The Free Press | Page 3

gave them a _mechanical similarity_ which was the
very opposite to the marks of healthy human news.
I would particularly insist upon this last point. It is little understood and
it is vital.

If we want to know what to think of a fire which has taken place many
miles away, but which affects property of our own, we listen to the
accounts of dozens of men. We rapidly and instinctively differentiate
between these accounts according to the characters of the witnesses.
Equally instinctively, we counter-test these accounts by the inherent
probabilities of the situation.
An honest and sober man tells us that the roof of the house fell in. An
imaginative fool, who is also a swindler, assures us that he later saw the
roof standing. We remember that the roof was of iron girders covered
with wood, and draw this conclusion: That the framework still stands,
but that the healing fell through in a mass of blazing rubbish. Our
common sense and our knowledge of the situation incline us rather to
the bad than to the good witness, and we are right. But the Press cannot
of its nature give a great number of separate testimonies. These would
take too long to collect, and would be too expensive to collect. Still less
is it able to deliver the weight of each. It, therefore, presents us, even at
its best when the testimony is not tainted, no more than one crude
affirmation. This one relation is, as I have said, further propagated
unanimously and with extreme rapidity. Instead of an organic
impression formed at leisure in the comparison of many human sources,
the reader obtains a mechanical one. At the same moment myriads of
other men receive this same impression. Their adherence to it
corroborates his own. Even therefore when the disseminator of the
news, that is, the owner of the newspaper, has no special motive for
lying, the message is conveyed in a vitiated and inhuman form. Where
he has a motive for lying (as he usually has) his lie can outdo any
merely spoken or written truth.
If this be true of news and of its vitiation through the Press, it is still
truer of opinions and suggested ideas.
Opinions, above all, we judge by the personalities of those who deliver
them: by voice, tone, expression, and known character. The Press
eliminates three-quarters of all by which opinion may be judged. And
yet it presents the opinion with the more force. The idea is presented in
a sort of impersonal manner that impresses with peculiar power

because it bears a sort of detachment, as though it came from some
authority too secure and superior to be questioned. It is suddenly
communicated to thousands. It goes unchallenged, unless by some
accident another controller of such machines will contradict it and can
get his contradiction read by the same men as have read the first
statement.
These general characters were present in the Press even in its infancy,
when each news-sheet still covered but a comparatively small circle;
when distribution was difficult, and when the audience addressed was
also select and in some measure able to criticize whatever was
presented to it. But though present they had no great force; for the
adventure of a newspaper was limited. The older method of obtaining
news was still remembered and used. The regular readers of anything,
paper or book, were few, and those few cared much more for the
quality of what they read than for its amount. Moreover, they had some
means of judging its truth and value.
In this early phase, moreover, the Press was necessarily highly diverse.
One man could print and sell profitably a thousand copies of his
version of a piece of news, of his opinions, or those of his clique. There
were hundreds of other men who, if they took the pains, had the means
to set out a rival account and a rival opinion. We shall see how, as
Capitalism grew, these safeguards decayed and the bad characters
described were increased to their present enormity.

III
Side by side with the development of Capitalism went a change in the
Press from its primitive condition to a worse. The development of
Capitalism meant that a smaller and a yet smaller number of men
commanded the means of production and of distribution whereby could
be printed and set before a large circle a news-sheet fuller than the old
model. When distribution first changed with the advent of the railways
the difference from the old condition was accentuated, and there arose
perhaps one hundred, perhaps two hundred "organs," as they were

called, which, in this country and the Lowlands of Scotland, told men
what their proprietors chose to tell them, both as to news and as to
opinion. The