The Star. THURSDAY, AUGUST 4, 1910. A CHANCE FOR THE CHURCHES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 9917, 4 August 1910, Page 2

The Star. THURSDAY, AUGUST 4, 1910. A CHANCE FOR THE CHURCHES.

We are disappointed with the Churches. For sonic days past the newspapers "nave been full of horrid, disgusting: and brutalising details of a very sordid and not very interesting crime. Wo suppose that Camden Road and th& neighbouring slums—if there are any neighbouring slums —must have been scraped pretty dry to supply all the unhandsome details that ha.ve been served up hot to Londoners and.

—rewarmed—to New Zealanders. It is a characteristic of the cable service to which the New Zealand newspapers are committed that between virtue and crime, preference must be given to the crime. The cable agent very plainly subscribes to a doctrine tliat is widely accepted among novelists, that virtue is always commonplace and vice always/ interesting. The theory Is that virtus is normal and vice abnormal, and that it is a waste of good money; and newspaper space to record happenings that contain no element of what is conventionally regarded as sensational. If this theory wero carried out logically and with some sense of proportion, there would be less reason to complain. But .the really big departures from the normal and the really sensational items of news rarely obtain their due measure of attention from the newspapers. As a matter of fact, the news services have never been organised with a view to the reporting of great events. What the world gets in the way of sensations is what the reporters can find ready to their hands in the police courts and the divorce courts. Occasionally, too, some scraps from the political world are gathered and recorded. But the dearth of news in regard to the quarrel between Spain and the Vatican, for example, shows how badly the world is served in regard to really important - ; and sensational news. . By no stretch of imagination can the Camden Road, tragedy be held to be worth all the space that has been given to it in the cablegrams. Of course, newspapers j exist for the provision of the news J that the public want to read, and a "meaty" tragedy is always popular; but it is difficult to find justification for the attention that has been given to the crime charged against Crippen. The fact that Crippen, against whom tho charge has still to be proved, was traced, across the Atlantic by wireless telegraphy invests that aspect of the affair with a special interest, but the adoption of "wireless" in the trackof alleged criminals scarcely excuses the transmission of tho brutal details of the crime itself. Between tho report of the Johnson-Jeffries fight and the report of the Camden Road murder there is a wide gulf fixed. The fight was a decently-conducted contest between two trained men, each of whom went into tho ring prepared to take whatever came his way in the matter of hard knocks. What logical excuses the Churches can offer for their loud outcry against the publication of the details of the fight and their silence concerning the publication of the details of the Camden Road murder, we are at a complete loss to imagine. People who held up their hands' in horror when they read, that Johnson blacked Jeffries's eye, have chuckled when they read that the girl who accompanied Crippen had her trousers held up with safety-pins. If the Churches want to know why their influence is not as great as they think it should, be, they may i'md an explanation suggested in their present attitude. They need to correct their ideas and their standards of judgment. They need to be a little more logical in their views of the hard facts of life.