Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/483



JOURNALISM OF TO-DAY 441

But for the newspaper, crime and corruption would often ex- ist unmolested. A newspaper is a megaphone through which re- formers call a city to arms and improve conditions. Just as the physician seeks out a diseased organ, even though he has to cut through pus and false flesh, so the newspaper which lives up to its duty must lay bare the cankered spots of the body politic. There can be no question that the public should know about the vice and corruption in order to combat the evil. J. St. Loe Strachey, editor of The London Spectator, thus emphasized this point in his address on "Ethics of Journalism":

It is good to know, within reasonable limits, the evil that is being done in order that we may lay our plans and bring up our forces to check that evil.

When the Reverend C. M. Sheldon was editing The Capital at Topeka, Kansas, for a week in 1900 as Christ would have conducted a newspaper, he defined news as "anything in the way of daily events that the public ought to know for its devel- opment and power in a life of righteousness" and therefore excluded details of crime from the columns. In commenting on Dr. Sheldon's attitude toward stories of crime The World of New York City went even farther than Mr. Strachey in the matter of such publicity:

It is painful, but it is a fact that this world is a vast battlefield between good and evil. This being the case it is of the very highest importance that the armies of the good should have the completest, the most accurate and the quickest information as to what the armies of evil are about. The journalist is an officer in the Department of Intelligence of the Armies of the Good. And whether he is working for his pay or for a principle or for both or without any conscious motive whatever, or even with a bad motive, so long as he remains true to the fundamental canon of his creed "Publicity! Publicity! Publicity!" he is serving the cause of the good. Whenever from any motive, good or bad, he violates that canon he is a traitor to that cause, a giver of aid and comfort to the enemy.

LEGITIMATE 8UPPEESSION

The "reasonable limits" mentioned by Mr. Strachey impose an obligation upon the press not to fill its columns with filth and fraud for which there is no justification. In this respect American