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 324 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

render it wholly unnecessary. Take two recent instances. Was it not as absurd as it was outrageous to put into Professor Palm- er's mouth a general plea for flirting and the teaching of flirting in women's colleges ? The incident which he actually reported in his address, and his own version of it, would have served every legitimate journalistic need of "comic relief," of humor and playfulness. A venerable Harvard professor, a teacher of morals, had advised a college girl to "flirt hard" in order to convince her fond and uneasy parents that too much learning had not made her awkward, shy, alien to the bright world of "society" ! There was absolutely no "occasion" for exaggeration and falsification, even from the viewpoint of a reporter not overburdened with honesty and virtue. Again, was it not gratuitous to misrepresent Dr. Eliot's views as to the religion of the future? An intelligent summary of his address would have afforded plenty of food for lively comment. Was it not simply idiotic to fasten on him the parentage of a "new religion," and one hostile to what is essential in Christianity to boot? Had the city editors "assigned" to the job reporters of some education and sense, their "stories" would have been quite sufficiently interesting to thousands of readers, without a bit of sensationalism or perversion.

Take the minor forms of faking — the padding of news when the cables or dispatches happen to be too brief ; the eager exploita- tion of silly and ignorant reports of lectures of college professors on scientific, literary, or ethical subjects; the "doctoring" of re- ports in such a way as to convert rumor into alleged fact, tentative project into settled and imminent enterprise. Do such things lend a newspaper strength, interest, freshness, newsiness? Would they be missed if in their place the editors and writers furnished truthful items and bits of real science and real life? If the public is interested in astronomy, chemistry, biology, religious philos- ophy, the current literature and discussion of these subjects will provide an abundance of available matter. For yellow astronomy, yellow biology, yellow chemistry there is not the slightest need from a journalistic point of view. It cannot be pleasant to editors and publishers to see university after university establish a censor- ship over news ; to see an astronomical convention prepare a list