Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/335

 IS AN HONEST AND SANE NEWSPAPER PRESS POSSIBLE?

BY AN INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST Chicago, 111.

It was once declared to be impossible to indict a nation. Nations have often been indicted sweepingly and scathingly — for example, the British by Matthew Arnold, Kipling, and Wells; the Americans by the editors and contributors of the London Academy and the Saturday Review — but these attempts have but emphasized the "impossibility" of the process. Such indictments are unfair, idle, and superficial. No one takes them seriously, not even the passionate f ramers of them.

It is equally "impossible" to indict the newspaper press of any country. The American newspaper has, indeed, been indicted often enough, even by men who really know the newspaper "from the inside." But the Socratic method would force these accusers to make so many admissions of a character favorable to American journalism — to pay it so many compliments — that precious little would be left of their wholesale charges of deterioration, men- dacity, venality, recklessness, sensationalism, etc.

The truth, of course, is that the American newspaper of today has serious vices, faults, shortcomings, as well as great virtues; that it has gained in some directions, improved some of its work, and lost in other directions. The same newspaper arouses your enthusiasm at one time, so that you write, or are tempted to write, to the editor warmly thanking him for his noble efforts, and provokes your anger and disgust at another time, so that you are ready to denounce it at the breakfast table as a poisoner of the public mind and an enemy of decency and truth.

However, it is hardly necessary in this day and generation to dwell on the power of the press, the value of the publicity it secures, the inestimable services it renders to all movements for political and social reform. What league, organization, settle- ment, improvement club would dispense with newspaper aid?

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