IMPRESSIONS OF THE PRESS

"I should like", says Mr. Allen in the "Atlantic Monthly", "to see lectures on 'How to Read the Newspapers given in colleges and schools and elsewhere." In the same issue Moorfield Storey writes: "The truth on matters of real public interest, well-weighed advice,--the news that is fit to print,--are what we have a right to expect from our newspapers. . . . Today the press is abandoning its high place, and, so far from educating the people, is too often corrupting and debasing them. . . . By excluding from their columns the matter that appeals to the lowest prejudices and passions of their readers, they may not become great leaders, but they can at least not be damagogues and scandalmongers."

From these two quotations one might gather that the reading public is unable to discriminate where discrimination is of the greatest importance, and that the American press is rapidly becoming degenerate. Several leading journals of the country have undertaken a defense of the press and their arguments are summed up in the amusing comment printed below--giving the public "what it wants" in order to sell the paper. According to them the fault lies with the reader.

What, then, is wrong with the reader? Besides a very human desire for sensationalism, he is unable--according to Mr. Allen--to appreciate the proper value of the important news items, "to distinguish the A. P. dispatch from the special correspondents' forecast of conditions, and the fact story from the rumor story, or to take into account the probable bias of the paper."

Nor is the University reader exempt from this classification. Theoretically we should furnish an approximation to that ideal public which the journalists claim is the sine qua non of an ideal newspaper; practically we are among the consistent devotees of the scare headline; we, too, are afflicted with the prurient curiosity" mentioned by Mr. Storey. Yet the fact that the more stable journals find a considerable sale in the University indicates that we read the lurid sheets for amusement rather than for information.

Since the undergraduate is addicted to both types of newspaper--worthless and worth-while--it is doubly important that he should learn to read the press intelligently. He must, furthermore, learn to do this for himself, since we have not at present a course such as Mr. Allen has suggested. Only when, through knowledge gained from reliable sources, we really understand how to picture "the world about us--can we play our part in it intelligently and independently," says Mr. Allen. In the process we shall force the newspapers to change their opinion as to "what the public wants."