Akin to the false notion that the newspaper is a sort of open channel
that the public may use as it chooses, is the conception of it as a
charitable institution. The newspaper, which is the property of a private
person as much as a drug-shop is, is expected to perform for nothing
services which would be asked of no other private person. There is
scarcely a charitable enterprise to which it is not asked to contribute
of its space, which is money, ten times more than other persons in the
community, who are ten times as able as the owner of the newspaper,
contribute. The journal is considered "mean" if it will not surrender its
columns freely to notices and announcements of this sort. If a manager
has a new hen-coop or a new singer he wishes to introduce to the public,
he comes to the newspaper, expecting to have his enterprise extolled for
nothing, and probably never thinks that it would be just as proper for
him to go to one of the regular advertisers in the paper and ask him to
give up his space. Anything, from a church picnic to a brass-band concert
for the benefit of the widow of the triangles, asks the newspaper to
contribute. The party in politics, whose principles the editor advocates,
has no doubt of its rightful claim upon him, not only upon the editorial
columns, but upon the whole newspaper. It asks without hesitation that
the newspaper should take up its valuable space by printing hundreds and
often thousands of dollars' worth of political announcements in the
course of a protracted campaign, when it never would think of getting its
halls, its speakers, and its brass bands, free of expense. Churches, as
well as parties, expect this sort of charity. I have known rich churches,
to whose members it was a convenience to have their Sunday and other
services announced, withdraw the announcements when the editor declined
any longer to contribute a weekly fifty-cents' worth of space. No private
persons contribute so much to charity, in proportion to ability, as the
newspaper. Perhaps it will get credit for this in the next world: it
certainly never does in this.