Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/339

 AN HONEST AND SANE NEWSPAPER PRESS 325

of "fakes" and warn readers against attaching the sHghtest im- portance to newspaper stories about them.

But to come to a more serious newspaper vice — one of which pubHc-spirited men and women complain most bitterly — the dis- honest treatment of political, industrial, social, and other "con- tentious" subjects in the news columns. A newspaper is entitled to its opinions and to its own interpretation of facts. But the public is, above all, entitled to the facts — to the truth. It has practically no other source of information; it depends almost entirely on the press for knowledge of the facts, whether the question be one of national, state, or municipal politics, educa- tional, industrial, or moral import. We hear much about the in- fluence of public opinion, the rights and interests of the com- munity, the impartiality and soundness of the public judgment in any case which has received full discussion. It is perfectly true that there is no higher and juster court than enlightened public opinion, and no better government than government by discussion. But public opinion cannot become enlightened and discussion cannot be profitable where the press perverts, distorts, suppresses, juggles with the facts. And there are times and occasions — campaigns, strikes, prosecutions — when the news- papers, far from working, directly or indirectly, for righteous- ness, for sanity, for substantial justice, seem to be desperately striving to darken counsel and make confusion worse confounded. Miss Jane Addams once deplored the "disappearance of the 'third party' " — the public — in connection with a particularly tangled labor dispute that seemed to resist all attempts at com- promise, and she was forced to lay much of the blame for the dangerous situation at the door of the local newspapers. They would not and could not give the facts; they would not and could not guide the public to reasonable conclusions. At such times the "publicity" of the newspapers is worse than useless ; it is positively harmful. It adds fuel to the flame; it intensifies prejudice, passion, misunderstanding.

In England a clever writer has said that what the "legitimate" is to the lurid and crude melodrama, the news section of the great papers is to the editorial page. In the reports, in other words,