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1851-1921 By Elmer Davis Originally published 1921 |
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carried an editorial on the issues of the campaign
which struck the Republican managers as about the
most forcible presentation of the case which they
had seen anywhere. Mr. Luther Little of the Com-
mittee was accordingly instructed to call on the
publisher to express the Committee's thanks and
appreciation and to order one million copies of that
issue for distribution.
To his profound surprise, the publisher of The Times
refused to accept the order. He felt that the wide
free distribution of a marked newspaper might easily
create, in the minds of many who received it, a false
impression to the effect that the appearance of the
article and ,the purchase of the copies might be in
some way a bargain. The Times, of course, would
not receive payment of any sort for what appeared
in its reading columns, and it did not want to incur
even the suspicion. Mr. Little argued, not without
plausibility, that The Times must have printed that
editorial hoping that people would read it, and here
a million more readers were offered. But the publisher of the paper felt that readers of that sort
would do the paper little good, while the accompanying suspicions would do positive harm.
The conductors of The Times were publishing a
paper for the people who liked the sort of paper
they were publishing. They did not want it forced
on anybody's attention or given away free because
it contained something which happened to strike
the fancy of gentlemen who were able to order and
distribute a million copies. Circulation of such character, it was felt, could do the paper no good and
might do a great deal of harm. The only readers
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