THE DAILY PRESS AND ITS INFLUENCE.
By William N. Glenn
THE waning influence of the daily press has come to be a subject of no little comment. The New York Evening Post has this to say of the California press:— "One of the saddest and yet not unexpected manifestations of the campaign is the attitude of the public toward the newspapers. The force of the editorial seems to have departed. All parties alike have to depend chiefly upon pamphlets and leaflets. A large number of private individuals are writing and publishing their views, and circulating them in this form instead of through newspaper articles." The San Francisco Argonaut indorses the above stricture in the following strain:— "The Evening Post is right. The people of California have ceased to heed the editorial opinions of their daily newspapers. How could it be otherwise? These papers are run as purely commercial enterprises, and their editorial columns are entirely secondary to their news and advertising columns. We pointed out in the election of two years ago how little influence the daily papers of San Francisco possessed—none of the candidates whom they advocated for mayor succeeded, and the only man with no newspaper support was elected." The same thing occurred in Oakland at the last municipal election. But it is not only in California that we see such results. The Literary Digest refers to the fact that the hostility of the local press of Detroit failed to defeat Mr. Pingree for mayor, and that all of Governor Altgeld's successes in the past have been achieved in spite of the antagonism of the combined press of Chicago. But the New York Voice gives what may be deemed a cue to the loss of editorial influence on the part of many daily papers. In its issues of October 1 and 8 it shows 'how degraded the public press may become at times under a comparatively slight money temptation, how ready to be bribed out of all semblance to simple manhood, and that, too, in communities in intelligence and in moral tone certainly not below the average of the country generally. Over forty odd newspapers of South Dakota, mainly leading ones, as shown by copies of letters, some of them facsimile, of their editors and proprietors, are eager, apparently, to sell themselves—not only their advertising space for reading or 'plate' matter, but at treble or quadruple rates, their editorial columns—to a New York 'advertising agent,' a representative of the liquor interest of the country, in order to overthrow prohibition in that state.' There is another growing feature of the daily press which must of necessity lower its influence with sensible people, and that is the substitution of absurd caricature for argument. These things no doubt help to sell the papers, but beyond the gratification of a rather morbid curiosity, they serve rather as a boomerang. It is a stooping from journalistic dignity, and for a time wielded a certain political influence; but it has been carried to such an extravagant and uncouth extreme that it seems almost impossible that it should carry with it any conviction in matters requiring sober judgment to decide. W. N. G.