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1851-1921 By Elmer Davis Originally published 1921 |
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so accurate that it brought down on itself almost at once the wrath of the Germans and their sympathizers, and within a few months had earned the honorable distinction of being the principal focus of the vituperation which the Germans and pro-Germans fired at an unsympathetic American press.
The news department of a paper should not be, and that of The Times is not, influenced by editorial policies. But it is sometimes forgotten by amateur critics of journalism that the editorial page has a function going somewhat beyond the mere assertion of opinion. It is often the duty of the editorial writers to interpret the news, to discriminate between the probable and the improbable, the tendentious and the more or less impartial, in the great volume of news reports which come to the office. Since human nature is fallible, it has been found advisable to print all the news and leave to the editorial page the assessment of its relative worth, rather than exercise discrimination at the news desk and suppress everything that fails to accord with the news editor's judgment of the probabilities.
The general reader may disagree with the editorial interpretation. That is his privilege, for it is presented only as an interpretation. But editorial writers are somewhat better informed than the average reader. They probably know more of the news than he does, for they read half a dozen papers a day where he reads one or two; a newspaper prints all the news it gets, so long as that news is not libelous, but a single paper does not always get it all. But the editorial writers have read much outside of the daily papers; they have a background
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