Eminently Respectable?

Yellow journalism is a form of commerce which consists in pandering to the tastes of a portion of the public-- sometimes at the expense of truth, always at the expense of fairness. Like thieving, yellow journalism exists in many varieties. There is the simple ruffianly attack. There is the subtler, less violent and less obvious form of getting away with it. The latter form of yellow journalism is usually practiced by those who go about in a cloak of respectability, wrap themselves up in a scarf of fairness and wear the hat of honest citizenry. Freud coupled the instinct of prudery with the instinct of license. Yellow journalism caters to both groups. The crude form attacks the character of a man without giving his defense, and serves as pimp to the sensation lovers of the community. The refined form attacks a man's opinions without giving him a hearing and purveys to the prejudices of the opposed group. The Christian Science Monitor is an eminently respectable newspaper. In its godliness, it steers clear of all things lascivious or scandalous. But it is not above shutting off its opponents without a hearing and then publishing attacks on them. In the early part of May, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, in a speech before the Missouri Society of New York (TIME, May 12, EDUCATION), attacked prohibition. Prohibition is a hobby of The Monitor. Dr. Butler 'did not advocate nonenforcement of the law; on the contrary, he placed himself on record as favoring obedience to the law; but he did demand that the Volstead Act and the 18th Amendment should be repealed as infractions of freedom and causes of immorality. A thorough search of a file of The Monitor failed to disclose that that paper made any mention of the speech on the following day. On the second day, a little three-inch article appeared, on the fourth page of The Monitor, saying that a Methodist had challenged Dr. Butler to present his views before the Methodist General Conference, and added that Dr. Butler had been "quoted in press dispatches," after which followed a brief quotation. The same day it published an editorial attacking Dr. Butler's views. Several days later, The Monitor published the news that Governor Pinchot had called Dr. Butler a "milliner." It followed this by publishing, on its front page, a letter given out by Charles W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard, countering Dr. Butler's views. To this statement Dr. Butler replied, but the search of The Monitor files disclosed no mention of the reply. Instead, The Monitor next published, also on its front page, a long article headed "American College Youth Repudiates Butler's Wet Views." All this occurred in the days following Dr. Butler's original remarks. But May dragged into June and The Monitor still continued its attacks on Dr. Butler. "Texas Repudiates Dr. Butlers View," "Governor and College Head Assail Dr. Butler's Position," "Tulsa Citizens Repudiate Dr. Butler's Wet Stan'd." The editor of The Monitor may well have written "Butler, Butler," all over his desk pad for 1924--lest he forget, lest he forget.