The Archbold letters, given to the press by Mr. Hearst in the late campaign, are further examples of commercialism in journalism. How the Standard Oil Company sent its certificates of deposit and giant subscriptions to sundry editors and public-opinion promoters, and how a member of Congress from the great state of Pennsylvania actually suggested to Mr. Archbold that it might be a good plan to obtain "a permanent and healthy control" of that very fountain-head of publicity,--the Associated Press,--these sinister transactions and suggestions have been so fully discussed as to need no further comment from me.
From the standpoint of journalistic ethics, the only thing more reprehensible than selling your opinions is offering them for sale. This is editorial prostitution. The mere 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.