named are based
on a sound American policy, but with their sharp, anti-English
tendency do us much more good than papers with admitted pro-German
bias. The chief value of the pro-German attitude of the organs of
the Hearst syndicate lies in the fact that their influence is not
limited to any particular town or district, but extends over the
whole Union. An English critic, S. K. Ratcliffe, recently wrote
about American newspapers in the _Manchester Guardian_.... 'Northern
papers are of no account in the South; the most influential New
York journals do not exist for the people of the Pacific coast,
and carry little weight in the Middle States. Hence, summaries of
opinion--confined to a small number of papers published east of
the Mississippi--are imperfectly representative of the Republic.'
This accurately observed geographical limitation of the influence
of the leading American newspapers is substantially overcome by
the Hearst organization, for the leading articles which appear
in the _New York American_ to-day will appear to-morrow in the
allied papers of Boston, Chicago and Atlanta, and the day after
in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

"Another factor that has improved the attitude of the American
Press towards Germany is the recent important development of the
wireless news service. By this I do not mean so much the extension
of the trans-Atlantic service in the communications of which a
considerable part of the Press here seems unfortunately to take
little interest, but the radiographic transmission of the full
reports of American correspondents in Berlin and on the German
fronts to the American newspapers or news agencies. Among the
interesting reports that have been received direct and unmutilated
in this way those of Messrs. William B. Hale, Karl von Wiegand, Cyril
Brown and Karl W. Ackerman have exerted a particularly favorable
influence for us, especially at the critical moments of the
break-through in southern Galicia and the battles of the Somme,
when, without the special news service via Nauen, the American
Press would have been completely misled by the mass of reports
that were flowing in from London. Among American journalists who
worked in Germany, Herbert Swope should be particularly mentioned,
who, after his return, published in _The World_ and other Pulitzer
papers, a series of fourteen articles on the situation and feeling
in Germany which attracted the attention of both the Press and the
reading p