If I remember this quote correctly, and please check this for yourself (with a reliable and valid source on history), Swinton was not a NYT editor when he said this quote (he was some sort of labor lobbyist); it's often misapplied on the web; this was sometime around the 1880s/1890s, or so, which was a completely different period of labor issues and American journalism (the start of the Yellow Journalism era); hence, what's the point? ... This is akin to many of the quotes I see from the American founding fathers taken out of context and misapplied on the Internet to various other contemporary situations. You skip more than a century of industry development in ethics and professional practices by trying to connect it to today. ...