A CRITIC OF THE AMERICAN PRESS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 5, 23 May 1884, Page 7

A CRITIC OF THE AMERICAN PRESS.

In an interesting article in the April Manliattan Mr. B. V. Smalley complains of the prominence given to accounts of crimes fer the American newspapers as calculated to present a " deceptive view of the lite and morals of the people of this nation." A country, he says, will£ always afford , until the millennium d-wns, a certain proportion of crimes and outrages. " Why cannot our newspapers let us take these things for granted without loading us with the details ? Why should we be expected to read of the homicide in Texas or the rape in Indiana ?" We quite agree with Mr. Smalley and are delighted to hear his complaint. This chronicling only of the bad that a small section of the population does, while omitting almost all reference to the good, ia calculated to give a very " deceptive view " indeed. But would Mr. Smalley, whose brother presents so many " views " on European affairs to the readers of the New York Tribune, kindly tell us what he thiiiks of the method practised with regard to Irish crimes and outrages by the American press ? Ireland is the least criminal country in the world in proportion to population ; yet one who took his views of Ireland from the " news " published by the American press would imagine it to be a very Gehenna of horrible depravity. Nothing at all is cabled to this' country about Ireland but what tells of Irish crime or relates to it in some way, And when these accounts reach this country, what prominence is given them by the American newspapers ! The disproportion that Mr. Smalley complains of between the respective amounts of space allotted to news of American crime and to news of American gooddoing is insignficant in view of the superiority assigned to accounts of lush crime, whenever it occurs, above all American news whatsoever. If one man, say a crime-committing and crime-provoking man , like the late Lord Leitrim, were lynched in Ireland, and if on the lame day somebody murdered a dozen men in an American State, our newspapers next morning would devote their biggest type and • most sensational headings to a double-leaded account of the Irish horror and accompany the same with a lurid editorial, while the duodecimal American murder would be dismissed in a few paragraphs somewhere in the inside pages. A week or two afterwards a portrait of the victim of Irish depravity with sketches of the shot gun and other " apparatus " of his murder would appear even in daily papers, ami for months, aye, for a year afterwards, the memory oE the event would be kept green in the public mind by constant allusions and rehashes of the story and accounts of the detectives' gropings for " information." It is not too much to cay tbat the memory of the twelve American murders would have faded away a few days after the crime was reported in the newspapers. Nay, who remembers now that only one month ago some twenty men were hanged out West by " Vigilance Committees " (that, by the way, is what the Irish Invincibles call their inner-circle)? Practically nobody remembers. Why ? Because the news of the affair was not even telegraphed, because only one paper, the N. Y. Sun, published the account tbat came by mail,.and because no other paper thought it worth while to copy the story from the Sun. Why was this wholesale hanging bout not telegraphed all over the country? Suppose twenty men were hanged in Ireland by " vigilance committees 1" If the view given by the American pres3 of American life and morals be "deceptive," would Mr. Smalley, who seems to be a discerning man, kindly characterise for us, in magazine article or otherwise, the " view " of the life and morals of the Irish people that the same press, duped by English news agencies, makes itself a party to presenting. — Pilot.