Subscribe..
VICE-EXALTING NEWSPAPERS
[Welland Tribune, 14 May 1897]
The dime-novel writer finds his occupation gone. Yellow journalism gratifies the morbid taste of the young much better than yellow literature. It can bring before the public gaze at a trifling cost a daily ghoulish feast. It can dress up crime and criminal tendencies in effects that are worse than realistic, because so vilely suggested. It can poison a thousand imaginations where the old dime purveyor of distorted fiction could affect one.
The base justification of this policy by those who pursue it is that the people want it. Many journals of once honorable name have drifted downward with that argument until they have become a hissing and a reproach among those who wish to see all the social forces kept pure and clean. They do not realize their own degradation. Action and reaction are equal, and finally they are at a loss, to understand why the better elements of society, and self-respecting organisations generally, resent the audacious and shameless diurnal parade of all the more disgusting details which their muck-rakes have lifted from the pestilential sewers of crime and misery. If there was the same effort made to exalt virtue and set it as a beacon-light before the people that there is to magnify and intensity details of vice, the influence of journalism upon politics, upon social order, upon the education of youth and the healthful direction of youthful ambition, would be of incalculable value. But competition is at is most feverish heat upon the lower levels. Public opinion must make this a losing business. –Boston Transcript.
Add A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.