If restraint be a sign of power, then the American press is weak indeed.  There is no reticence about it.  Nothing is sacred to an American reporter; everything that can be in any sense regarded as an item of news is exposed to the full glare of publicity.  It has come to be so widely taken for granted that one likes to see his name in the papers, that it is often difficult to make a lady or gentleman of the American press understand that you really prefer to have your family affairs left in the dusk of private life.  The touching little story entitled “A Thanksgiving Breakfast,” in Harper’s Magazine for November, 1895, records an experience that is almost a commonplace except as regards the unusually thin skin of the victim and the unusual delicacy and good feeling of the operator.  The writer of an interesting article in the Outlook (April 25, 1896), an admirable weekly paper published in New York, sums it up in a sentence:  “It is no exaggeration to say that the wanton and unrestricted invasion of privacy by the modern press constitutes in certain respects the most offensive form of tyranny which the world has ever known.”  The writer then narrates the following incident to illustrate the length to which this invasion of domestic privacy is carried: 

A cultivated and refined woman living in a boarding-house was so unfortunate as to awaken the admiration of a young man of unbalanced mind who was living under the same roof.  He paid her attentions which were courteously but firmly declined.  He wrote her letters which were at first acknowledged in the most formal way, and finally ignored.  No woman could have been more circumspect and dignified.  The young man preserved copies of his own letters, introduced the two or three brief and formal notes which he had received in reply, made a story of the incident, stole the photograph of the woman, enclosed his own photograph, mailed the whole matter to a New York newspaper, and committed suicide.  The result was a two or three column report of the incident, with portraits of the unfortunate woman and the suicide, and an elaborate and startling exaggeration of the few inconspicuous, insignificant, and colorless facts from which the narrative was elaborated.  That a refined woman in American society should be exposed to such a brutal invasion of her privacy as that which was committed in this case reflects upon every gentleman in the country.

No doubt, as the Outlook goes on to show, the American people are themselves largely responsible for this attitude of the press.  They have as a whole not only less reverence than Europeans for the privacy of others, but also less resentment for the violation of their own privacy.  The new democracy has resigned itself to the custom of living in glass houses and regards the desire to shroud one’s personal life in mystery as one of the survivals of the dark ages.  The newspaper personalities are largely “the result of the desperate desire of the new classes, to whom democratic institutions have given their first chance, to discover the way to live, in the wide social meaning of the word.”