p. 375 | Newspaper Honor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 23, 1883

Newspaper Honor.

In an address at Fort Wayne, Ind., Col. G. A. Pierce used the following sensible language:—

A short time ago a discussion arose in Chicago as to the relative duties of lawyers and newspapers, and the following query occurred to me: What would be said of any respectable journal that should take a fee for trying to make black appear white—that should undertake the defense of a notorious murderer, for instance? Not secretly, and while pretending to be impartial—that, of course would be intensely hypocritical and dishonorable—but openly and notoriously? The accused party would say, for instance: “I want defenders. I will hire Lawyer Such-a-One and newspaper So-and-So.” What an outcry would go up, and yet what is it that makes such an act highly dishonorable on the part of the newspaper and perfectly permissible and proper on the part of an attorney? Is newspaper honor held too high, or is legal honor held too low? I believe the time will come when a lawyer’s duties will be confined to seeing that murderers and highway robbers have a fair and just trial according to law, and when no amount of money will be allowed to convert them into paid eulogists of dangerous men.