Abstract
Forty years ago Donald Taft suggested that newspapers advocate correctional methods in a manner which reflects popular opinion and personal editorial biases, rather than scientific fact. In order to test this hypothesis a content analysis of the New York Times was undertaken covering the period (1890–1914) when first the French Bertillonage System of criminal identification and later when the British fingerprint system was finally introduced into the New York State justice system. The findings of this study indicate that the personal editorial biases of the New York Times may have played a leading role in blocking an effective crime detection technique (fingerprinting) from the New York State justice system for at least a decade, and these biases may have been rooted more in an anti-British pro-French stance of the newspaper than in ignorance of scientific testing.
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