a new league and raise defense funds, print leaflets and pamphlets and devise a system of house-to-house distribution, call big strikes and parades of protest; by this prodigious mass of effort they succeed in conveying some small portion of the truth to some small portions of the population. Is it not obvious that society cannot continue indefinitely to get its news by this wasteful method? One large section of the community organized to circulate lies, and another large section of the community organized to refute the lies! We might as well send a million men out into the desert to dig holes, and then send another million to fill up the holes. To say that William Marion Reedy, after a study of our journalistic dishonesty, could find no better solution of the problem than pamphleteering, is merely to say that bourgeois thought is bankrupt.
The first remedy to which every good American takes resort is the law. We pass fifty thousand new laws in America every year, but still we cling to the faith that the next thousand will "do the business." Let us have laws to punish the lying of the press!
I, as a good American, have thought of laws that I would like to see passed. For instance, a law providing that newspapers shall not publish an interview with anyone until they have submitted the interview and had it O.K.'d; or unless they have obtained written permission to quote the person without such O.K.
Also, a law providing that when any newspaper has made any false statement concerning an individual, and has had its attention called to the falsity of this statement, it shall publish a correction of the statement in the next edition of the publication, and in the same spot and with the same prominence given to the false statement.
For example, the press sends out a report that the Rev. Washington Gladden is about to resign his pulpit. His mail is full of letters from people all over the country, expressing regret. Says Dr. Gladden:
The trouble with such a report is that you can never get it corrected.
I have done my best to get such correction, but in this I have
signally failed. Anything which discredits a man is "good stuff,"
which most newspapers are ready to print, provided it is not actionable;
any correction which is made of such a report is not so apt to find a
place on the wires, and is pretty sure to be blue-pencilled by the
telegraph editors.
