"A certain amount of exaggeration is legitimate, even necessary, but exaggeration does not mean falsification."
That was a quote by the editor of the Daily Express, RD Blumenfeld, at the dawn of popular journalism in the 20th century, well before the creation of red-top tabloids.
It reminds us that the narrowly drawn and subjective justifications for sensationalism have enjoyed a long history. And it is just one of the gems to be mined in a book about two largely forgotten editors from Fleet Street's past, Blum & Taff: A tale of two editors*.
Blumenfeld edited the Express for 27 years from 1902, notably encouraging a Canadian adventurer, Max Aitken, to buy the then ailing paper. Aitken was to become famous and influential when ennobled as Lord Beaverbrook.
Taff was the nickname of the Welsh-born HA Gwynne, editor of the Morning Post for 26 years until it was absorbed into the Daily Telegraph in 1937.
Neither man has been the subject of a biography so Dennis Griffiths has put that right with this lengthy tome. He tells how, for 40 years, the two men were close friends and near-neighbours in rural Essex.
Prior to becoming editors, they earned their spurs as reporters. Blum reported on revolution in Haiti for Gordon Bennett Jr's New York Herald. Gwynne was a war correspondent who covered several conflicts in west Africa, the Greco-Turkish war and the Boer war for The Times and Reuters.
Once they secured their editors' chairs they became hugely influential figures. Between them they knew every prime minister from Gladstone to Churchill.
Both were friendly with Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard. Rudyard Kipling was a life-long friend of Gwynne's while Blum was close to HG Wells. Both were also on good terms with business moguls such as Gordon Selfridge.
Aside from the mingling with celebrity, these men were also involved in the kinds of controversies that have a resonance today. It was, for example, Gwynne, who was responsible for publishing, in 1920, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-semitic hoax that purported to describe a Jewish plan for global domination.
And Blumenfeld lent his paper's enthusiastic support to the illegal importation into Ireland of guns for the Ulster Volunteers in 1914.
Griffiths, a prolific newspaper historian, has certainly rescued history with this book, illustrating that editors of a century ago who were desperate to win sales while obeying their proprietor's political wishes were little different from those of today.
*Blum & Taff: A tale of two editors by Dennis Griffiths (Coranto Press, RRP £25)