The silver state. [volume] (Winnemucca, Nev.) 1909-1925, 1923-07-19
WHAT is A GOOD NEWSPAPER?

IT
WHAT IS A GOOD NEWSPAPER?
A minister writes: "Can we not have
a whole weeks issue in which there is not
single crime or divorce suit, or political
scandal or story of human frailty?
Publish for whole week all the good
things you can find in Winnemucca and the
world. Let your readers know what a
good town they have. It will be news to
them. It will relive them of the depres
sion that settles on them as they face the
daily grist of human sin. Give virtue and
kindness and good will weeks publicity"
The question is one every conscientious
journalist has ruefully asked himself ever
since the beginning of publicity. With the
same earnestness a pastor might sigh for
the day when he could dispense with read
ing the decalogue and could omit the
prayers for sinners
In either case it can be little more than
a pious aspiration, since both church and
press deal with conditions of living. For
the newspaper, it has to be said that it is
primarily the handmaiden of history; day
by day it records what men say and do;
sin, it realizes, does not vanish because I'm.
remarked. Society eliminates sin by de-
,tecting and denouncing it. Publicity is the
greatest agent of restraint. The minister
who wrote the letter probably realizes this
Nor would he be willing, on reflection, to
welcome an ostrich journalism which, by
sticking its head into the sands, would SET
no evil, hear no evil, and thus pretend to
believe that the community could do no
evil.
The newspaper is reporter of events.
II it is less it evades its duty. But if it
searches out crime, not for the plain record
of it, but to enlarge on it, ornament it,
envelop it in the gilded robes of romance,
and suspend it like bait day after day be-
fore the eyes of the public, then duty has
been long since left behind and such a
newspaper is with the panderers to crime,
and is popularity known as yellow.
Do men become good because the exist
ence of evil is ignored? Do communities
become good because the evils of society
are suppressed from knowledge? The key
to the moral conscience of this generation
is not in the existence of sin either in in
dividual or in community, but in the in
slant denunciation of it when discovered
and the proclamation of society's ostracism
of evil.
The newspaper, whose ethical princi-
pals are sound, knows that it is its duty to
inform its readers each day Of the truth
as it discovers it, neither more nor less. It
knows that its readers do not want to be
lulled into false complacency by the omis-
sion of any part of society's activity, good
or bad, any more than he wishes his in
telligence affronted and his home de-
graded by the printed presentation of bale
full explorations and passion-provoking
distortions of the weakness of men and
women. The abnormal character of "bad
news" sufficiently bad in its bare exist
ence, is the supreme compliment to that
decent living confidently assumed to be-
long to the great majority of citizens.
When men and women no longer yield
to passion and dishonor, good newspapers
will be freed from including the records
in their columns. But, as the true record
of the times in which we live, those things
which men do and say as challenges to
common morality, must find their place for
the scrutiny and judgment of society. For
that is the weapon of reform and the news
papers watchful contribution to good liv-
ing.