Newspapers and the Moral World

Extract

Charles Merz, editor of the New York Times, once observed that there is nothing like a good murder for giving the nation something on which to test its moral values. He had in mind, of course, the newspaper accounts of murder, seeing that most citizens, even in a thrillingly wicked place like Chicago, must be content with getting their murders at secondhand. On occasions of murder and other exciting events, the newspaper functions as a social conversation.

In these times, when virtually everyone reads newspapers, there are in every large city several sorts of journal to satisfy the demands of several types of reader. At one extreme is the newspaper for the least literate level of society. It reflects the very ordinary man's tastes. It can always be identified by the conspicuousness of its sporting news and the quantity of news pictures, comic strips, stories of radio and film stars, and the whole gamut of current fads and fancies. For the ordinary man, be he a street-car conductor, janitor, sales clerk, or factory worker, may in his tastes in newspaper reading be called the complete layman. If his paper seems to consider crime and the movies more important than anything else, it is because it is seeking the widest possible market for itself, by catering to the greatest common denominators of interest. Men whose daily occupation calls for little thought or learning, whether in this country, in England, France, or Germany, are prone to look upon the newspaper as a diversion.