NEWSPAPER INVASION OF PRIVACY
IS THE PAUL PRY AND PEEPING TOM TYPE OF REPORTING ON THE INCREASE?
THE newspapers printed the initial paragraph of Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s will, and some of them made it the theme of very respectful and profitable comment. It was as intimate a statement as can well be imagined, a solemn committal of the soul of the maker of the will into the hands of his Saviour, and a charge to his children to maintain and defend “the blessed doctrine of the complete atonement for sin through the blood of Jesus Christ.”
But Mr. Morgan was a public person. All of us, in that sense, became members of his family. We had made our way to his bedside as he lay dying in Rome, and we expected to be given his will to read as soon as his wife and son and daughters had read it. They were obliged to give it to us: what could they do? Mr. Morgan, by reason of his great wealth and his distinguished public service had lost the privilege of privacy.
At the same time, there were those who read the will, and especially the beginning of it, with a certain sense of embarrassment, as if they had been found reading a neighbor’s private letters. The situation is one which arises in connection with some modern biographies and autobiographies, but the newspapers present it to our conscience every day. Now is abundantly fulfilled the prediction of an old book which said, “There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.” When the book promises further that that which is spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops, we seem to see the reporter in the midst of his characteristic activities. All the closet doors are now wide open; or, if they are shut and locked against us, there are dictagraphs inside.
The other day at a great college a student was found dead in bed. The reporter who put the fact in the paper reported also that the president and the dean, and other persons much older and perhaps wiser than himself, had done their best to keep the matter private. Their endeavors appear to have been entirely for the sake of thestudent’s family and friends. There was no suspicion of anything wrong except such as the reporter himself conveyed to heighten the interest. These kindly endeavors the reporter, according to his own frank and impudent confession, had frustrated. No purpose seems to have been served by the publication except that the reporter got his money for it.
The other day, in the midst of a suit for divorce, the wife was stricken with a mortal disease, and the husband was sent for. She was unconscious when he arrived, and he knelt by her bedside, praying. Then she opened her eyes and saw him, and told him that she loved him still. Behind the door was a reporter, with his paper in one hand and his pencil in the other, putting down what he saw and heard through the crack, and going out to shout it through a megaphone in the street.
Two lads in a high school fought a duel over the attentions which one was paying to the other’s sister. The local newspapers gave it nearly as much space as they gave to the floods in Ohio. The little girls who looked on were all interviewed, and we were told what the sister said when she went to see her wounded lover in the hospital. Of course the perspective was absurd, but the performance was by no means absurd.
So with the divorce-suits that are tried in the court-rooms, which have no walls, where the busy reporters prepare themselves to tell us a hundred things that we have no right to know. A brutal husband forces his wife to sue him for divorce as her only defense against his cruelty, and the newspapers coöperate with him in exposing to the common gaze all the tender privacies of the woman’s soul.
We read such revelations, at first ashamed, as if we were looking through a keyhole, then somewhat brutalized ourselves by the experience. Thus the line is blurred between the publicity which is for the good of the people and for the terror of offenders, and the publicity which is only gossip and scandal printed for no other purpose than to sell the papers and make money. Whatever the remedy, the fact is plain that our sense of the honest rights of privacy is dulled. If Lady Godiva were to ride through the streets of Coventry to-day, there would be Peeping Toms in groups at every window with cameras and machines for taking moving pictures.
It is not improbable that one of the next important movements in this country will be for a greater sense of responsibility to wholesome public opinion on the part of the press. There is so much that is good and helpful and truly progressive in the better newspapers, and they are so sound on the larger questions of national policy, that it is to be hoped that the reformation of the grosser faults of journalism will be initiated by them. And in saying this we must not forget the offenses against good taste and good morals which are continually being perpetrated by certain periodicals that appear but once a month.