Page:Herr Glessner Creel - Tricks of the Press (1911).djvu/15



On a wager I will allow you to write about any given person the most libelous story you can conceive. Then we'll submit it to your attorney. We'll get his opinion that it is thoroughly and wholly libelous and will hold in any court. You may sign my name to it. Let me have it for five minutes. I'll agree to rewrite and change it so slightly that you'll not notice the difference—your attorney may, but you'll not. And I guarantee you couldn't get a five-cent piece from me in all the courts in the land.

But again I say—and I want to drive this home—that you are not acquainted with these delicate methods of twisting the English language; of saying one thing and being able to prove that you said another. You are not skilled in the trickery with which the newspaper man is familiar. You don't know how to detect the false from the true. You don't like for me to say that, but deep in your heart you know it's so.

Here's something else: You remember the killing of Young Lazarus Averbuch in Chicago. He was murdered in the home of Chief of Police Shippy. You were told that Averbuch was an anarchist; that he went to Shippy's home armed with a knife and a gun; that after a desperate personal encounter Shippy succeeded in shooting the anarchist, but not until the Chief had been severely wounded with a knife.

I saw Averbuch as he lay on a slab in the Cook county morgue. He was a boy 20 years old. A consumptive. Emaciated. Shippy was a man six feet two inches in eight, of splendid physique. He was an athlete, trained