“Yes, one or two papers, well fee’d by this young woman’s spare cash, might do her more good than any service I can render her. I dare say the accounts now published, or soon to be published, will leave a strong bias against her.”
“Why not fee a reporter as well as a lawyer, eh, Tom? There is no great difference, as I can see.”
“Yes you can, and will, too, as soon as you look into the matter. A lawyer is paid for a known and authorized assistance, and the public recognises in him one engaged in the interests of his client, and accepts his statements and efforts accordingly. But the conductor of a public journal sets up a claim to strict impartiality, in his very profession, and should tell nothing but what he believes to be true, neither inventing nor suppressing. In his facts, he is merely the publisher of a record; in his reasoning, a judge; not an advocate.”
The doctor now laughed, in his turn, and well he might; few men being so ignorant as not to understand how far removed from all this are most of those who control the public journals.
“After all, it is a tremendous power to confide to irresponsible men!” he exclaimed.
“That it is, and there is nothing among us that so completely demonstrates how far, very far, the public mind is in the rear of the facts of the country, than the blind, reckless manner in which the press is permitted to tyrannize over the community, in the midst of all our hosannas to the Goddess of Liberty. Because, forsooth, what is termed a free press is useful, and has been useful in curbing an irresponsible, hereditary power, in other lands, we are just stupid enough to think it is of equal importance here, where no such power exists, and where all that remains to be done, is to strictly maintain the equal rights of all classes of citizens. Did we understand ourselves, and our own real wants, not a paper should be printed in the state, that did not make a deposit to meet the legal penalties it might incur by the abuse of its trust. This is or was done in France, the country of all others that best respects equality of rights in theory, if not in practice!”
“You surely would not place restrictions on the press!”
“I would though, and very severe restrictions, as salutary checks on the immense power it wields. I would, for instance, forbid the publication of any statement whatever, touching parties in the courts, whether in civil or criminal cases, pending the actions, that the public mind might not be tainted, by design. Give the right to publish, and it will be, and is abused, and that most flagrantly, to meet the wishes of corruption. I tell you, Ned, as soon as you make a trade of news, you create a stock market that will have its rise and fall, under the impulses of fear, falsehood, and favour, just like your money transactions. It is a perversion of the nature of things, to make of news more than a simple statement of what has actually occurred.”
“It is surely natural to lie!”
“That is it, and this is the very reason we should not throw extraordinary protection around a thousand tongues which speak by means of types, that we do not give to the natural member. The lie that is told by the press is ten thousand times a lie, in comparison with that which issues from the mouth of man.”