Cincinnati daily press. [volume] (Cincinnati [Ohio]) 1860-1862, 1860-04-07
Newspaper venallty---Job Omces, with
Newspaper Attachments.

world, from considerations other than those
of interest desires to know who are the truly
incorruptible and knowing, never fails to
honor them. Newspaper publishers make
mistake when they suppose that they can use
their columns for illegitimate purposes with
out being detected. The popular conscious
ness is more watchful than they suppose and
Il is very seldom indeed that in the end it does
not become aware Of all existing rottenness,
however ample the cloak Of professions with
which il is enveloped.
The sense of disgust which several of our
contemporaries have exhibited, each toward
the other, in consideration Of alleged prac
tices of corruption, is evidence of the ideas
which they severally entertain of the manner
in which such practices are looked upon by
the public. Each is fully aware that he can
in no other way damage the other so effect
ually as by showing up his avarice, and the
hypocrisy of his pretensions to independence
and impartiality. To do so, we may be per-
mitted to say, each has, within few days
past, labored assiduously; and, 1t is probable,
not without some effect. Not that the public
was greatly in the dark upon the subject
before. Suspicious, perhaps, have hardened
into convictions, and that which was vaguely
conjectured has taken the form of substantial
reality.
To men of narrow minds the control of the
columns Of public journal offers occasions
of temptation of a kind that it is hard to
resist. The devotion of the greater share of
the newspapers of the country to the interests
Of some party, to sustain, right or wrong, its
measures and its men, inaugurates interest as
the rule in respect to the largest subject Of
newspaper treatment, and renders its en-
trance easy, into any of the others. He who
prostitutes his paper in politics has no ground
of consistency to stand upon when asked to
do so in relation to anything of which a
personal interest may predicated and with
such, when temptation is offered, there can
be but one question: Does the operation
promise to be remunerative2
The leading Characteristic of a'venal news
paper is timidity in respect to matters of sem
timent. The conductors, conscious Of that
want of integrity which alone can give
weight to opinions, become parasites. They
attach themselves to systems and ideas which
bear the appearance of established respecta-
bility, and while they eschew all novelties as
dangerous, seek to prove the sincerity of their
faith by their intolerance of dissent and dis
senters, and their professed dread of the in
huence of their notions upon society. OF
this slavishness-this utter and pitiful self
egation--Cincinnati can furnish abundant
examples. In ostentatious poverty Of spirit
in that servility which invites aggression, and
breads to do right for fear of offending, some
of our cotemporaries may, without danger of
exaggeration, be said to excel.
The reading public has needed neither the
testimony of the Gazette against the Com
mercial nor that of the Commercial against
the Gazette, to be aware that the editorial
departments in certain of our public jour-
nals--the railway, heriver, and the amuse-
ment especially, but more or less, all the
to enlarge the business and profits of the job
printing establishment connected with the
concern. Taken together, the thing is, in
fact a job Office with a newspaper attach
ment-the latter in practice, holding to the
former a subordinate relation. 1t needs but
a cursory glance over the departments above
mentioned, in any of our long-established
and highly respectable public journals, to dis
cover how the land lies-which theater or
steamboat, or railway patronizes the job Office
to which it is attached, and which carries
its posters, its bills or its tickets to some
other concern. Does show, mountebank
or humbug, come down pretty hand
somely, it is puffed in proportion; does a
corporation determine to give all its work
to one establishment, the impulse communi-
Gates itself instantly to the proper depart
ment, and is manifested in glowing periods
and fulsome personalities. The heads of
these departments are, in fact, runners
for the job Offices. They offer their
columns TO be prostituted in proportion as
that is patronized. They hunt down timer
ent freight and ticket agents, besiege the
apartments of travelling showmen, dance
attendance upon theatrical stars and eminent
circus riders, and, like cockroaches, work
their way into every crevice where a chance
for pickings is suspected to exist.
How much of value this style of proceed
ing is likely to add to the intellectual and
moral value of the journal upon which it is
practiced, others are as well qualified to Judge
as ourselves We are simply speaking of
what is, in the light of testimony, not at all |
recondite.