IS CRIME INTERESTING?
The newspaper reader, for one or another reason, regards crime as important news because he is full of morbid curiosity regarding whatever is abnormal in human conduct. A crime is something strange and fascinating because passions play through it, and secret places in human life are uncovered by it. It interests us because we are human, with strange forces of evil coming up now and again into consciousness and suggesting our brotherhood to the thief and the murderer. Many a man reads in a story of defalcation, things he has himself done without being found out. Many a woman reads in the story of a murder, passages from her own life where she also might have taken the fatal step beyond the line of safety. Try as much as we may, we cannot divest ourselves of the curiosity and the unconscious sympathy which make us look over the crime record with more interest than we give to any other part of a newspaper.
The newspapers are reproached for publishing all about crimes; but the average reader, perhaps we might say the best reader, peruses even the details with absorbing interest. He may be ashamed of himself for his curiosity, but he has the curiosity. The fact is not complimentary to us, and we lash the press when we know we ought to lash ourselves. For the reason just given, the remedy for the daily feast of passion and blood is not an easy one to find. A newspaper needs great merits to be able to omit the crime record; and though it should be accepted without that record, many a subscriber of it would look for the record elsewhere. The remedy is difficult because the public has to cure itself—the newspaper can not cure it—of the desire to know “the evil that is in the world through lust.” The world, the flesh and the devil take up a commanding position in our anxieties, solicitudes, curiosities, and sympathies. We must be a great deal better as a people before we shall be content to live in ignorance of any badness which breaks through the calm surface of life and rises into a billow of crime. It is true that the curiosity may be educated out of us—not entirely, but in large degree—and yet it is also true that we do not display any serious desire to be so educated. We want this kind of news. We want to know at least the motives of the crimes, how they were committed and whether they were punished or not. The newspaper may give us these outline facts discreetly and briefly, but the mass of us will secretly hunger for more. The moral of the business may be left to the pulpit; it is tolerably plain to the pews.