are: (1) the desire of the owners of the newspaper to use it to advance their own private interests or those of their party or faction; (2) the influence of advertisers and other business interests that wish to protect their own enterprises; (3) the effort to make the news more attractive and sensational than it really is in order to gain readers.
Effects of Adulterated News. Whatever may be the reason for the "coloring" or the suppression of news, the effect of this distortion or suppression upon the opinions and the votes of citizens is a matter of sufficient importance to the people generally to warrant careful consideration, not only by citizens but by newspaper men themselves. If the social and political interests of the community are vitally affected by news furnished in the newspapers, as has been shown in the examples given, publishers cannot claim that the purpose of the newspapers is to sell as many copies as possible, to get as much advertising as possible, and to give the people what they want to read, rather than to furnish their readers with a record of the interesting and significant activities of the day, as complete and accurate as it can be made. Like common carriers, such as railroads, the newspapers have a public function as well as the private one of making money, and that public function is to furnish news, the commodity in which they deal, in a complete and accurate form.
News adulterated and "colored" is as harmful to the opinions of newspaper readers as impure and poisonous food is to their physical constitutions. Before pure food legislation prohibited adulterating, coloring, and misbranding of foods, the buyer was at the mercy of the unscrupulous manufacturer, just as the newspaper reader is at the mercy of the unscrupulous newspaper maker. Although public sentiment has demanded
