What Difference?

Mr. Bruce Barton used to edit magazines--The Home Herald, The Housekeeper, Every Week; he was at one time sales manager of a magazine--Collier's. He constantly writes articles

for magazines--Tin-American, Collier's, The Woman's Home Companion

(TIME, Dec. 1); constantly writes advertising copy for magazines--the

magazines patronized by Barton, Durstine & Osborn, a distinguished Manhattan advertising agency of which Mr. Barton is President.

Despite the fact, that Mr. Barton is

so friendly disposed toward magazines,

he has no very high opinion of newspapers.

Last week, Collier's published an article at the hand of Mr. Barton: What Difference Does It Make? Mr. Barton declared that he had "almost quit reading newspapers" and in so doing had added 30 minutes a day to a life which he appears to relish keenly. At one time, he had felt it incumbent upon him, as a well-informed man, to consume one entire newspaper both morning and evening--glutting up all the stories about box victims, drink-mad stabbers, love-cult brides, modern Bluebeards, poisoned toadstools ,and incendiary spinsters together with more important social and political items. Then a flurry of circumstances had caused him to cease buying newspapers; he had found he got on comfortably without them and his answer to his own question was implied: Not a particle of difference. "Isn't it possible that most of us overdo the newspaper habit?" And Agent Barton adduced the example of President Roosevelt, who freed his mind of "all the pull and tug of the nonessential" by having his secretaries clip and paste up the essence of each day's news.

Herbert Bayard Swope, dynamic Executive Editor of The New York World, is obviously a man to take exception to such talk. When the editors of Collier's showed him What Difference Does It Make?, Editor Swope shouted for a stenographer and dictated It Makes a Lot of Difference. "Perhaps if my friend Bruce Barton were a more consistent reader of newspapers, he would not have committed himself to so many fallacies as he does in this article. Because one item in his paper was unimportant, he argues that all items are unimportant . . . Not so long ago some shots were fired at royalty in an insignificant village near the Serbian border. The Bartonized man would have asked 'What difference does it make?' He had--and has --his answer . . . Make a mistake some day [in a newspaper] and see what happens . . . Knowledge is fed from four main springs:

"1) What we are told--the traditional.

"2) What we are taught in school and what we read in books--the academic.

"3) What we do--the empiric.

"4) : What we read in the press--the journalistic."

Finally to annihilate Mr. Barton in this friendly argument, Editor Swope closed with the adduction of Thomas Jefferson's remark that, if it were left to him to decide "whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I would not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter."