AMERICAN PRESS

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 17, 14 October 1933, Page 16

AMERICAN PRESS

New Zealander’s Criticism

“SUBLIMATING CRIME”

Dominion Special Service.

Christchurch, October 13.

“The general opinion among the best and most cultured minds in America is that the Hearst newspapers are just as responsible for the wave of criminality in America to-day as anything else. They throw a sentimental halo round crime, and with their specially-arrang-ed photographs of criminals and the prominence they give to crime news they have succeeded in sublimating crime in the minds of a great section of the public.” That was portion of str.ong criticism made of the American Press to-day by Mr. F. Milner, C.M.G., who recently returned to New Zealand after attending the world Rotary congress and the Institute of Pacific Relations conference at Banff and making an extensive lecture tour of the United States. “I wonder how a great'country like the United States can be satisfied with the vulgarised form of Press that it has,” he said. “With the exception of the ‘New York Times,’ the New York ‘Herald-Tribune,’ the ‘Christian Science Monitor,’ the ‘Baltimore Sun,’ the ‘St, Louis Post-Dispatch,’ and a few other papers, one finds the Press bereft of international news and of leading articles as we understand them. The leaders are not educative or even informative.”

After criticising the Hearst Press particularly, Mr. Milner said that the from bootlegging to kidnapping was a very menacing development, and President Roosevelt and. his advisers were now thinking of instituting a Federal Scotland Yard with the object of making a nation-wide drive against crime. “One sees the country’s magnificent developments in science and industry, and then one finds the Press full of vulgar personal gossip, with disproportionate attention given to criminality,” he said. “This gives us an utterly wrong idea of the country.”