Emotion and Curiosity

NO subject could be more pertinent to the understanding and the criticism of modern American life and standards than that which has been chosen for the first of a series to be published on the general subject of journalism. Not only is it being discussed with a vigor and an interest that for the first time approach the intensity of news itself, but in a public that has been fed for twelve months on such hors-d'oevres as the Dempsey-Tunney fight, the death of Rudolph Valentino, Queen Marie, the Hall-Mills case, Aimee McPherson, President Coolidge's sportive antics in the Adirondacks, and Peaches Browning, there must certainly appear symptoms that need the cear sort of diagnosis that Mr. Johnson has provided.

What is news? "In general practice," says Mr. Johnson, "news is what is in the newspapers; and newspapers are what newspapermen make them. It is a depressing reflection, rather a terrible reflection. But it is true." That this is pessimism there can be no denying. But that it is side-stepping the issue, as it may seem to many, is hardly true. Mr. Johnson has devoted almost a hundred pages to an elaboration of the principle of that dog-bitting man who has been so often slandered in this connection, and one feels with him at the end the futility of any other definition of news than that with which he ends his book.

One needs but read the book to appreciate the true efficacy of the pragmatic standard in any criticism of the modern newspaper. And one needs but read the newspaper itself to become infected with the pessimism of which Mr. Johnson has no monopoly. With the addition of the British general strike, the North Pole, and the Florida hurricane, the list of news stories mentioned above must inevitably be considered the best and the biggest news of the past year. Someone once told Eric C. Hopwood of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, when he was a cub, that a newspaper should be like a mirror to the public consciousness in which it flourished. This is today the discouraging possibility. Even the most cynical of us must hope that such a list as this reflects not the whole of public opinion or interest, and that the fault for the distortion of values that so characterizes journalism today must be laid where Mr. Johnson puts it, squarely on the shoulders of the newspapermen themselves.