But the charge that the press intentionally suppresses thenews can not be so lightly dismissed . It has been made repeatedly by the press itself, although never in the form of a confession , and it has been scarcely less frequently made by individual journalists both in public and in private. In 1905, Greenwood wrote to Gold win Smith : " In England the character of journalism is certainly
falling. . . . Butwhere, I think, the newspaper press sinks lowest is in its dealing with news. There is far more selection , repression , maiming, and focussing of news than was thought decent forty years ago .” 7 So often has the statement been iterated and re
iterated that it has come to have somewhat the authority of an axiom . Does the press suppress news? Unquestionably it does, and it may be added , equally unquestionably , it ought to suppress much
more than it does. Does it suppress the news that the public ought to have, does it suppress it knowingly, and through fear ofdimin
ishing its revenues ? That is another question and one to bemore cautiously answered . It is always easy for the critics of the press
to make the worse appear the better reason and vice versa . If news that the critic thinks important does not appear in his morning paper , the impulse is to assume that it has been wil
fully suppressed . But this condemnation fails to recognize the variations in
judgment and in interest thatmake one set of conditions seem vastly important to one person and entirely negligible to another .
A class in journalism was recently asked to select the most im portant news item on the first page of a greatmetropolitan daily , - practically every item on the page was selected by some one, with the exception of the one that had seemed most important to the instructor in charge. The selection of the one hundred best books of all time, or of the past year, or of the current week, or for a shelf of any length must always vary infinitely , even the Bible and Shakespeare would presumably not be listed by Chinese or Brahmin scholars, and in some quarters doubts in regard to Shakespeare have arisen since the reminder that it was German scholarship that discovered his rank. During an important trial involving labor and capital, the charge was made that " the
- Correspondence of Goldwin Smith , pp. 43
