“EVENING STINGERS.”

Marlborough Express, Volume V, Issue 267, 24 December 1870, Page 7

“EVENING STINGERS.”

The insertion of the following extract from the West Coast Times is due to a foolish pot-house threat made on Monday last at the close of the case in the Resident Magistrate’s Court, by the defendant therein. We need not further allude to the individual in question, at present : “ There is a parasitical class of newspapers, possessing no distinct life of its own, but which, subsisting by sufferance, injures, or endeavours to injure, the one essential to the life of a newspaper of another class—its reputation. Coming out of an evening, like the mosquitoes, newspapers of this class imitate these move peculiar than pleasing creatures by making a buzz and a bite, and there ends, apparently, all the good purpose they serve in the economy of nature. An occasional experience of this buzzing and biting may be relieved of its irritation by a sense of its novelty, but when persistent, it developes into a nuisance, and should be brushed aside as would be the mosquito, or any other leas reputable member of its race.

The mosquito newspaper, like the sandfly of the country, has attained a high state of development as a mosquito in New Zealand. In some places they buzz with such a fierceness of buzz as almost to be mistaken for blue-bottles. They bite and sting with a fondness and a frequency which might be calculated, but for their construction, to injure their little bodies. Fortunately their development is numerically restricted by no quarter being given them in morally healthy localities, and they exist with impunity chiefly in places where experience of their habits renders them innocuous or justifies them being treated with contempt. The moral attributes of the mosquito newspapers, if we may be permitted to mix metaphor, are distinguished chiefly by a mania of suspicion, sometimes real, sometimes affected, as madness sometimes is. Somebody is always stealing something from it. To drop the metaphor a little more, the Government is always purloining or impeding the transmission of its important telegrams. Contemporaries are “cribbing” its extremely original paragraphs or its local or foreign reports, procured at no end of expense. Produced probably by one factotum—or teetotum — kept on the premises, it presumes that what it familiarly speaks of as its contemporaries maintain, no “ staff ” whatever, but wait only with eager maw to appropriate the result of this teetotum’s indefatigable exertions. Filling its own lean frame with extracts from the columns of those very contemporaries, it adopts that ingenious expedient, “the first word of flighting,” and, before the event, exclaims Ta quoque. In fact, what the mosquito newspaper is capable of doing in tho utterance of insinuations, assertions, and fabrications with the object of its own selfinflation and the injury of others, is only excelled by its utter incapacity to do anything. within its a newspaper. Itself a r caricature by its presumption, it presumes to caricature the ;work of others by attributing ih to itself, and in a word, as a mosquito, cuts such antics as should, make the angels, if they are ever so disposed, rather to laugh than weep.” . . , >