The Zest for the Sensational. (C. L. Daniels, in the American Magazine.)

On the ground of journalistic civility, the refined and cultured classes of society have a right to demand from the publisher a courtesy and decency in his sheet which he dares not overstep in person. The young and untrained minds who find one-half of their education in the pages of a family journal, and who imbibe their notions of society, morals, etiquette, law, policy, and religion from the columns intended to convey the record of the world's doings; the gentleman who culls the necessary data of affairs from the débris of scandals, divorces, murders, elopements, thieveries, and cruelties forced upon him—all who come under the influence of a periodical, should find the same protection of law and custom respecting their intellectual food that is rigorously observed over the food of the body. We have an inspector of milk; let us have an inspector of reports. For instance, why should the face of a great daily paper present the the features of a murder, day after day, in boldest type and most minute pictorial effects? Why must the boys and girls, the young men and maidens of this country find a picture of the saw, the knife, the trunk, the bloody furniture, the headless body, and all the sickening particulars of a murder in low life made the most prominent portion of a newspaper professedly designed to convey the latest information? Or why should the portrait of an unfortunate or wicked woman, the cell in which she is confined, the gallows on which she is to be executed, and a hundred other details, be either portrayed or « written up » in graphic language? I have looked through the great dailies of London and of England generally, but, to their honor and credit, not one of those in good standing devotes as much as a column, nor gives a single picture to those horrors which must constantly occur there. It is reserved for the press of America to spread in hundreds of thousands of copies the useless, demoralizing; vice-provoking and crime-stimulating stuff which is falsely called news.

I see no legitimate reason why a nation, any more than a family, should wash its dirty linen in public. If evil is an acknowledged factor of civilization, and cannot be wholly eliminated, every effort should be made at least to keep the unnecessary and practically irrelevant circumstances of crime in the background. « Papa, » said a thirteen-year-old boy the other day, as he looked up from a New York daily, in which he had been absorbed for half an hour, « Papa, I'm going to read the paper every day now. I wish I had read it ever so long ago. I didn't know it was like that! » « Like what? » inquired his father, surprised at the flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes of his boy. « Why, like that! » pointing to a woodcut. « It's better than Cousin Dick's detective stories, for it's real. They did do it, you know, papa, and they have to go to prison for it! It's ever so much better than made up stories. That fellow who robbed the store was smart, wasn't he papa? » « Smart »—that was the idea received of a burglary. And that was the first time a Christian father had brought close home to him the bad influence of sensational journalism.

There is one magic way by which the opinions of those may be changed who offer us the news mixed, like an olla podrida of a hundred elements. If the more intellectual among us would persistently ignore the sensational newspaper and as persistently buy the cleanest daily in the market, so that thousands of readers should suddenly drop from the famous circulation, to the immediate detriment of the financial departments of such journals, doubtless a season of virtuous reform would set in, headed and advertised with the same zeal now displayed by those who « must give what the public demand. » For after all, the press is what we make it. We can make or break this great concentrated power if we are fully determined. It behoves each honorable person to act unselfishly so as to further the true good of humanity, and when all the best individual minds and wills are pulling in the same direction against a mass of undisciplined and untaught intelligence, the newspaper must go with the stronger party or be split from end to end.