Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 129.djvu/57

 for playing Sunday tennis; when he disputes the amount of his bill for shredded wheat at a San Francisco hotel, the newspapers are after him like a gang of small boys after a stray dog.

Other examples of the same sort of hoodlumism on the part of newspapers come readily to mind. Recently the press howled similarly about the heels of Mr. Bouck White. When the inhabitants of the village where he was staving saw fit to tar-and-fcather him because of charges his young French wife had made against him, the press joined in the fun, and in lengt hy reports, satirically written, applied their own kind of tar-and-feathers. They did not. like him or his economic views, and they leaped at the chance to make him an object of ridicule and scorn. Plots on the part of the capitalist press? Not a bit of it. Average men on the rampage, using the weapon of misrepresentation because it is nearest at hand. There is no question that newspapers often give biased reports of strikes and other industrial conflicts. But, again, the charge of a conspiracy is too farfetched. The reason these things happen is that the press is a human institution, and that much capital is required to run a newspaper. Owners of papers mostly have large financial interests and positive views on political, economic, and other matters. Many of them are excessively timid about offending financially influential people, which usually means conservative people. Newspaper owners are not all equally conscientious about the fairness of their news. Editors and reporters find out that what pays is to write the sort, of newsstories which pleases the man at the top. In rare cases, of course, there may be actual corruption; but more often what puts bias into the news is merely the permeation of the staff by a sense of expediency. They put their jobs first and the truth second.

Often, oddly enough, the motives that lead to such misrepresentation of the news are praiseworthy. A newspaper proprietor believes that the unions are a menace. He believes that every good citizen ought to understand and oppose their methods. He wants to stir up the public. He thinks of himself as crusading against radicalism. He would be ashamed to print in his paper a word of news which would seem to favor the unions. He does not go so far as to pass the word down that the news must be distorted, for he does not believe in distortion. He simply wants to keep his paper clean of pro-union propaganda, as he fancies it. An item in the paper meets his eye; to him it seems radical; he explodes, and soon the staff is on its guard against another explosion. And then, perhaps, actual misrepresentation takes place. It is so easy! If even honest reporters, trying their best, find it difficult to exclude prejudice from their reports, how simple it is, when you don’t try too hard, to make a strikers’ meeting look like a failure when it really was a success, or to make Mr. William Z. Foster look redder than he is, or to pick out just the proper incidents to show how local public opinion looks upon the issues of the strike! How easy to make Senator A's denunciation of Senator B appear the well-justified act of a man sorely tried and at last giving vent to righteous indignation! And all because the men on the staff of the paper are weak, like other human beings, and because the owner fails to realize that the triumph of any cause, no matter how excellent, should be to him secondary to the duty of telling the truth.

There is much less outright, intimidation or domination of the newspapers by advertisers than is often supposed. Many a newspaper has defied department stores successfully. Domination of the press by the department stores