Page:Oregon Exchanges volume 7.djvu/143

 a ham. or the driver of a grocery truck ran away with his boss’s wife, the judge might feel differently about it.

“And lastly we are assured that he has been a friend of order and an enemy of crime, just as though it were quite the usual thing for judges to be enemies of order and friends of crime. Of course this Main street conclusion which was written by one of the Babbitts will not be detected by the others, but it probably answers the question that our correspondent asks.

“Indeed, why should any intelligent human being read such vacuitiesi And yet this restating of the obvious con stitutes by far the larger part of the editorial utterances of our great dailies. Now and then a brilliant star like Menck en or the late Frank Cobb will break through the dreary murk that enshrouds editorial utterance to delight, instruct and dazzle, but such comets are almost as rare as Ha1ley’s. “In the main if one is looking for sublimated asininity he need go no fur ther than the editorial columns of our great dailies. One may find good English written about nothing. Mr. Bryan's writings are fine examples of this. But when one turns to the writings now under discussion not even that virtue is dis coverable. “The editorials of Horace Greeley and Charles A. Dana were perhaps too per sonal not to oflfend good taste, but what a spring in the wilderness they were to the insipid, illogical and barren stuff that is now ground out and printed by the great dailies! Indeed, almost any of them on the same subject are so barren and inno cent of either information or wit that they might have been written by the same Babbitt. The only discoverable difference is that in their patentable paucity of ideas one is sometimes a little more in tense in its oppressive dullness. “Perhaps the trouble lies in the very nature of modern journalism. Charles A. Dana, Horace Greeley and even Col. Wat terson usually knew what they were writ ing about. They brought to the work in tense conviction, a living interest and usually some dependable knowledge. The editorial of today scarcely rises in its loftiest conception beyond the pot boiler stage. The fellow who writes it must fill the space and he therefore falls easily into the wearied jargon of Main street with all of its stereotypes of ideas——or the lack of them—and their expression. Hav ing usually neither interest in the subject nor much knowledge about it he proceeds to illuminate all that which was perfectly apparent before. This is, perhaps, his reason why most people skip the edi torial page and hasten on to the ball score or to learn what has happened to Andy and Min.” All of which means that Om-:o0N Ex CHANGES believes that whenever editors themselves regard their editorials seri ously and put into them the same care and thought and preparation that they lavish on other departments of the paper, they attract the readers they are meant to attract and produce something of the effect they were intended to produce. Getting back to the definition given above, the writer of this article believes that the trouble with editorials that are not read is, that they occur in a news paper whose editorial columns are filled with articles that are not the “personal expression of the editor.” They are not, therefore, strictly speaking, editorials. They may express the views of some anonymous eastern syndicate writer; they may represent what he thinks the public would like to read; they may represent what the editor thinks some force in the community would like to have him say; or they may represent merely so much “copy” to fill the yawning columns. They lack sincerity. Why should anyone read them? A single sincere expression, clear-cut, based on adequate study and thought, is worth more than columns of filler. [31