332 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
legislation — and he may have the time and disposition to wade through several columns — or even, in rare cases — pages of matter ; but he has no time or energy to waste on mere verbiage, on repetition, on chatter that adds nothing to the facts or the speculation of the case. To let correspondents drool ; to fill space with empty interviews; to say a thing three times over, is not "to give the public what it wants." Whatever we may choose to blame the public for in the shortcomings of the great newspaper, there is not the least ground for debiting it with a preference for dull verbiage, for inflated egotism in correspondents, for the multiplication of words. The notion of some publishers or editors that a paper without bedlamite headlines, without inane and empty "dispatches," with excruciating and misdirected "humor" would lose circulation is devoid of all foundation in experience.
I have said nothing so far of the yellow variety of news- papers, first because it is too easy to assail them, and, second, because there are not many of them to corrupt the public taste and mind. The real danger is from the yellow streaks and the yellow practices of the respectable and "white" newspapers. If they were to mend their ways, to practice what they so virtuously preach, the yellow press could be dismissed as a negligible quantity. Its most flagrant abuses would tend to cure themselves ; its own readers would weary of hysteria, of clamor, of scandal, and of imbecility. There is no "Gresham law" in joifmalism; the good do not find the competition of the bad fatal to their sur- vival or prosperity. The "good" have not had sufficient faith in the virtues they have affected ; they have lacked courage and per- sistence; they have distrusted the public.
Sane and honest journalism is possible — possible here and now — simply because there is nothing Utopian about the stand- ards dictated by sanity and honesty. There is no objection to stalwart partisanship when it is genuine and honest. There is no objection to publicity within reasonable limits. There is no irra- tional squeamishness. The qualities and practices to which objec- tion is offered, and which cause certain "superior" persons to plume themselves — as, for example, Mr. Balfour, the Tory leader in Great Britain, is represented as doing — on boycotting the
