Our Governmental Machine

ownership. Newspaper management under a system in which the incentive of profits is the most powerful impulse, of necessity resolves itself into a race for circulation; for circulation means advertising, and advertising means money. In general, this signifies yellow journalism. The way to sell the paper is to catch the public's fancy. That fancy may best be caught by an appeal to the emotions, prejudices, biases, complexes, or what not, of the multitude. To catch and retain that fancy much must be sacrificed. And so the newspaper staff trims and adorns its stock in trade the news-in the way which in its judgment will produce the largest sales. "First to last, the public" becomes one of the mottoes of the newspaper office. And you have newspapers dramatizing events -introducing heroes and villains where none existwell aware that for millions the melodrama is the most popular form of entertainment. Hence you have appeals to race hatreds, religious antipathies and national prejudices. Indeed, it is frequently both safer and more profitable to encourage the public in the falsehoods with which it is familiar than to tell it the unpleasant truths it does not want to hear.

It would seem, then, that the press is a frail instrument with which to carry the burden of popular government. And consideration of the real nature of the news even when undefiled by the perversions noted above but confirms the belief. At best the news is not a "mirror of social conditions, but merely the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself." So says

one of the ablest analysts of the modern press, and but little reflection is necessary to confirm the truth of his statement. The newspaper reporter does not survey the entire realm of human activity. He can not. For the most part he confines his gaze to those places where private activity touches public authority. The result is that merely an aspect of a situation is presented to the public. Inevitably the public often obtains a distorted impression of what is actually transpiring. So frequently is this the case that it has led Mr. Lippmann, the critic cited above, to maintain that the news and the truth are not synonymous. "The function of the news," he says, "is to signalize the event, the function of truth is to bring into light the hidden facts and set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act." The press "is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents and eruptions.'

But that in great measure is exactly what they are trying to do. And the distortion of the news by the forces previously discussed makes the task even more difficult.

Is there any panacea? None. Certain of the defects, however, can be partially overcome. The obvious course to pursue upon the discovery that certain 1 Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion, p. 358 and 364.

papers place certain emphasis on this or that is to discount that emphasis. Perhaps the best way to do this is to check one paper against another and occasionally, if not regularly, compare the accounts that are given of the world's news. A further corrective is the reading of magazines which review the happenings of the week, and in this reading you should include a periodical with whose point of view you entirely disagree.

But it is only by the study of books that the defects of the modern press can be overcome. The preparation of a book is a much more careful and painstaking undertaking than the writing of an article for the press, and as a result books are generally much more accurate than the press. But there are many books, and some of them are more worthless than the yellowest papers! By a judicious following of the book reviewers, however, or by obtaining guidance from the specialists in various fields of knowledge, it is possible for the average individual to make a selection. which, with but a reasonable expenditure of time, will place him among the well-informed few.

But what has all this to do with government? Everything! On the basis of the information or misinformation now obtained from the press, the individual forms a judgment which becomes a part of and helps to determine that great force-public opinion. And public opinion rules the country. Our political parties, city councils, state legislatures, and Congress exist for the sole purpose of enacting into law the deci

sions of public opinion. Whatever defects exist in the machinery that supplies the public with the information upon which it bases its decisions are basic defects in the governmental machinery of the country.

It is to a consideration of the difficulties in the way of the formation of a rational public opinion that your attention has been called in this chapter. It is with the question: What can you do to remedy them? that it leaves you.

Books