Good Business?

When there is a lack of cheaper free sensation-fodder for newspaper presses, how large a sum is it good business to pay for a really choice blob of pedigreed scandal?

At Washington, last week, Publisher William Randolph Hearst went far toward quoting the market price which he considers sound. Testifying before a Senate special committee (see THE CONGRESS) he named "$15,000 or $16,000" as the purchase price of the recent Hearst series of pseudo-Mexican documents purporting to show that huge bribes were ordered "paid" to four U. S. Senators (TIME, Dec. 19).

If such self-discrediting and sorry stuff is worth $16,000, perhaps it is also good business to obtain it by bribery, "planting" of agents in the bureaus of a foreign state, and inciting these agents to commit burglary. Last week Hearstling subordinates testified that such were substantially the methods used to obtain the purported "original documents."

If these methods were indeed resorted to, an aura of "pedigree" hangs about the documents; but questions put by the investigating Senators, last week, prompted a suspicion that the papers may be simple forgeries which have not even been burglared.

The degree of ethics which Mr. Hearst considers good business was made clear by him in his answers to the Senators' questions:

Q. Did you investigate whether money had been actually paid to United States Senators? A. No, we didn't.

Q. Did you go to the Senators mentioned and ask them? A. No, we couldn't without revealing the contents.

Q. Have you any evidence that any Senator received any such money as mentioned here? A. No; in fact, I don't believe they did receive any money.

Q. Have you ever heard of any evidence to sustain such a charge? A. No. I don't believe the charge.

The attitude of reputable news organs toward this concept of journalistic good business was summed up, last week, by the New York World with relentless logic:

"The honest publisher who prints, believing them to be genuine, documents falsely assailing the honor of public men is guilty of culpable neglect. The publisher who prints such documents not even believing them to be true; who makes no effort to ascertain if they are true; who disregards internal evidence suggesting that they are forgeries, and who seeks to protect himself against libel suits by partly blotting out names which yet remain identifiable by the associates of the men traduced--that publisher is a disgrace to the profession." Since one of the Hearst documents purports that $25,000 was "ordered paid" from Mexican sources to Editor Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation, he quietly took occasion to reproduce that document in facsimile, last week, in The Nation's cover. In an unruffled article The Nation said: "We are aware, of course, that the Senators look upon the entire series as impudent but unskilled forgeries and that they joked about them. . . . It is pointed out that the Spanish of the documents is faulty, that the Hearst forces changed the date of one dispatch three times in three consecutive editions, and that no officials of any government which disburses secret funds for corrupt purposes are so stupid as to commit anything to paper. . . . The facts are set forth here for purposes of historical record."