“Dulness is ever apt to magnify.”
Having so often discussed the advantages of Newspaper Reading, it becomes a duty again to refer to such glaring misleaders as the veering Times, which affects to guide, not to follow opinion. The flood and ebb of public opinion is carefully marked by this unprincipled Paper, and to every passing breeze it trims its sails. The most signal instance of the transparent dissimulation of the Times, is its truly hypocritical expression of its “great regret,” because the Lords threw out the Repeal Bill! St. James’ Square, and Printing House Square, have coalesced, and the “Heads of Houses,” Derby, Walter, and Co., must now be prepared to take the consequences of their revolutionary tactics. No doubt my esteemed friend, the Author of Festus, had the Shuttlecock Times in view when he favoured me with the Portraiture of Newspapers. It is far too sweeping an indictment, for the tone of the Press generally is sound and healthy, always excepting the misleading Times, the Daily Telegraph, and Morning Advertiser.
I will quote Mr. Bailey’s clever sketch of the “great mercantile concern.”
“I think if working men are to be led to read at all, the Newspaper with its ill feeling, bad reasoning, worse taste, fallacious assumptions and distortions of the truth, is about the most objectionable school in which they could be educated.”
Speaking generally, the newspaper literature of 1860 exhibits as much information, and more talent than can be found in modern empty books with gilt edges, vellum, and morocco. The Editors of the London Journals, with a few base exceptions, nobly use their opportunities of directing public opinion. No such vile journalism exists in this country as can any day be found in the New York Herald, a one, or two cent daily paper, owned and edited by the black mail levying vagabond, and fugitive from Scotland, James Gordon Bennett; a paper which does its best to fan the flame of discord, by abusing “the Britishers.” The patriotic Times quotes the lying Herald as if it were a reliant organ of the Americans, ignoring the fact that this notorious Print is estimated in New York as the Satirist was in London. It is curious that two persons, of unenviable fame, the Scotchman Bennett, and a Somersetshire man, Richard Adams Locke, both of whom I well knew in New York, in 1833, and who both left their country for their country’s good, are always described as “Americans.” The great Moon hoax, [38a] “Astronomical Discoveries” by Sir F. Herschell, at the Cape of Good Hope, published in the New York Sun, was written by Locke, the degenerate Englishman, who the Illustrated Times describes as an “American.” The New York Era, edited and owned by R. A. Locke, and J. G. Bennett’s Herald, appeared in 1834. Arcades ambo! Arcadians both, suspicious characters both, these rival “American” Editors abused each other in no measured terms. I have always held it is the worst crime the intellect can commit, to edit such vituperative Journals, and it is indeed well for the community such worthless prints are few in number. Obscure indeed, is the mental vision of those Editors who cannot discern the iniquity of misleading, instead of leading aright public opinion, who with pens of ready writers, strive to make the worse the better reason; and who viewing all subjects through the spectacles of Party, tell us that “white is not white, nor black so very black.” Talk of the Times as the LEADING Journal of Europe! If daily to utter unblushing falsehoods, and odious calumnies, knowing them to be such, constitutes leadership in Journalism, in this sense [à la Heenan, the Irish American Bouncer] the Times is “The Champion of the World.” [38b]
Ever strongest on the strongest side, if ever there was a disengenuous untrustworthy arbiter of Opinion, it is this false Oracle of Printing House Square! Why its leader, 16th May, on “the most extraordinary case ever produced in a Court of Justice,” clearly denotes that I am NOT an unjust Judge, in sentencing the Times to be gibbeted as a wicked, misleading guide. Observe its sudden changes of doctrine, and how rapidly it veers from N.W. to S.E. Now that the balance of opinion has taken a decided turn, and there is a distinct assent to the perjury of Eugenie, and the innocence of her victim, the Times tries to mislead and insult the judgment of the public, by representing the “ingenuous” Eugenie Plummer as “the daughter of RESPECTABLE and wealthy parents!” [Would that such “respectability” were consigned to gaol, until this “wealthy” Mrs. Plummer paid a fine of £1000 to Mr. Hatch, as some atonement for her neglect, and guilty connivance.] Now the case is closed, and the verdict is recorded, the Times is “first at last” in making the discovery that
“nemo repente fuit turpissimus,”
that no one, especially a clergyman, ever became lost to all sense of decency at once. The “leading” Journal can NOW see clearly enough the obvious improbability, and unreasonableness of the disgusting accusation of two girls of established precocity, against a clergyman of good extraction, education, and behaviour, who for eight years had filled a responsible situation without reproach, and against whose conduct, until this time, not a charge had ever been alleged. Could not this “organised hypocrisy” the Times (as Disraeli would call it) have said all this at the first trial, and not cried
“I warn’d you when the event was o’er.”
Ah! but this great Ocean of Print, the Times, is a “mercantile concern,” and does not keep a conscience, and sneers and laughs at the least earnestness in the Editorial department. Perhaps Mr. John Walter, the Times Manager, and Chief Proprietor, by the competition of an unfettered Press, may find out that in Journalism, as in other pursuits, “Honesty is the best policy.” That maxim is now utterly discredited. Yet even at the eleventh hour there is for such a first class moral delinquent as the Times, a locus penetentiæ, but as a sine quâ non, the Editor, or literary hireling, must abjure servility, and disdain to become