ls, church
festivals, - all are often written up in advance and the accounts published , yet the events themselves have been postponed or given up altogether on account of conditions of weather. Mar riage ceremonies are described as having taken place in a church,
while sudden illness has made necessary a change in plans and the ceremony has been performed in private. Obituary notices
are published of prominent citizens said to be at the point of
death , yet they have recovered and sometimes lived for years after these notices appeared. Another fertile source of error is found in mistranslation , although it is one that does not belong particularly to the local
reporter . Errors are almost inevitable when reports are trans mitted through an unfamiliar language, or when seemingly
unnecessary words are omitted and have to be filled in . Conscious mistranslation may explain other errors, as was possibly true
when in September, 1914, a dispatch was received in English in New York City quoting an English naval officer who, when the
Kaiser was a child , had once carried him on board a British war ship . He was quoted as often saying, “ If I had dropped the little fellow overboard , what a lot of trouble would have been saved to Europe and the world .” — The New York Staats-Zeitung of Sep
tember 29, 1914 , translated the remark, " Ich wollte , ich hätte ihn über Bord geworfen " - " I wish I had thrown him overboard.” 11 If the reporter is sometimes censured for fostering a sense of disproportion in news values , he, in his turn , may retort that he
is himself the victim of this perverted sense. Macaulay once exclaimed , “ A broken head in Coldbath Fields produces a greater sensation than three pitched battles in India,” 12 and it is the broken head that the reporter often feels obliged to report.13
Yet here again the report may be conditioned by time and place . In a sparsely settled country , where there is little to break 11 New York Times, October 2, 1914. See also translation of le presbytère as “ the Presbyterian School (in Bel gium )." - New York Times, February 8 , 1918.
12 Čited by M . Macdonagh, “ In the Sub -Editor's Room ," Nineteenth Century , December, 1897, 42: 999 - 1008.
13 The Monthly Chronicle in its third volume, 1730 , announced that it
would give special place to " observable domestick occurrences , honours and
preferments, ecclesiastical promotions, marriages and births, and
deaths,” — a list of subjects that affords an enlightening comparison with
the local occurrences on which reports were demanded a century la
