Note 93 — Chapter IX · SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle seems to imagine that all the newspapers in the world are against him. After his Australian tour he accused the Australian papers of refusing to publish the truth about his seances. Writing about American newspapers in his book, “An American Adventure,” he says: “The editors seem to place the intelligence of the public very low, and to imagine that they cannot be attracted save by vulgar, screaming headlines.

“The American papers have a strange way also of endeavoring to compress the whole meaning of some item into a few words of headline, which, as often as not, are slang.”

Even in Canada Sir Arthur claims to have badly used by the newspapers. In “Our American Adventure” he writes: “There were some rather bitter attacks in the Toronto papers, including the one leader in the Evening Telegram, which was so narrow and illiberal that I do not think the most provincial paper in Britain could have been guilty of it.

“It was to the effect that British lecturers took money out of the town, that they did not give the money’s worth, and that they should be discouraged.

“‘Poking Them in the Eye’ was the dignified title.

“It did not seem to occur to the writer that a comic opera or a bedroom comedy was equally taking the money out of the town, but that the main purpose served by lectures, whether one agreed with the subject or not, was that they kept the public in first hand touch with the great current questions of mankind. I am bound to say that no other Toronto paper sank to the depth of the Evening Telegram but the general atmosphere was the least pleasant that I had met with in my American travels.”