Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 December 1878 — The Clean Newspaper. [ARTICLE]

The Clean Newspaper.

There is a growing feeling in every healthy community against the journals which make it their special object to minister to perverted taste by seeking out and serving up in a seductive form disgusting scandals and licentious revelations. There is good reason to believe that the clean newspaper is more highly prized to-day than it was four or five years ago. It is also safe to predict that as people in all ranks of life, who protect their own at least from contamination, become more conscious of the pernicious influence of a certain class of journals, called enterprising because they are ambitious to serve up dirty scandals, they will be careful to see that the journals they permit to be read in the family circle are of the class that never forget the proprieties of life. Already men and women of refinement and healthy morals have had their attention called to the pernicious influence of bad literature, and have made commendable efforts to counteract the same by causing sound literature to be published and sold at popular prices. These efforts are working a silent but sure revolution. The best authors are more generally read to-day than at any previous time. The sickly, sentimental story paper and wild ranger and pirate story book are slowly yielding the field to worthier claimants. To the praise of the decent newspaper, it may be said tliat -where it lias a place in the family, and has been read for years by young and old, it has developed such a healthy tone and such a discriminating taste that the literature of the slums has no admirers. Fortunately, the number of such families is increasing in the land, and, as they increase, the journal that devotes itself to sickening revelations of immorality will be compelled to find its supporters solely among those classes that practice vice or crime, or are ambitious to learn to fellow such ways.— Boston Herald.