Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 125, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 May 1910 — Why Libel a Shite? [ARTICLE]

Why Libel a Shite?

A good many people have noticed that the Indianapolis news is making a specialty of following up the field examiners now operating under the new accounting law, and whenever a township trustee is found short, playing it up under scare headlines as a vindication of the new law. In this way an impression is created that the state is honeycombed with dishonesty and graft, w r hile as a fact, dishonest officials are only rare exceptions and honest ones the rule throughout the state. The Indianapolis Sun, under the caption “Why Libel a State?” gives this propensity of the News a well deserved airing. It says: . . “The protest of township officials and local newspapers all over Indiana against the libeling of the state by the Indianapolis News in conjunction with the State Bureau of Accounts is justifiable. The News is to be given credit for its work in getting the accounting law upon the statute books that being its pet measure at the last legislature. But it is not necessary to give out the impression that every township official is a crook, a defaulter or a thief in order to prove the law a good one, and it certainly is not within the province of the State Board of Accounts to act as an attache of the News in its abetting of this injustice.

Hundreds of trustees have been examined by the state bureau and those who have been found in error in their accounts have been comparatively few. while of these a great many were in fault only in technical bookkeeping; there being no evidence of any shortage or willful violation of the law. But the State Bureau of Accounts has not seen fit to put the best side foremost. It has given out with great gusto every delinquency of every kind %nd has done so in order that the News might make capital of it. As stated in the Sun yesterday, the field examiners of this state office have gone so far as to deny information to local papers in the state, telling them to watch for the report in the News.

Is the Bureau of Accounts an agency of that paper, or is it a state bureau? The question is a pertinent one. It is not a question of sour grapes with the Sun; it would not have published these misleading reports had it been offered them. It simply protests in the name of justice and square dealing against the publication of every township delinquency in an elaborate form, and making no mention of the vast majority of township trustees who have , made competent and trustworthy' officials. It gives people in Indiana and those outside of the state the grossly erroneous impression that this state is infested with incompetents. What is worse, such persistent libeling of towSiship officials brings the office into disrepute and begets the very weakness the law purports to cure. Let us have a stop to it."