MOSQUITO NEWSPAPERS.

Grey River Argus, Volume IX, Issue 742, 20 October 1870, Page 2

MOSQUITO NEWSPAPERS.

[WEST COAST TIMES.] There is a parasitical class of newspaper, possessing no distinct life of its own, but which, subsisting by sufferance, injures, or endeavors to injure, the one essential to the life of a newspaper of another class — its reputation. Coming out of an jevening, like the mosquitoes, newspapers of this class imitate these more peculiar than pleasing creatures by making a buzz and a bite, and there ends, apparently, all the good purpose they serve in the economy of news-giving, as ends also the good purpose of the mosquito in the economy of nature. An occasional experience of this buzzing and biting may be relieved of its irritation by a sense of its novelty, but, when persistent, it developes into a nuisance, and should, be brushed aside as would be the mosquilo, or other less reputable member of its race. The mosbuito newspaper, like the sandfly of the Country, has attained a high state of development as a mosquito in New Zealand. In some places they buzz with such a fierceness of buzz as almost to be mistaken for blue-bottles. They bite or sting with a fondness and a frequency which might be calculated, but for their construction, to injure their little bodies. Fortunately their development is numerically restricted by no quarter being given them in morally healthy localities,

and they exist with impunity chiefly in places where experience of their habits render them inocuous or justifies their being treated with contempt. { The moral attributes of the mosquito newspaper, if we may be permitted to mix metaphor, are distinguished chiefly by a mania of suspicion, sometimes real, uome times affected, a3 madness sometimes is. Somebody i 9 always stealing something from it. To drop the metaphor a little more, the Government is always purloining or impeding the transmission of its important telegrams. Contemporaries are " cribbing" its extremely original paragraphs or its local or foreign reports, procured at no end of expense. Produced probably by one factotum — or teetotum — kept on the premises, it presumes that what it familiarly speaks of a3 its contemporaries maintain no "staff" whatever, but wait only with eager m&w to appropriate the result of this teetotum's indefatigable exertions. Filling its own lean frame with extracts from the columns of those very contemporaries, it adopts that ingenious expedient, " the first word of flighting," and, before the event, exclaims Tv quoque. In fact, what the mosquito newspaper is capable of doing in the utterance of insinuations, assertions, and fabrications with the object of its own self-inflation and the injury of others, is only excelled by its utter incapacity to do anything well within its legitimate sphere as a newspaper. Itself a caricature by its presumption, it presumes to caricature the work of others by attributing it to itself, and in a word, as a mosquito, cuts such antics as should make the angels, if they are ever so disposed, much more disposed to laugh than weep.