Editors on Editors

In Washington, assembled the American Society of Newspaper Editors. To eat with them and talk with them came President Calvin Coolidge. Said he:

"The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction. No newspaper can be a success which fails to appeal to that element of our national life."

The editors themselves turned to a discussion of newspaper ethics -- crime news in particular.

Willis Abbot, Managing Editor of the earnest Christian Science Monitor, defended his paper's policy of publishing no crime news. He contended that crime news only served to produce more crime.

Herbert Bayard Swope, vigorous Executive Editor of The New York World, contended the opposite: that printing crime news is a legitimate part of a newspaper's function, that it arouses communities to fight crime, serving as a definite check on evil doing. "Expression," he affirmed, "can never be so bad as suppression."

Grove Patterson of The Toledo Blade protested against the indiscriminate publication of details in scandal cases, citing the recent cases of Percy Stickney Grant, the blackmailed rajah, Leonard Kip Rhinelander.

The question of medicine and the press was discussed by Dr. Morris Fishbein, erudite editor of the American Medical Association Journal. He declared that in the past year the press reported five tuberculosis cures and five cancer cures none of which was backed by scientific proof of any merit. Indeed, the press rarely if ever curries news of scientific discoveries which is , not sneered at by doctors, although important scientific discoveries have a great need of proper publicity. The difficulty, said Dr. Fishbein, was that it is difficult, almost impossible, to get men with adequate medical training who have journalistic ability. At the present time, the quacks and "publicity hounds" get most of the publicity and real work is inadequately or improperly presented.

He pointed out that the American Medical Association has complete information on all licensed physicians and more than 100,000 cross-indexed cards containing information concerning quacks, cultists and nostrums of various kinds -- information kept not for physicians but for the benefit of the public. He suggested that newspapers avail themselves of this information to avoid being duped by egregious quacks.