By the best papers—­and these are steadily multiplying—­the “interview” is looked upon as a serious opportunity to obtain in a concise form the views of a person of greater or less eminence on subjects of which he is entitled to speak with authority.  By the majority of journals, however, the interview is abused to an inordinate extent, both as regards the individual and the public.  It is used as a vehicle for the cheapest forms of wit and the most personal attack or laudation.  My own experience was that the interviewer put a series of pre-arranged questions to me, published those of my answers which met his own preconceptions, and invented appropriate substitutes for those he did not honour with his approval.  A Chicago reporter made me say that English ignorance of America was so dense that “a gentleman of considerable attainments asked me if Connecticut was not the capital of Pittsburgh and notable for its great Mormon temple,”—­an elaborate combination due solely to his own active brain.  The same ingenuous (and ingenious) youth caused me to invent “an erratic young Londoner, who packed his bag and started at once for any out-of-the-way country for which a new guide-book was published.”  Another, with equal lack of ground, committed me to the unpatriotic assertion that neither in Great Britain nor in any other part of Europe was there any scenery to compare with that of the United States.  But perhaps the unkindest cut of all was that of the reporter at Washington who made me introduce my remarks by the fatuous expression “Methought”!  Mr. E.A.  Freeman was much amused by a reporter who said of him:  “When he don’t know a thing, he says he don’t.  When he does, he speaks as if he were certain of it.”  Mr. Freeman adds:  “To the interviewer this way of action seemed a little strange, though he clearly approved of the eccentricity.”  This gentleman’s mental attitude, like his superiority to grammar, is, unfortunately, characteristic of hundreds of his colleagues on the American press.

The distinction between the editorial and reportorial functions of a newspaper are apt to be much less clearly defined in the United States than in England.  The English reporter, as a rule, confines himself strictly to his report, which is made without bias.  A Conservative speech is as accurately (though perhaps not as lengthily) reported in a Liberal paper as in one of its own colour.  All comment or criticism is reserved for the editorial columns.  This is by no means the case in America.  Such an authority as the Atlantic Monthly admits that wilful distortion is not infrequent:  the reporter seems to consider it as part of his duty to amend the record in the interest of his own paper or party.  The American reporter, in a word, may be more active-minded, more original, more amusing, than his English colleague; but he is seldom so accurate.  This want of impartiality is another of the patent defects of the American daily press.  It is a too unscrupulous partisan; it represents the ethics of the ward politician rather than the seeker after truth.