Another gem from Ralph Raico’s Great Wars and Great Leaders:
Roosevelt, who always viewed any criticism of himself as a perversion of true democracy, was outraged. The President of the United States wrote a personal letter to a managing editor declaring that Flynn, “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly.” Whether or not as a consequence of FDR’s spite, The New Republic dropped the column by Flynn it had been publishing since 1933, a sign things were changing in the circles of left-liberalism. In the years to come, FDR would use the FBI, the IRS, and other agencies to spy on, harass, and intimidate his critics. This – and his lying, his constant lying – more than any supposed mental affliction, explains the hatred so many harbored for Franklin Roosevelt.
Grover Cleveland was one of the best extemporaneous speakers to ever hold the nation’s highest office. Here is a transcript of an interview he gave to the Daily Continent, New York, April 12, 1891:
“I believe a large majority of reporters are decent and honorable men, who would prefer to do clean and respectable work. Of course there are some among them who are mentally and morally cracked, and who never ought to be trusted to report for the public anything they claim to have seen or heard. Eliminate these, and I do not think any of the remainder would deliberately indulge in downright barefaced falsehood; but there is something connected with their work that they appear to think is necessary to its complete finish, which, for want of a better word, may be called embellishing. This proceeds so far, sometimes, that, almost unknown to himself, the reporter falls into mischievous and exasperating falsehood–sometimes lacking the intent to annoy and injure and sometimes not. There ought to be much less of this. The reporter who sends in these extravagant embellishments can never know when they may constitute the most outrageous injury to the feelings of the innocent and defenseless.
But, as a general rule, the responsibility for all that is objectionable in the reportorial occupation should be laid at the doors of the managers and owners of newspapers. If they wanted fair and truthful reports, they would be furnished them with more alacrity than they are now supplied with the trash so often demanded as a test of the reporter’s skill and ability.
Good, clean journalism and a proper sense of newspaper responsibility , prevailing at headquarters, would so raise the standard of the duties of those remaining that they would not only be gladly welcomed by all who have information interesting to the public to impart, but would be received, without the suspicion of intrusion, at any place where legitimate news would be collected.”
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