"FRONT PAGE"

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 232, 23 May 1932, Page 2

"FRONT PAGE''

YELLOW PRESS LIFE OF AMERICAN NEWSPAPER REPORTER. HAS NO FEELINGS. Margaret Lane, the woman reporter of the London Daily Express,_ six months ago sailed into American journalism and became a "front page" success. In an article in the Daily Express she now gives her impressions of American journalists. To make friends with an American newspaper man (she writes) you must first accept and acknowledge certains things ahout him that are as near to his heart as face and figure to the heart of a pretty woman. Like Flint. In the first place it must be underStood that he has no feelings. In the second that his callousness makes flint look foolish. Third, that police and puhlic are in the hollow of his inky hand. Fourth, that he is entirely aware of evrything ulterior that is going on. And, lastly, that the millc of human kindness is a commodity to which he is a total stranger. Once you have acceded him these he accepts you on equal terms. His vanity is purely professional. He takes a child-like pride in his own toughness. I think the xecent talkies about him have heen bad for his modesty. They made him feel such a hell of a fellow. Key to Every Home. Added to that, you must remember that, like sorrow, he has the key to every home. He has an entirely impersonal feeling of right to your innermost secrets — that is, if you are a person of importance, like a murdered gangster's sweetheart or an assaulted chorus girl, and if your secrets are lively enough to be interesting. I have known Chicago newspaper men who found it difficult to helieve that in England one does not ring up the Prince of Wales and ask him what he thinks of companionate mar- ■ riage. "Has any one tried," he persists, and you abandon the suhject, knowing him to he convineed that he could do it if only he were in London. | Libel laws in the United States are | lax to disappearing point. That lax- | ity puts into the hands of newspaper j men' and women a very sinister v/eapon — that of saying pretty well as they choose of persons as well as events. Any one who sues an American newspaper for libel runs so grave a risk of having still worse mud thrown at them that almost nobody dares do it. No Xllusions. Thus a.working for an American newspaper is extremely stimulating, because power, however immoral, is always pleasant. When I say newspaper men, I am not thinking of those exalted ones who hreath'e the pure atmosphere of the New York Times. The Times office is rather like the headquarters of a great bank, and the American banks are like refined Bible pictures of the Temple of Mammon. I am thinking of the more numerous kind that I work among, who pound out their copy in a desert of litter and carbon, who have one cigar in the mouth and three in the pocket, \vho know everybody from Washing-' ton senators to "stick-up" men, and would rather die than be suspected of cherishing the illusion. S,ob-Sisters. Sometimes on a good murder joh, there is a sprinkling of "soh-sisters." (A sob-sister is a girl reporter whose job is to discover the "human angle" of the news.)

These young women are always busy with the murdered man's wife or the murderer's old white-haired mother, and they make a point of being kind to them, and of never being at a loss for a wise-erack, and of taking their liquor like gentlemen. Chicago is always pointed out as the city that is ruled not so much by gangsters as by the Press. Newspapers "made" the crime- kings 'and invested them with a devilish splendour they would never have thought of by themselves. Social Institutxon. Certain it is that in Chicago the newspaper reporter is monarch of all he surveys. Myself, armed with an American Press pass, I have fetched judges off the bench, sheriffs from their offices and policemen from their stations, and chiselled my way into prisons, morgues, the fastnesses of Chicago's "Scotland Yard," and a thousand places where I had no earthly business. The American reporter has fulfilled a curious destiny. Unlike his English prototype, he is not an outcast hut a social institution. In common with the blonde and the gangster, ha holds a high place in the imagination of his people. He is the hero of countless novels. Talldng pictures are made ahout him.