The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1910-04-11
Relation Between the Railroad
and the Newspaper.
Are Officials Too Tight" With
Their Information.
CHANCE FOR MISTAKE.
Unless Proper Attention Is
Given to the Reporters.
Other Items of General Interest
i'm Railroad World.

A few months ago a collision of some
seriousness occurred on one of our
eastern railway lines. The first tele-
graphed report of ii stated that the en-
gineer at fault had been on duty SO
hours without rest, says the Railway
Age Gazette. The facts were otherwise.
The engineer had been given his time
Tor sleep and when the collision came
was very much awake, or should have
been. Within few hours the operat
ing officers of the company had the
exact facts in hand. But no official de-
NAL followed hotfoot on the telegraph
ed nisstatement. The truth dribbled
out by bits a few days later with the
emphasis of big headlines. There was
no official statement at all. Some mil
lions of newspaper readers got an inn
preston more or less deep that the
railway corporation was overworking
Its men and endangering its passenger
service. And that impression, empha-
sized in its character by a human in
terest" story told on the wires, went to
take Its place as unit in the thousand
and one impressions, favorable or the
reverse, by which the great mass Of
public opinion for or against the rail-
way corporation was made up. The
truth, to be sure. could never have
quite caught up with the original error;
but IL could have heeled the error close
and much qualified its evil. The Vir-
gillian Latinism concerning the growth
of scandal as it flies rests for much of
Its force upon whether or not truth is
pursuer.
The special incident expresses, in It's
limited way. the general truism of the
overgrowth of reticence as a railway
policy. Silence, in undue extremes, has
become the line of action-or, rather,
inaction-in the railway office. Nor is
it to be denied that, perhaps primarily,
the newspaper itself is one cause There
are newspapers and newspapers. Some
give railway matters intelligent treat
ment.
They see railway affairs in clear per-
spective, detect and expunge the abb
surdity in reportorial copy discrim-
mate fact from fiction. But there are
other newspapers, unblessed alike with
the accurate reporter and with the
copy reader up in railway circum-
stance, that run riot in the railway
world of visions. Their presses turn off
which the railway officer cons on the
clipping sheet with a sardonic smile.
But the smile is unfortunate.
1t means the transmission to the
sensorium of the railway office of the
Idea that the column of the newspaper
is too faulty to be worth attention;
that the reading public either does not
believe what = reads or forgets quickly
what it does not believe; and that the
better plan is to let the newspapers
severely alone. Such a theory easily
crystallizes into the chronic reticence
with which the railway officer treats
the news seeker. Coupled with it often
go the too sharp discrimination be-
tween things of public interest and
railway interest and the theory that
what concerns the one does not concern
the other. The mind your own bust
ness is undoubtedly too strong and
fast a phrase to describe this attitude.
Yet that idea. which a great railway
king once accented with profanity has
its SAVIOR of fact.
Subject to certain reservations the
0kh
extreme. Some of the elements of a
public interest in the railway. rational.