Some years ago—as lately as the presidential contest between Cleveland
and Blaine—it was a cast-iron tradition of journalism that personal
defamation was a necessary and effective aid to success. True, every
newspaper deprecated it in a general way, and rose at it, shrieking
when it hurt; but nearly all practised it and always had done so.
Every political campaign was a disgraceful welter of detraction and
calumniation. To snout out a candidate’s “personal record,” and if it
was found clean befoul it—that was what the partisan editor regarded as
his first and highest duty to his party. The besmirching of candidates
was a tradition sacred and inviolable; it is now a dead practice, and
we have probably seen the last campaign of mud-slinging. The thing
might advantageously have been stopped at any time. The people did
not demand it; they were as decent then as now. The case was that
newspaper men did not know their business; and in respect of many other
disreputable survivals they do not know it now. I could name a full
dozen newspaper traditions now in full and strenuous vitality that are
as needless and mischievous as the vilification of candidates. They
will all die hard, but die they must, for the world will finally fall
into the sun, which will consume them.
V
That the newspapers might with advantage to the community be made
a deal cleaner is a proposition hardly open to question. In my
judgment this could be done without loss to their owners, but that
is an irrelevant consideration. It is not permitted to them to urge
that a decenter course would ruin them, for the community is under
no obligation to make publication of newspapers profitable. To the
editorial argument, “I have to live,” the answer is, “Yes, but not in
that way.” That plea is precisely as valid when made by the burglar.
Every one who has not committed a capital crime has a right to live,
but no one has a right to live by mischief.
Clean newspapers if enterprising, honest and clever do thrive; so
what is really meant by “the right to live” is the right to live in
luxury—the right to a great income, instead of a smaller one. There
is no such right. If there were it would spare from condemnation the
grocer who sells poisonous goods because there is a demand for them,
the noctivagant Dago crying his rotten tamales, the quack doctor in
pursuit of his patient’s health. There is no such right.
Charles Dudley Warner said, and it is repeated after him with tireless
iteration, that nearly every publisher of a newspaper is making a
better paper than he can afford to make. That is true, provided (1)
that good newspapers are not so well supported as bad, and (2) that
publishers cannot “afford” to be poor, or only moderately wealthy. Some
of the best and greatest men in the world, including Jesus Christ, have
thought they could afford to be poor. Poverty is not dear at the price
that one pays for it; it is dirt-cheap. Any one can afford it, and many
can not afford to be without it.
The right to publish news _because_ it is news has no basis in
law nor in morals; nor dare its most intrepid protagonist assert his
claim in consistent practice. Every newspaper man learns almost daily
of occurrences so lurid, of sins so “sensational,” of crimes so awful
that they have immunity from print. The world is not only a good deal
better but a good deal worse than it looks through any newspaper.
An editor has constantly to “draw the line”; he can draw it where
he pleases—nobody is compelling him to “go far” in publication of
immorality. To assert a right to do so; to affirm other compulsion
than curiosity—that is dishonest. It is dishonest to unload his
responsibility upon the shoulders of even the sinners whose sins he
relates. They break the laws of decency, but they do not compel him to.
They do not force him to expose for sale narratives of their offenses;
they prefer that he do not. He has no mandate to make the way of the
transgressor hard: we have laws for that. He has only the mandate of
his pocket; if in obeying it he damage or disgust or distress the best
persons among whom he lives he can not plead the profit that he makes
in gratification of the others. It is no way desirable that they be
gratified.