Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/429

Rh the ten years ending about January 1, 1914, was the period of the greatest ethical advance made by this nation in any decade.

Another change was what might be called feminizing the newspaper. To a certain extent it was doubtless the reaction of the suffrage movement, or, to be more exact, the movement whereby women widened their activities, social, commercial, and political. The time came when every page, possibly with the exception of that devoted to sports, had to be written so that the intelligent woman could understand it. Even the advertising columns were prepared to appeal to women as merchants learned that the housewife made the purchases for the home. Dorothy Dix in a journalism lecture at New York University emphasized this point when she said:

"Women spend the money of the world. Except for his vices and his outside clothes, the average man does not handle a penny of the money he earns. His wife spends it. She buys the groceries, the furniture, the piano, the jewelry, everything that is advertised in the newspapers, and the advertisers, of course, support the paper. Therefore, surprising as it may seem to the uninitiated, it is the women readers and not the men who are considered first in the make-up of a paper."

The period also saw numerous regulations of the press by both state and national legislation. While most of the bills presented, and a great majority of those passed by legislators, related to advertising, some were aimed at the reportorial and editorial columns, especially in handling the news about crime and in the attacks on personal character. More drastic libel laws were passed by numerous States. In several instances, the courts held that newspapers, in printing privileged matter such as the reports of divorce and criminal cases, must not overemphasize such accounts either by sensational headlines or by emphasis upon sordid details in order to increase street sales, and construed such action as constructive malice. Most of the regulations, however, affecting the newspapers came from the Postal Department.

These three changes were so closely interwoven, both objectively and subjectively, that it is almost impossible to separate