ENVOY
Old straight whiskey! That is the drink of life—
Consolation, family, friends and wife!
So make your glasses ready,
Pour fingers three, then—steady!
“Here’s good luck to Kentucky and whiskey straight!”
††††
No one, like Allison, who has made the newspaper profession a life work, has failed to study its weak spots and to note its imperfections; or on the other hand, to grasp its marvelous opportunities for studying the wonderful mystery of the variations of human nature. In the very essence of things therefore, he recognizes the human elements in his own profession and does not hold that the newspaper man is perfect or that it does not harbor types of black sheep the likes of which may not be found in other flocks. At the same time nothing raises his gorge quicker than to hear the uninformed or unthinking deliver themselves, parrot-like, of the formula “that’s only a newspaper lie” or to see some man climb high by the aid of the newspaper and then kick down the ladder by which he rose. Allison once discussed this subject skillfully in an address on “Newspaper Men and Other Liars” which is worth a half-hour of any man’s time. The only difficulty would be experienced in finding a copy, for so far as known, I have the only one extant. Allison believes and says that by the very nature of his occupation and training the newspaper man is the least of liars among men and proves to his own complete satisfaction that the reporter gets his undeserved reputation for lying from his very impersonality—an impersonality that may be condemned with perfect safety. Fact, he declares, is a block of granite that the whole world may see without wrangling over, but once inject the human interest, with its divided opinions, into the occult mystery of the printed type and you have the newspaper “lie” in so many of its aspects, an analysis that leads him to arrive at this rather remarkable deduction:
I might almost define a lie as being the narrative of a human event that had been printed.
And what about a comparison of those “other” liars with the newspaper man? Allison makes it very adroitly this way: