The Free Press | Page 7

that tin-tacks make a very good breakfast
food, my newspaper containing such news and such an opinion would
obviously not touch the general thought and will at all. No one, outside

the small catholic minority, wants to hear about the Pope; and no one,
Catholic or Muslim, will believe that he has become a Methodist. No
one alive will consent to eat tin-tacks. A paper printing stuff like that is
free to do so, the proprietor could certainly get his employees, or most
of them, to write as he told them. But his paper would stop selling.
It is perfectly clear that the Press in itself simply represents the news
which its owners desire to print and the opinions which they desire to
propagate; and this argument against the Press has always been used by
those who are opposed to its influence at any moment.
But there is no smoke without fire, and the element of truth in the
legend that the Press "represents" opinion lies in this, that there is a
limit of outrageous contradiction to known truths beyond which it
cannot go without heavy financial loss through failure of circulation,
which is synonymous with failure of power. When people talked of the
newspaper owners as "representing public opinion" there was a shadow
of reality in such talk, absurd as it seems to us to-day. Though the
doctrine that newspapers are "organs of public opinion" was (like most
nineteenth century so-called "Liberal" doctrines) falsely stated and
hypocritical, it had that element of truth about it--at least, in the earlier
phase of newspaper development. There is even a certain savour of
truth hanging about it to this day.
Newspapers are only offered for sale; the purchase of them is not (as
yet) compulsorily enforced. A newspaper can, therefore, never succeed
unless it prints news in which people are interested and on the nature of
which they can be taken in. A newspaper can manufacture interest, but
there are certain broad currents in human affairs which neither a
newspaper proprietor nor any other human being can control. If
England is at war no newspaper can boycott war news and live. If
London were devastated by an earthquake no advertising power in the
Insurance Companies nor any private interest of newspaper owners in
real estate could prevent the thing "getting into the newspapers."
Indeed, until quite lately--say, until about the '80's or so--most news
printed was really news about things which people wanted to
understand. However garbled or truncated or falsified, it at least dealt

with interesting matters which the newspaper proprietors had not
started as a hare of their own, and which the public, as a whole, was
determined to hear something about. Even to-day, apart from the war,
there is a large element of this.
There was (and is) a further check upon the artificiality of the news side
of the Press; which is that Reality always comes into its own at last.
You cannot, beyond a certain limit of time, burke reality.
In a word, the Press must always largely deal with what are called
"living issues." It can boycott very successfully, and does so, with
complete power. But it cannot artificially create unlimitedly the objects
of "news."
There is, then, this much truth in the old figment of the Press being "an
organ of opinion," that it must in some degree (and that a large degree)
present real matter for observation and debate. It can and does select. It
can and does garble. But it has to do this always within certain
limitations.
These limitations have, I think, already been reached; but that is a
matter which I argue more fully later on.

VII
As to opinion, you have the same limitations.
If opinion can be once launched in spite of, or during the indifference
of, the Press (and it is a big "if"); if there is no machinery for actually
suppressing the mere statement of a doctrine clearly important to its
readers--then the Press is bound sooner or later to deal with such
doctrine: just as it is bound to deal with really vital news.
Here, again, we are dealing with something very different indeed from
that title "An organ of opinion" to which the large newspaper has in the
past pretended. But I am arguing for the truth that the Press--in the

sense of the great Capitalist newspapers--cannot be wholly divorced
from opinion.
We have had three great examples of this in our own time in England.
Two proceeded from the small wealthy class, and one from the mass of
the people.
The two proceeding from the small wealthy classes were the Fabian
movement and the movement for Women's Suffrage. The one
proceeding from the populace was the sudden, brief (and rapidly
suppressed) insurrection of the working classes