San Francisco Chronicle - Sunday, April 21, 1895

A STRIKING COMPARISON.

The New York Press said recently: "Daily during the trial of Wilde-Queensberry case the London papers, with the decent exception of the St. James Gazette, have printed 6000 to 12,000 words of the, to American notions, unprintable testimony. There is nothing new about this. The London papers, when rid of their bugaboo libel law, are the nastiest in the world. No American journal could or would print the details of the testimony in the many recent cases whose trials have chronicled the decay of a large portion of the English leisure class. But in the Wilde case, for instance, some American newspapers would, had it been an American case, long ago have exposed the practices of the man and the tendencies of the time, and it would have done it in a way which would have punished the one and corrected the other without making sinks of its news columns."

This comparison, as just as it is striking, is vastly to the credit of American journalism. The English method, owing partly to tradition and partly to cowardice, is not to tear the mask from the face of the hypocrite or sensualist, but to wait until the law puts its hand on him, and then to publish column after column of undisguised and unblushing vulgarity, secure in its nastiness behind the legal shield of a privileged publication.

We prefer the American style. It is true that it sometimes runs into ultra-sensationalism, that it is personal journalism and that on rare occasions injustice is done an individual, but, balancing one method against the other, the conclusion must be reached that the American method is better for the conservation of public morals and the maintenance of public decency than the English.

There would be, perhaps, no necessity for making this comparison were it not that English writers, especially in reviews and magazines, are continually holding up American newspapers as glaring examples of what journalism should not be. Of course, most of the writers write from the depths of profound ignorance, as, for instance, when one of them delivered himself of a profound and anathematical screed on the "Arizona Kicker" as a sample of the American newspaper, not knowing that the paper is a wholly imaginary one; but others, better informed, are weighted down with preconceived notions of the horrors of journalism as exemplified in the United States. In the future, however, there will always be an unanswerable reply to such aspersions, as pointed out by the New York Press, that while some American newspapers would have hunted down and exposed the infamy of Oscar Wilde, no paper in this country would have opened its columns to the floods of vileness and vulgarity which overran the London press as soon as the case got into court and became thereby a privileged publication, and not the foundation of a libel suit.