NOTHING OF INTEREST.

Waikato Times, Volume 107, Issue 17995, 14 April 1930, Page 15

NOTHING OF INTEREST.

ROMANCE OF THE PAPER. ARE PEOPLE ABSOLUTELY BLASE? Mid-evening in a suburban home. The children have been put to bed. The radio speaker, tuned low, discourses soft music (writes Charles Nuttall, in “Life,” Melbourne). The slippered citizen reads a newspaper; his wife, on a sofa, darns stockings; the cat doses on the hearthrug. The wife breaks a long silence.

“Anything in the paper?” she asks indifferently.

“Nothing of interest,” the man replies. He puts the newspaper aside, turns a knob on the face of the radio set, and reaches for his pipe. Let us in imagination pick up that discarded news-sheet- Here is a record of moving adventure by air, flood and field. Here are stories of business advance and downfall. Reports, “hot from the Press,” of romantic happenings, of riot, murder, sudden death. Governments are overthrown; kings are sent to exile, mountains are removed, the course of rivers changed. Tornadoes —inundations — earthquakes. The world quivers, trembles. . . You will find the complete story in the paper. Yet, there is

“Nothing of Interest.” Is there nought of surprise i Q the world? Are we become utterly blase? ■ln every city are certain institutions that are the very core of the city’s heart. The newspaper offices are forever abuzz with excitement of news electrically alight throughout the night, teeming, through the day, with busy feet of messengers, with work of writers and editors, with whirring machinery of print. In the moriing, in the suburbs, the breakfast egg grows cold while the news is read. The News!—adventures that befall persons who are not ourselves. News is the greatest interest of our life. In a recent speech, the Lord Chief Justice of England raised a paean in praise of the makers of daily newspapers- Said be: “Let it be granted,, if you please, that the production of newspapers Is mixed up with the art of making money. So, too are all the practical arts. ' So is medicine, for example; so is surgery; so is accountancy; so is engineering; so even is law. With such a being as man in such a world as the present, these tilings perhaps are not to he avoided.

“But when we take in our hands a really first-rate English dally newspaper, do w r e always reflect upon the recurrent miracle of the leading articles —so aptly chosen and to-day so happily named, the rapid harvest of we know not how much brilliancy in school and university, how severe a training in affairs, how fine a character, and how wise a mind? Or turn to the special articles, of which there may seem to the casual reader to be an Easy and Unceasing Supply, do we stop to think in .what circumstances and by whom those topics arc chosen, with what anxious care the writers are engaged, and with what unsparing labour the work is produced?

“Or, when we look at the telegrams and reports from all quarters of the world, the work of the foreign department, the work of the reviewing staff, the work of the sub-editors, the work of the reporters, and not the least the work of the law reporters, together with an infinity of work besides, are we not sometimes a little inclned to lake everything for granted, to think that somehow the newspaper automatically produces itself, and to forget, that every issue of that journal which means so much to us pre-sup-poses and depends upon the daily initiative, the daliy industry, and the deliberate organisation and correlaton of the daly industry, of a vast unseen hand of highly skilled and conscientious artists ? “To conceal the art, is, no doubt, a work of art. But there are occasions, and perhaps this may be one of them, when a debt which is not always visible, and is never claimed, may at least be gratefully acknowledged.” ■How —unconsciously—we are in(Contmued in next column.

fluenced by our reading of newspaper articles and reports! At times, reports are coloured red, that public feeling may be stirred. The mobinstinct, present in the mind even of cultured persons, responds to such appeal, and it may be admitted that, in certain matters, the End Justifies Such Means. As a rule, newspaper advocacy of causes is straightforward in intent and in principle; our daily Press mirrors the age in which we live. In politics -and in general conduct it sets and maintains high standards. Today, we do not withhold from our children the privilege of reading the day’s news. If we accept as statement of fact the saying that the newspaper is a true mirror of to-day’s thought and event —then we may re- ; joice that the W’orld is as wholesome as its appearance in that mirror, I the daily Press-