Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 244, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 October 1910 — TRUTH IN DAILIES [ARTICLE]

TRUTH IN DAILIES

Novelist Says Sticking to Facts Is Best Policy. Daily Newspapers, Richard Whiteing States, Prevents Apathy, Aids Literature and Helps the Poor. London.—Richard Whiteing, veteran of Fleet street and author of “No. 6 John Street,” who celebrated recently his seventieth birthday anniversary, has given to an Interviewer some of his latest ideas about journalism. Mr. Whiteing sprang into fame at sixty. His well-known novel did it. Prior to “No. 5 John Street,” he was a hardworking leader writer on a, London morning paper. With his big body and big head, his white hair and his brilliant, penetrating brown eyes, he Is one of the most picturesque and most magnetic men of letters in the metropolis. “I often think,” he said, "when I see the order that reigns in our streets what it means to keep these people quiet. A good many of them suffer much. But the fact that the press is there, watching over them as a sort of poor man’s friend in the big sense, helps them enormously. The fact that there is always some one who will represent you and your cause aright, as Hamlet puts it, is a great calming and tranquilizing influence. “The so-called ‘lower class' is beginning to feel much the equal of the classes above, chiefly because there is no longer any monopoly of how the world wags. Travel, history, politics, art, literature—the daily half-penny manual is a sort of daily manual of all of them. Some foolish people have said that daily Journalism is killing literature in its highest forms. I say,

To the contrary, .'that the daily paper provides a sort of first course in literature, and I am an immense admirer of the clear, incisive style adopted by the half-penny press. “It stimulates curiosity, and when once you have done that in any human being you have started him on the right road. The one deadly thing is apathy. The cow in the field has no note of interrogation. The savage might see an aeroplane and not wonder. You can lead a man from the curbstone to the stars when you have once made him curious. A newspaper forces a man to be curious. “The dear old truth! That's all we want. The truth is so beautiful, so amazingly interesting, so much more wonderful than fiction! Therefore I say that, quite apart from morality, it is policy for a paper to tell the truth. It is policy in much the same way for a paper to keep Itself pure, because the mass of the people are essentially serious. Life hits most of them very hard, and hard hitting does not make a frivolous generation.”