Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [91]
When citizens file incomplete returns, Pulitzer told readers, “they commit—to use the mildest term possible—a falsehood, both ridiculous and monstrous. And a much stronger term could be used without the danger of libel suits.” To prove its point, the Post and Dispatch reprinted the text of the taxpayers’ oath each day, with the headline WHAT TAX-DODGERS SWEAR AND SWALLOW. Pulitzer, who had lied in official oaths himself, told his readers that his paper’s reporting revealed “that honor and honesty, law and oath even, are palpably violated by some of our ‘eminently respectable’ and ‘most prominent’ citizens.”
The gas campaign yielded a victory. The city rejected the plan in late February. The tax exposé, however, failed. A grand jury was convened but decided that there was nothing to probe, because the state law was so full of loopholes.
Pulitzer concluded that reporting alone wouldn’t build circulation no matter how great the story, unless one trumpeted it. To that end, he sent his reporters out to interview citizens about the tax abuses and then published reports on what they thought. This ploy paid a double dividend. It permitted the newspaper to publicize its own gallant work—THE POST AND DISPATCH MEETS WITH GENERAL APPROVAL, read one headline—and it ensured that even people who didn’t read the paper learned of its contents. Pulitzer was convinced that news reporting could be combined with promotion, and he pushed his staff to do both. A typical headline would invariably include a subhead such as “Another Exposure by the Post and Dispatch.” By March, his efforts had secured 540 new readers, an outstanding growth rate that, if maintained, promised profits by the end of the year.
Treating every aspect of city life as unexplored territory, Pulitzer commissioned articles on who lived in the alleys and byways. “Tramps, Darkeys, Goats and Garbage” were what the reporter found. Pulitzer sent his staff to learn who owned the houses that were used as brothels: well-heeled citizens, it turned out. And he had the courage to shatter the myth, steadfastly believed by its citizens, that St. Louis was on its way to becoming the nation’s next great city. Instead Pulitzer revealed that it was being outstripped in population and economic growth by its rival, Chicago.
There was hardly anything Pulitzer would not try; he even picked fights with his competitors. He never missed a chance to criticize, embarrass, or simply poke fun at other newspapers, especially Hyde’s Republican, with which he competed for Democratic readers. Once, he laid a trap for the Star. The Post and Dispatch published a fake article, said to be a cable dispatch from Lahore, Pakistan, reporting a massacre of an English garrison at the hands of rebellious Afghan war prisoners. The Star copied this and published the story prominently in its second edition, with the credit “special cable to the Star.” The next day, the Post and Dispatch revealed on its front page how it had fooled the Star.
Pulitzer’s goal was to publish every day at least one article so intriguing, so unusual, so provocative that it would cause people to talk about it at the dinner table. Sensationalism was the most common way newspapers tried to attract attention. But for readers in St. Louis that was old hat. Even the staid Republican, for example, regularly ran stories likely to ruin breakfast for anyone with a sensitive stomach. On December 9, 1878, the day Pulitzer was buying the Dispatch, the Republican put on page one a report of a child’s beheading by a train in Nevada.