The American Newspaper | Page 8

be remarked that editorial discrimination
has not kept pace with the facilities. We are overpowered with a mass
of undigested intelligence, collected for the mast part without regard to
value. The force of the newspaper is expended in extending these
facilities, with little regard to discriminating selection. The burden is
already too heavy for the newspaper, and wearisome to the public.
The publication of the news is the most important function of the paper.
How is it gathered? We must confess that it is gathered very much by
chance. A drag-net is thrown out, and whatever comes is taken. An
examination into the process of collecting shows what sort of news we
are likely to get, and that nine-tenths of that printed is collected without
much intelligence exercised in selection. The alliance of the associated
press with the telegraph company is a fruitful source of news of an
inferior quality. Of course, it is for the interest of the telegraph
company to swell the volume to be transmitted. It is impossible for the
associated press to have an agent in every place to which the telegraph
penetrates: therefore the telegraphic operators often act as its purveyors.

It is for their interest to send something; and their judgment of what is
important is not only biased, but is formed by purely local standards.
Our news, therefore, is largely set in motion by telegraphic operators,
by agents trained to regard only the accidental, the startling, the
abnormal, as news; it is picked up by sharp prowlers about town, whose
pay depends upon finding something, who are looking for something
spicy and sensational, or which may be dressed up and exaggerated to
satisfy an appetite for novelty and high flavor, and who regard
casualties as the chief news. Our newspapers every day are loaded with
accidents, casualties, and crimes concerning people of whom we never
heard before and never shall hear again, the reading of which is of no
earthly use to any human being.
What is news? What is it that an intelligent public should care to hear
of and talk about? Run your eye down the columns of your journal.
There was a drunken squabble last night in a New York groggery; there
is a petty but carefully elaborated village scandal about a foolish girl; a
woman accidentally dropped her baby out of a fourth-story window in
Maine; in Connecticut, a wife, by mistake, got into the same railway
train with another woman's husband; a child fell into a well in New
Jersey; there is a column about a peripatetic horse-race, which exhibits,
like a circus, from city to city; a laborer in a remote town in
Pennsylvania had a sunstroke; there is an edifying dying speech of a
murderer, the love-letter of a suicide, the set-to of a couple of
congressmen; and there are columns about a gigantic war of half a
dozen politicians over the appointment of a sugar-gauger. Granted that
this pabulum is desired by the reader, why not save the expense of
transmission by having several columns of it stereotyped, to be
reproduced at proper intervals? With the date changed, it would always,
have its original value, and perfectly satisfy the demand, if a demand
exists, for this sort of news.
This is not, as you see, a description of your journal: it is a description
of only one portion of it. It is a complex and wonderful creation. Every
morning it is a mirror of the world, more or less distorted and imperfect,
but such a mirror as it never had held up to it before. But consider how
much space is taken up with mere trivialities and vulgarities under the
name of news. And this evil is likely to continue and increase until
news-gatherers learn that more important than the reports of accidents

and casualties is the intelligence of opinions and thoughts, the moral
and intellectual movements of modern life. A horrible assassination in
India is instantly telegraphed; but the progress of such a vast movement
as that of the Wahabee revival in Islam, which may change the destiny
of great provinces, never gets itself put upon the wires. We hear
promptly of a landslide in Switzerland, but only very slowly of a
political agitation that is changing the constitution of the republic. It
should be said, however, that the daily newspaper is not alone
responsible for this: it is what the age and the community where it is
published make it. So far as I have observed, the majority of the readers
in America peruses eagerly three columns about a mill between an
English and a naturalized American prize-fighter, but will only glance
at a column report of a debate in the English parliament which involves
a radical change in the whole policy of England; and