THE NEWS MARKET

Because the news standards of a large portion of the metropolitan press utterly fails to jibe with the taste of America's upper middle class, criticism and correction has been directed at journalism with a good deal more vehemence than effect. There have been many picturesque epithets applied to the newspapers. "The putrid press," "the pornographs," "the yellow dogs" are exemplary examples. For remedies, suppression and censoring have been the least acceptable although the most tangible and the most often called for. Plans for reform from within have emanated from educated and conservative quarters but have been lacking in provision for specific relief.

In the current "Century", writing under the title, "An Unfortunate Necessity", Gerald W. Johnson discards censorship and discovers a new method of attack. The fault of the newspapers is, he says, not in telling unpleasant news but in telling it unpleasantly. If the journalists were clever enough, his intimation is, they could tell questionable stories in a humorous vein which would alleviate the usual sultry effect or with scientific discernment which would allay popular and fallacious deductions. Yet he never once asks himself or his readers why newspaper men should want to draw the sting from crude news to protect a public which will pay the price to be stung.

Mr. Johnson's mistake is the common one. He looks to the producer to set values instead of to the consumer. He forgets that the producer is simply a caterer and that in the case of an individual's revolt at serving bad meats, there are others waiting to take his place and profit from his morality. Undoubtedly there are plenty of ways whereby journalists could fill their columns without resorting the shady sides of law and living. Yet the public would still demand these and with good reason. For if the upper middle class, or even all of what could be termed the middle class, were subtracted, the total population of the nation would remain substantially intact. The proletariat remaining contains millions of city dwellers drawn largely from foreign lands, sunk at the bottom of the social scale, and intellectually nourished on simple tales of virtue and sordid tales of vice. These form their gossip, their excitement, their cultural horizon. It is the pictorial papers that have recently thrown this class into relief and emphasized its importance. Three pictorials have thriven in the city of New York with a scarcely perceptible intrusion into the circulation of the older dailies. They serve a new public whose introduction to print is the result of the attraction of pictures.

It would, hence, be hard to consider the journalistic evils of our time as fit subjects for execration or ingenious reform. They are rather a symptom of a state and condition of society which is to be met and considered not alone in a dissemination of the news, but in industrial strife, in social stratification, and increasingly in political agitation.