"Can't Print That"

The yardstick by which newspapers judge "what is news" is often mislaid when the story of a libel suit occurs. No matter how interesting to the public the facts might be, newspapers rarely mention legal action against themselves or their contemporaries, even if decided favorably to the Press; practically never if the verdict be adverse.

It remained for the Dry partisan Christian Century last week to inform its small portion of the reading public that on June 3, in Los Angeles, the Rev. Edwin Courtland Dinwiddie, onetime officer of the Anti-Saloon League, was awarded $150,000 damages against Publisher William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner. All Los Angeles dailies of June 3 and 4 spurned the story, as did most of the news services.

The victory over the Examiner was not the first, but the most lucrative of a series of libel suits begun last year by Mr. Dinwiddie against Hearstpapers for an "expose" printed in the spring of 1928.

Mr. Dinwiddie's suit is based on articles alleging that he "misappropriated" $10,000 provided by Congress in 1915 for an anti-alcoholism conference, which was postponed by the advent of the War.

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