Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/347

 AN HONEST AND SANE NEWSPAPER PRESS 333

newspapers are repugnant to elementary sense and elementary propriety. There is no risk in renouncing them — none what- ever.

But what of the advertising columns? Can they be over- hauled, cleansed, and purified without loss and risk?

There are newspapers that are passionately denouncing gamb- ling in all its higher and lower forms (including the mining and stock-exchange varieties) in their editorial columns, that are call- ing loudly for rigorous legislation against demoralizing specula- tion while maintaining an open door, or several open doors and windows, for the benefit of all stock gamblers and get-rich-quick sharks. These are "moral" newspapers that publish quack adver- tisements and serve as media of vice and filth. Is is too much to ask them to sacrifice the revenue from such sources as these? Can the plea be entertained that "business is business," or that a newspaper office is not a moral censorship? Assuredly not. Fraud and vice in advertising should be put in the same category with pandering, swindling, obtaining money under false pretenses. White-slave traffickers might as well plead that they "must live" ! Society prescribes a moral level, and there is no operating below it. Newspapers, like builders of tenements, like money-lenders, must manage to "live" without fostering or breeding immorality and dishonesty. That they occasionally "expose" or condemn in their editorials the very things which they encourage by adver- tising, scarcely mitigates the offense. A pickpocket might con- sent to preach respect for property and law once a week, but we should not give him a license on those terms.

I said above that no risks or sacrifices are involved in a policy of honesty and sanity for our newspapers, great or small. The assertion needs but one qualification — there would be no permanr- ent sacrifice. Temporary loss there might be in a given case, as in rejecting improper advertisements, or in losing the patronage of an industrial Bourbon and arrogant plutocrat. But in the end independence, intelligence, reasonable courage, integrity, and effi- ciency bring their reward in journalism as in everything else. The investment pays. And editors who are so ready to trust public opinion in political and industrial controversies should be