THE EXPOSURE OF EXPOSURE.
Things That Are Being Said About the
"Journalism of Conscience" by Critics,
Passionate and Dispassionate.
When fire is discovered in a house it sometimes happens that the tenants, in their excitement, hurl fragile bric-à-brac from the windows and with much effort carry the feather beds down-stairs and out to safety. Suppose that the incongruity of such action suddenly becomes apparent. The alarmed tenants may reverse the process. Better still, they may endeavor to put out the fire. But to cease all effort because they stand convicted of excited folly would be absurd.
The inevitable reaction from recent wild exposures in finance and politics has lately shown itself. Prominent men and leading journals have convicted the "yellow" newspapers and magazines, and the people influenced by them, of excited folly. Senator Lodge has said in the Senate, concerning sensational contributors to the magazines:
Writers of that type come and go. They seize upon the excitement of the moment and presently rise like a flock of shore birds and whirl away to another spot where they think they can find a fresh feeding ground. These modern imitators of Titus Oates will pass away as he passed away. They will bring no innocent heads to the block as he did, although they may here and there cause distress. They will not end in the pillory as he did, because the pillory has been abolished, but they will go out of fashion just as he did into silence and contempt.
District Attorney William T. Jerome, speaking at a banquet in New York, referred to magazine articles which have described the Senate as treasonable.
Treason is an ugly word. It is punishable by death. We have got so used to superlatives that our own racy tongue has become debauched and we have no superlatives left. The Senate of the United States—is it a treasonable body? A body that holds a man like Murray Crane, of Massachusetts? Because some men are there who ought not to be there—some who bought the position—shall we say that the governors of our body politic are guilty of treason? Base men are there, but when in the bright, breezy sentiments of modern newspaper life you assert there is treason, you either lie or misconceive the meaning of the English language.
On the other side, Norman Hapgood says, in Collier's:
Who is doing most to make railroad and beef trust facts and problems understood? Who but the same magazine which has printed the history of Standard Oil and explained to the people the needed changes in State and city government. What a farce to speak of McClure's Magazine as yellow; what a dull, injurious farce, unless by yellow we mean every movement of benefit to our kind! Did Mr. Steffens's printing of the news about Philadelphia do any harm to the inhabitants of that town? Did it, or did it not, act as a battle-cry which spurred the good citizens and the newspapers of that town to action? When original, living, and conscientious journalism speaks, the routine newspapers are sometimes forced to echo bold words which receive the public's approving seal.
So the balance of expressed opinion on the subject shifts up and down. In all the confusion we sometimes hear an opinion like that, uttered by Herbert S. Hadley, attorney-general of Missouri:
There is no reason to question the efficacy of existing laws so long as they are supported by public sentiment, for law is, in fact, merely the reflection of the moral sense of the country. What I mean by that statement may be illustrated by the fact that while a vast majority of lawyers, as well as laymen, will to-day agree that corporations are amenable to laws from which an individual might be exempt, the same proposition would have met with violent refutation hardly more than two years ago by most lawyers and many laymen.
But the public is now practically agreed, and the courts have sustained this view, that corporations are not above the laws of the State which made their existence possible. An officer of a company may to-day refuse to answer questions on the ground that he would himself be incriminated by replying, but he cannot refuse to answer on the ground that his company would be incriminated. In other words, corporations are no longer considered to have the same rights as individuals and cannot evade investigation and prosecution by maintaining a policy of silence.
Such is the moral sense of the country and such is the law as determined by the highest courts, and with such a condition of public sentiment and law it is no longer possible for public officials to plead that they cannot get at the facts whenever there is a suspicion that any corporation has failed to comply with the laws of the State which created it.