The Press: Hot Potato

Last week, the U. S. press was presented with one of the hugest and hottest journalistic potatoes ever baked in Washington, D. C.—the dubiously legal opportunity of publishing the income tax figures of U. S. citizens as paid since Jan. 1, 1924.* Some newspapers had anticipated this opportunity, others had to decide speedily upon their conduct toward the luscious, but alarming, vegetable. Besides the ambiguity of the law, the papers had to consider the reactions of their readers and the dictates of policy. Would curiosity overpower the anger of the individual at seeing the private affairs of himself and his neighbor thus laid bare? Would public opinion swing against the publicity and regard it as excessively bad taste? What did one’s political affiliations demand—to publish or not to publish? Of Republicans, not to. Of anti-Republicans, by all means to publish—loud, long, vigorously. The cold theory of journalism enjoined all to publish. Here was news—big, big news. What matter who had let it out? If one newspaper published it, why not all?

Typical of the actions of newspapers the country over were the actions of four leading newspapers in Manhattan:

The Evening Post (Republican) held consistently against publishing the lists, “not only because such publication is against the law but because it is a gross violation of the rights of the individual which we opposed when the law was passed by the Democratic-Radical-Renegade coalition in Congress last spring.

“We do not propose to stultify our position now or to further such injustice and unfairness on the specious plea that it is ‘news.'”

The Times (Democratic), livest to the situation of all Manhattan newspapers, took counsel early, decided that it was within the law, published all the names and amounts it could lay hands on. It gobbled the hot potato whole and was willing, if necessary, to pay $1,000 for so good a meal. To a city full of irate financiers it said: “Resentment . . . is justified but belated. It should have been aroused more vehemently at the time the bill was pending.”

The World (Democratic) fingered the potato, dropped it, then picked it up again. In its first edition, the World carried the lists. In the second edition, the lists had been stricken from the page, only to be restored again in the last edition for the day.

The Republican Herald-Tribune’s course reflected weak vacillation. On the morning that the Times’ and the World’s owners of competing newspapers—Mr. Hearst of the American, the Messrs. Pulitzer of the World, and Mr. Reid of the Herald-Tribune, but it carefully concealed the amount paid by its own proprietor.”

Others noted that in the first lists which the Times published, the name of Mr. Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis, the Post’s owner, was also “carefully concealed,” doubtless for the same reason that Mr. Ochs’ was—temporary unavailability. Next day the Times published the tax of Adolph S. Ochs.

*For an account of the political aspects of the income tax publicity, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS. For an account of Wall Street’s reactions, see BUSINESS.