The Bright and Dark Sides
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THE BRIGHT AND DARK SIDES.
The newspaper reader who confines his reading, as many people do now-a-days, to the columns of the periodical press, is likely to be a very despondent individual. In fact there is almost ground for believing, that he who draws his ideas of men and things from the periodical press alone would soon become a misanthrope.
Taking up his paper the reader glances over the police report, with its "awful tragedies," "appalling atrocities," "scandalous revelations," thefts, assaults, riots, suicides. It is the dark side of human nature alone that is here laid bare before him. For every murder, there are ten lives saved; but unless the circumstances border on the marvelous, they fall not within the provinces of the ubiquitous reporter to chronicle. For each seduction there are fifty instances of triumphant virtue—but they are not revealed in the police courts as are the former. For every arrested drunkard there are a hundred sober people quietly spending their evening at home. For every rowdy rioter in the streets, there are a dozen studious, law-abiding young men improving their minds or enjoying innocent recreation. Yet there is nothing of this that falls to the lot of the press to mention.
The reader has had enough by this time of the police reports. He turns to the all-engrossing, never-exhausted topic, politics. Conventions have been sitting, meetings have been held, and movements are on foot. Through the thin disguise of simulated public spirit, he can perceive the utter selfishness and meanness of the men, and the abject littleness and contemptibility of their real aims. But this class, numerous and powerful for mischief as they are, are not all the public. There are far more than they, in all classes of society, who are quietly and honestly minding their own business, following their own trade or occupation, while the noisy few assemble in bar rooms and [cut away]
Disgusted again, the reader turns to the foreign news. Wars and rumors of wars; slavery and filibusterism; aggressions and retaliations; selfish schemes of aggrandisement undertaken and contemplated under the name of diplomacy; these comprise the staple of this part of the paper. The growing tendency to misanthropy in the reader's mind finds here no abatement, unless he reflect that in other countries, as in his own, it is not the solid basis of peace, comfort and propriety, but the floating elements of looseness, crime and degradation, which rise to the surface of society and attract the notice of the recorders of current events.
Last, but not least, the desponding reader turns to the column editorial. Here again he finds the age depicted in no flattering colors. The staple of the editor's utterance, like the bulk of the news on which he comments, consists of the more faulty and reprehensible kind of events. Denunciation is the main editorial duty and mission. Eulogiums from his pen are few and far between; his chief task is to rebuke the wrong. With regard to the great mass of good in the world, he is wisely content to "let well alone;" but the evil and the wrong it is his province to condemn and rectify.
But notwithstanding that the newspaper lays bare more of vice than virtue, more of dishonesty than rectitude, of violence and crime than of order and sobriety; it must not be concluded that there is more of the wrong than the right in society. It devolves on the papers to publish the names of deliquent tax payers, and not of those who settle promptly with the Collector. It is the exception, not the rule, which the newspaper must illustrate. Because vice and dishonesty are exceptional, their manifestations become the staple news of the day. Were they to become the usual and ordinary rule, instead of the infrequent exception, they would cease to have that novelty which makes them subject matter for the journalist. The greater detail and prominence bestowed on a topic by the newspaper, proves the rarity of its occurrence. The worst symptom of social disease would be manifested, were the crimes and offences of the day unheeded, or passed by with trivial notice from the journalist.