CHAPTER XIX
PERIOD OF SOCIAL READJUSTMENT
1900—
With what is said to be characteristic candor, Henry Watterson, the veteran editor of The Louisville Courier-Journal, thus summed up the conditions obtaining at the opening of the Period of Social Readjustment:
Journalism is without any code of ethics or system of self-restraint and self-respect. It has no sure standards of either work or duty. Its intellectual landscapes are anonymous, its moral destination confused. The country doctor, the village lawyer, knows his place and keeps it, having the consciousness of superiority. The journalist has few, if any, mental perspectives to fix his horizon; neither chart of precedent nor map of discovery upon which his sailing lines and travel lines have been marked.
NEWSPAPER ETHICS CODIFIED
Practically every newspaper before 1900 had been, as Mr. Watterson asserted, a law unto itself, without standards of either work or duty: its code of ethics, not yet codified like those of medicine and of law, had been, like its stylebook, individualistic in character. The most important change to leave its mark upon the journalism of the period was not in the gathering of news, not in the speed with which it could be placed before the public, not in the ownership and control of the journal from the individual to the incorporated company, but in the ethical advance made in all departments of the newspaper. New standards of ethics were established, not only for the editorial, but also for the advertising and circulation departments. Yet the press but reflected again the trend of the times, for it was an era of moral awakening. Collier's Weekly in "taking stock" asserted:—
Fifty years from now, when some writer brings Woodrow Wilson's "History of the American People" up to date, we think he will say that
