by an acquaintance, or by some person with whom his work brings him into contact, to suppress, as a whole or in part, a piece of news that it falls to his lot to report. Men and women threatened with exposure or disgrace because of one wrong step, will plead with him to spare them and their families by suppressing the news of their downfall. In all such cases the reporter will do well to refer the request to his superiors and to avoid promising to suppress any news. Older and more experienced newspaper men in positions of authority on the paper are usually better able to judge of the desirability of yielding to requests and pleas of this kind than is the young reporter.
How "Faking" Does Harm. In collecting and presenting facts the reporter should make every reasonable effort to have them as complete and accurate as possible. He is not justified in defending his failure to get and present the truth and the whole truth on the ground that as long as a story is interesting it makes little difference whether or not it is entirely true. The first temptation to depart from the truth not infrequently comes in an apparently innocent form. In the absence of real news, or in an effort to show his cleverness, the reporter takes some trivial incident and, by amplifying it with humorous but imaginary details, makes of it an amusing little feature story. Such stories often seem quite harmless in their effects on the readers or on the persons mentioned in the stories. Instances are on record, however, of persons who have committed suicide because their acquaintances bantered them about the ridiculous situations in which they had been portrayed in such newspaper stories. The reporter must remember that the persons who play a part in his stories are human beings with feelings, and that to hold them up before thousands of readers in a ridiculous situation
