Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/337

 AN HONEST AND SANE NEWSPAPER PRESS 323

There are such newspapers, and they are reasonably prosper- ous, though there are no "millions in them." Cannot the big newspapers, those of national or wide circulation and prestige, be equally clean, sensible, and upright?

It is reported in newspaper circles that the publisher and editor of one of the biggest New York papers regards one of the smaller local papers as his ideal of what a daily newspaper should be, and that when he was asked why he did not practice the virtues so admired in his own organ, he replied : "I do not care to address a select committee; I wish to speak to the nation." The clear implication is that to gain and hold a nation's attention an editor must offend his own reason and conscience! But exactly what concessions, and how many of them, are essential to popularity? Granting that to attract tens of thousands of readers means giving them what they like and enjoy, the question is, what does the great public want ?

One of the vices of the big newspapers — at least of the ma- jority of them — is what is called "faking." Does the public demand fabrication, misrepresentation for the sake of effect, sen- sationalism in the news columns? The public does prefer the dramatic, the picturesque, the romantic, the extraordinary (and this fact has even been pressed into a defense of the extreme kinds of "yellow journalism"), but, surely, it is not a mere phrase that truth is stranger than fiction. This world of ours is anything but dull or prosaic; what with Persian and Turkish revolutions, counter-revolutions, and second revolutions ; what with Morocco, Spain, the British budget, the German and Austrian diplomatic coups; what with earthquakes, conquests of the air. North Pole discoveries — assuredly the newspapers have not, of late, been driven to manufacture news or color and spice their material! And what is true of any period is, in reality, true of all periods. There is never a dearth of dramatic and interesting news, of ma- terial for readable and stimulating issues.

"Faking" assumes many forms, and while not all of them are base and profoundly immoral, all of them are offensive and in- excusable. A little honesty, with a little intelligence in the heads of departments and in the reporters or special writers, would