getting out of winter-resort
numbers, automobile numbers, financial numbers, and Alaska-Yukon-Pacific
Exposition numbers is not at all to be condemned, though the motive may
be commercial, as the swollen advertising pages in such special numbers
attest.

But what shall we suspect when a paper which claims a million readers
devotes a long editorial to praising a poor play, and then in a
subsequent issue there appears a full-page advertisement of that play?
What does it mean when not a single Denver paper publishes a line about
three nefarious telephone bills before the Colorado Legislature? And
what shall we think of a certain daily whose editor recently told me
that there was on his desk a list three feet long of names of prominent
people who were not to be mentioned in his paper either favorably or
unfavorably?

But direct bribe-giving and bribe-taking are, as I have said, very
rare. Such a procedure is too crude. If you should get up some palpable
advertisement disguised as news, and send it around to the leading
papers asking them to put it in as reading matter, and send you the
bill, expecting them to swallow the bait, you would be disappointed. It
is more likely to be done in another way. A financier invites an editor
to go with him on a cruise in his private yacht to the West Indies, or
offers to let him in on the ground floor in some commercial
undertaking. Then, after the editor is under obligations, favors are
asked and the editor is enmeshed.

Although I have said much about the sordid side of journalism, and the
temptations that we editors have to meet in one form or another, I do
not want you to think that the profession or trade of journalism offers
no scope for the highest moral and intellectual attainments. I have
dwelt thus long on the seamy side of our profession because there is a
seamy side, and I believe it does good occasionally to discuss it with
frankness. The first step in correcting an evil is to acknowledge its
existence. Were the title of this lecture "Journalism and Progress," or
"The Leadership of the Press," I could have told a far different and
rosier, though a no less true story.

But, as I approach my conclusion, let me give you some more pleasing
examples of the better side of "Commercialism and Journalism."

George Jones, the late owner of the New York "Times," when that paper
made its historic fight against the Tweed Ring, was offered five million
dollars by "Slippery Dick" Conn