so-called journalists deny me and you shall be rewarded…Listen. The first great end and aim of journalism is to make a sensation. If you have none, make one.

“Seize upon the prominent events of the day, and clamor about them with a maniacal fury that shall compel attention. Vilify everything that is unpopular - harry it, hunt it, abuse it, without rhyme or reason, so that you get a sensation out of it.

“Laud that which is popular - unless you feel sure that you can make it unpopular by attacking it. Hit every man that is down - never fail in this, for it is safe.”

Around 1870, the New York Sun regularly competed circulation-wise, with the New York Daily News, the Herald, the Tribune and the New York Times, sometimes winning. It’s not hard to see why.

Writing as someone who escaped the newspaper world a quarter century ago but still reads a few on a regular basis, it troubles me to see how many of our current media outlets - newspapers, magazines, TV stations, podcasts, talk radio - follow Dana’s recommendations, uh, dare we say religiously?

Whether it’s TMZ sending a photographer to track a disgraced NFL football coach all the way to Utah to snap a shot of him buying a track suit for his wife or a three-day front page story with gory details about an overwrought mom in the midst of an ugly divorce killing her two children, ages 7 and 6, then trying to slit her own throat and driving to her aunt’s place in Vermont to tell her what she did. Or maybe it was a stop-action, freeze-frame photo of the Secretary of Health and Human Services being whisked away by bodyguards from the Hilton hotel the other night, his wife, actress Cheryl Hines in a ball gown, about eight steps behind, trying to run to keep up, these are the kinds of things that are thrown in our face and up on our screens every single day.

Is it news? Or is it, as Dana told Twain, “a sensation”? Have we reached a place in American journalism and media where we can’t tell the difference? There should be a difference, shouldn’t there?

Mark Twain wrote this piece 156 years ago. It doesn’t sound like it, does it? But it should, right? It should. Sadly, it doesn’t. Seems like he wrote it yesterday.