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The bad conditions as such are not news, because in all but
exceptional cases, journalism is not a first hand report of the raw
material. It is a report of that material after it has been stylized.
Thus bad conditions might become news if the Board of Health reported
an unusually high death rate in an industrial area. Failing an
intervention of this sort, the facts do not become news, until the
workers organize and make a demand upon their employers. Even then, if
an easy settlement is certain the news value is low, whether or not
the conditions themselves are remedied in the settlement. But if
industrial relations collapse into a strike or lockout the news value
increases. If the stoppage involves a service on which the readers of
the newspapers immediately depend, or if it involves a breach of
order, the news value is still greater.

The underlying trouble appears in the news through certain easily
recognizable symptoms, a demand, a strike, disorder. From the point of
view of the worker, or of the disinterested seeker of justice, the
demand, the strike, and the disorder, are merely incidents in a
process that for them is richly complicated. But since all the
immediate realities lie outside the direct experience both of the
reporter, and of the special public by which most newspapers are
supported, they have normally to wait for a signal in the shape of an
overt act. When that signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or
a summons for the police, it calls into play the stereotypes people
have about strikes and disorders. The unseen struggle has none of its
own flavor. It is noted abstractly, and that abstraction is then
animated by the immediate experience of the reader and reporter.
Obviously this is a very different experience from that which the
strikers have. They feel, let us say, the temper of the foreman, the
nerve-racking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, the
drudgery of their wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess
of their tenements. The slogans of the strike are invested with these
feelings. But the reporter and reader see at first only a strike and
some catchwords. They invest these with their feelings. Their feelings
may be that their jobs are insecure because the strikers are stopping
goods they need in their work, that there will be shortage and higher
prices, that it is all devilishly inconvenient. These, too, are
realities. And when they give color to the abstract news that a strike
has been called, it is in the nature of things that the workers are at
a disadvantage. It is in the nature, that is to say, of the existing
system of industrial relations that news arising from grievances or
hopes by workers should almost invariably be uncovered by an overt
attack on production.

You have, therefore, the circumstances in all their sprawling
complexity, the overt act which signalizes them, the stereotyped
bulletin which publishes the signal, and the meaning that the reader
himself injects, after he has derived that meaning from the experience
which directly affects him. Now the reader's experience of a strike
may be very important indeed, but from the point of view of the
central trouble which caused the strike, it is eccentric. Yet this
eccentric meaning is automatically the most interesting. [Footnote:
_Cf_. Ch. XI, "The Enlisting of Interest."] To enter imaginatively
into the central issues is for the reader to step out of himself, and into
very different lives.

It follows that in the reporting of strikes, the easiest way is to let
the news be uncovered by the overt act, and to describe the event as
the story of interference with the reader's life. That is where his
attention is first aroused, and his interest most easily enlisted. A
great deal, I think myself the crucial part, of what looks to the
worker and the reformer as deliberate misrepresentation on the part of
newspapers, is the direct outcome of a practical difficulty in
uncovering the news, and the emotional difficulty of making distant
facts interesting unless, as Emerson says, we can "perceive (them) to
be only a new version of our familiar experience" and can "set about
translating (them) at once into our parallel facts." [Footnote: From
his essay entitled _Art and Criticism_. The quotation occurs in a
passage cited on page 87 of Professor R. W. Brown's, _The Writer's
Art._]

If you study the way many a strike is reported in the press, you will
find, very often, that the issues are rarely in the headlines, barely
in the leading paragraphs, and sometimes not even mentioned anywhere.
A labor dispute in another city has to be very important before the
news account contains any definite information as to what is in
dispute. The routine of the news works that way, with modifications it
works that way in regard to political issues and international news as
well. The news is an account of the overt phases that are interesting,
and the pressure on the newspaper to adhere to this routine comes from
many sides. It comes from the economy of noting only the stereotyped
phase of a situation. It comes from the difficulty of finding
journalists who can see what they have not learned to see. It comes
from the almost unavoidable difficulty of finding sufficient space in
which even the best journalist can make plausible an unconventional
view. It comes from the economic necessity of interesting the reader
quickly, and the economic risk involved in not interesting him at all,
or of offending him by unexpected news insufficiently or clumsily
described. All these difficulties combined make for uncertainty in the
editor when there are dangerous issues at stake, and cause him
naturally to prefer the indisputable fact and a treatment more readily
adapted to the reader's interest. The indisputable fact and the easy
interest, are the strike itself and the reader's inconvenience.

All the subtler and deeper truths are in the present organization of
industry very unreliable truths. They involve judgments about
standards of living, productivity, human rights that are endlessly
debatable in the absence of exact record and quantitative analysis.
And as long as these do not exist in industry, the run of news about
it will tend, as Emerson said, quoting from Isocrates, "to make of
moles mountains, and of mountains moles." [Footnote: _Id.,
supra_] Where there is no constitutional procedure in industry, and
no expert sifting of evidence and the claims, the fact that is
sensational to the reader is the fact that almost every journalist
will seek. Given the industrial relations that so largely prevail,
even where there is conference or arbitration, but no independent
filtering of the facts for decision, the issue for the newspaper
public will tend not to be the issue for the industry. And so to try
disputes by an appeal through the newspapers puts a burden upon
newspapers and readers which they cannot and ought not to carry. As
long as real law and order do not exist, the bulk of the news will,
unless consciously and courageously corrected, work against those who
have no lawful and orderly method of asserting themselves. The
bulletins from the scene of action will note the trouble that arose
from the assertion, rather than the reasons which led to it. The
reasons are intangible.

4

The editor deals with these bulletins. He sits in his office, reads
them, rarely does he see any large portion of the events themselves.
He must, as we have seen, woo at least a section of his readers every
day, because they will leave him without mercy if a rival paper
happens to hit their fancy. He works under enormous pressure, for the
competition of newspapers is often a matter of minutes. Every bulletin
requires a swift but complicated judgment. It must be understood, put
in relation to other bulletins also understood, and played up or
played down according to its probable interest for the public, as the
editor conceives it. Without standardization, without stereotypes,
without routine judgments, without a fairly ruthless disregard of
subtlety, the editor would soon die of excitement. The final page is
of a definite size, must be ready at a precise moment; there can be
only a certain number of captions on the items, and in each caption
there must be a definite number of letters. Always there is the
precarious urgency of the buying public, the law of libel, and the
possibility of endless trouble. The thing could not be managed at all
without systematization, for in a standardized product there is
economy of time and effort, as well as a partial guarantee against
failure.

It is here that newspapers influence each other most deeply. Thus when
the war broke out, the American newspapers were confronted with a
subject about which they had no previous experience. Certain dailies,
rich enough to pay cable tolls, took the lead in securing news, and
the way that news was presented became a model for the whole press.
But where did that model come from? It came from the English press,
not because Northcliffe owned American newspapers, but because at
first it was easier to buy English correspondence, and because, later,
it was easier for American journalists to read English newspapers than
it was for them to read any others. London was the cable and news
center, and it was there that a certain technic for reporting the war
was evolved. Something similar occurred in the reporting of the
Russian Revolution. In that instance, access to Russia was closed by
military censorship, both Russian and Allied, and closed still more
effectively by the difficulties of the Russian language. But above all
it was closed to effective news reporting by the fact that the hardest
thing to report is chaos, even though it is an evolving chaos. This
put the formulating of Russian news at its source in Helsingfors,
Stockholm, Geneva, Paris and London, into the hands of censors and
propagandists. They were for a long time subject to no check of any
kind. Until they had made themselves ridiculous they created, let us
admit, out of some genuine aspects of the huge Russian maelstrom, a
set of stereotypes so evocative of hate and fear, that the very best
instinct of journalism, its desire to go and see and tell, was for a
long time crushed. [Footnote: _Cf. A Test of the News,_ by Walter
Lippmann and Charles Merz, assisted by Faye Lippmann, _New
Republic,_ August 4, 1920.]

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Every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole
series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what
position they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what
emphasis each shall have. There are no objective standards here. There
are conventions. Take two newspapers published in the same city on the
same morning. The headline of one reads: "Britain pledges aid to
Berlin against French aggression; France openly backs Poles." The
headline of the second is "Mrs. Stillman's Other Love." Which you
prefer is a matter of taste, but not entirely a matter of the editor's
taste. It is a matter of his judgment as to what will absorb the half
hour's attention a certain set of readers will give to his newspaper.
Now the problem of securing attention is by no means equivalent to
displaying the news in the perspective laid down by religious teaching
or by some form of ethical culture. It is a problem of provoking
feeling in the reader, of inducing him to feel a sense of personal
identification with the stories he is reading. News which does not
offer this opportunity to introduce oneself into the struggle which it
depicts cannot appeal to a wide audience. The audience must
participate in the news, much as it participates in the drama, by
personal identification. Just as everyone holds his breath when the
heroine is in danger, as he helps Babe Ruth swing his bat, so in
subtler form the reader enters into the news. In order that he shall
enter he must find a familiar foothold in the story, and this is
supplied to him by the use of stereotypes. They tell him that if an
association of plumbers is called a "combine" it is appropriate to
develop his hostility; if it is called a "group of leading business
men" the cue is for a favorable reaction.

It is in a combination of these elements that the power to create
opinion resides. Editorials reinforce. Sometimes in a situation that
on the news pages is too confusing to permit of identification, they
give the reader a clue by means of which he engages himself. A clue he
must have if, as most of us must, he is to seize the news in a hurry.
A suggestion of some sort he demands, which tells him, so to speak,
where he, a man conceiving himself to be such and such a person, shall
integrate his feelings with the news he reads.

"It has been said" writes Walter Bagehot, [Footnote: On the Emotion of
Conviction, _Literary Studies_, Vol. Ill, p. 172.] "that if you
can only get a middleclass Englishman to think whether there are
'snails in Sirius,' he will soon have an opinion on it. It will be
difficult to make him think, but if he does think, he cannot rest in a
negative, he will come to some decision. And on any ordinary topic, of
course, it is so. A grocer has a full creed as to foreign policy, a
young lady a complete theory of the sacraments, as to which neither
has any doubt whatever."

Yet that same grocer will have many doubts about his groceries, and
that young lady, marvelously certain about the sacraments, may have
all kinds of doubts as to whether to marry the grocer, and if not
whether it is proper to accept his attentions. The ability to rest in
the negative implies either a lack of interest in the result, or a
vivid sense of competing alternatives. In the case of foreign policy
or the sacraments, the interest in the results is intense, while means
for checking the opinion are poor. This is the plight of the reader of
the general news. If he is to read it at all he must be interested,
that is to say, he must enter into the situation and care about the
outcome. But if he does that he cannot rest in a negative, and unless
independent means of checking the lead given him by his newspaper
exists, the very fact that he is interested may make it difficult to
arrive at that balance of opinions which may most nearly approximate
the truth. The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he will
tend to resent not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of
news. That is why many a newspaper finds that, having honestly evoked
the partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the
editor believes the facts warrant it, change position. If a change is
necessary, the transition has to be managed with the utmost skill and
delicacy. Usually a newspaper will not attempt so hazardous a
performance. It is easier and safer to have the news of that subject
taper off and disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it.

CHAPTER XXIV

NEWS, TRUTH, AND A CONCLUSION

As we begin to make more and more exact studies of the press, much
will depend upon the hypothesis we hold. If we assume with Mr.
Sinclair, and most of his opponents, that news and truth are two words
for the same thing, we shall, I believe, arrive nowhere. We shall
prove that on this point the newspaper lied. We shall prove that on
that point Mr. Sinclair's account lied. We shall demonstrate that Mr.
Sinclair lied when he said that somebody lied, and that somebody lied
when he said Mr. Sinclair lied. We shall vent our feelings, but we
shall vent them into air.

The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and
truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished.
[Footnote: When I wrote _Liberty and the News,_ I did not
understand this distinction clearly enough to state it, but _cf._
p. 89 ff.] The function of news is to signalize an event, the function
of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into
relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men
can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take
recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body
of news coincide. That is a comparatively small part of the whole
field of human interest. In this sector, and only in this sector, the
tests of the news are sufficiently exact to make the charges of
perversion or suppression more than a partisan judgment. There is no
defense, no extenuation, no excuse whatever, for stating six times
that Lenin is dead, when the only information the paper possesses is a
report that he is dead from a source repeatedly shown to be
unreliable. The news, in that instance, is not "Lenin Dead" but
"Helsingfors Says Lenin is Dead." And a newspaper can be asked to take
the responsibility of not making Lenin more dead than the source of
the news is reliable; if there is one subject on which editors are
most responsible it is in their judgment of the reliability of the
source. But when it comes to dealing, for example, with stories of
what the Russian people want, no such test exists.

The absence of these exact tests accounts, I think, for the character
of the profession, as no other explanation does. There is a very small
body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability or
training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist's own discretion.
Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the
County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all
fixed standards disappear. The story of why John Smith failed, his
human frailties, the analysis of the economic conditions on which he
was shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred different ways.
There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline
in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct
the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm
of truth. There are no canons to direct his own mind, and no canons
that coerce the reader's judgment or the publisher's. His version of
the truth is only his version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he
sees it? He cannot demonstrate it, any more than Mr. Sinclair Lewis
can demonstrate that he has told the whole truth about Main Street.
And the more he understands his own weaknesses, the more ready he is
to admit that where there is no objective test, his own opinion is in
some vital measure constructed out of his own stereotypes, according
to his own code, and by the urgency of his own interest. He knows that
he is seeing the world through subjective lenses. He cannot deny that
he too is, as Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which
stains the white radiance of eternity.

And by this knowledge his assurance is tempered. He may have all kinds
of moral courage, and sometimes has, but he lacks that sustaining
conviction of a certain technic which finally freed the physical
sciences from theological control. It was the gradual development of
an irrefragable method that gave the physicist his intellectual
freedom as against all the powers of the world. His proofs were so
clear, his evidence so sharply superior to tradition, that he broke
away finally from all control. But the journalist has no such support
in his own conscience or in fact. The control exercised over him by
the opinions of his employers and his readers, is not the control of
truth by prejudice, but of one opinion by another opinion that it is
not demonstrably less true. Between Judge Gary's assertion that the
unions will destroy American institutions, and Mr. Gomper's assertion
that they are agencies of the rights of man, the choice has, in large
measure, to be governed by the will to believe.

The task of deflating these controversies, and reducing them to a
point where they can be reported as news, is not a task which the
reporter can perform. It is possible and necessary for journalists to
bring home to people the uncertain character of the truth on which
their opinions are founded, and by criticism and agitation to prod
social science into making more usable formulations of social facts,
and to prod statesmen into establishing more visible institutions. The
press, in other words, can fight for the extension of reportable
truth. But as social truth is organized to-day, the press is not
constituted to furnish from one edition to the next the amount of
knowledge which the democratic theory of public opinion demands. This
is not due to the Brass Check, as the quality of news in radical
papers shows, but to the fact that the press deals with a society in
which the governing forces are so imperfectly recorded. The theory
that the press can itself record those forces is false. It can
normally record only what has been recorded for it by the working of
institutions. Everything else is argument and opinion, and fluctuates
with the vicissitudes, the self-consciousness, and the courage of the
human mind.

If the press is not so universally wicked, nor so deeply conspiring,
as Mr. Sinclair would have us believe, it is very much more frail than
the democratic theory has as yet admitted. It is too frail to carry
the whole burden of popular sovereignty, to supply spontaneously the
truth which democrats hoped was inborn. And when we expect it to
supply such a body of truth we employ a misleading standard of
judgment. We misunderstand the limited nature of news, the illimitable
complexity of society; we overestimate our own endurance, public
spirit, and all-round competence. We suppose an appetite for
uninteresting truths which is not discovered by any honest analysis of
our own tastes.

If the newspapers, then, are to be charged with the duty of
translating the whole public life of mankind, so that every adult can
arrive at an opinion on every moot topic, they fail, they are bound to
fail, in any future one can conceive they will continue to fail. It is
not possible to assume that a world, carried on by division of labor
and distribution of authority, can be governed by universal opinions
in the whole population. Unconsciously the theory sets up the single
reader as theoretically omnicompetent, and puts upon the press the
burden of accomplishing whatever representative government, industrial
organization, and diplomacy have failed to accomplish. Acting upon
everybody for thirty minutes in twenty-four hours, the press is asked
to create a mystical force called Public Opinion that will take up the
slack in public institutions. The press has often mistakenly pretended
that it could do just that. It has at great moral cost to itself,
encouraged a democracy, still bound to its original premises, to
expect newspapers to supply spontaneously for every organ of
government, for every social problem, the machinery of information
which these do not normally supply themselves. Institutions, having
failed to furnish themselves with instruments of knowledge, have
become a bundle of "problems," which the population as a whole,
reading the press as a whole, is supposed to solve.

The press, in other words, has come to be regarded as an organ of
direct democracy, charged on a much wider scale, and from day to day,
with the function often attributed to the initiative, referendum, and
recall. The Court of Public Opinion, open day and night, is to lay
down the law for everything all the time. It is not workable. And when
you consider the nature of news, it is not even thinkable. For the
news, as we have seen, is precise in proportion to the precision with
which the event is recorded. Unless the event is capable of being
named, measured, given shape, made specific, it either fails to take
on the character of news, or it is subject to the accidents and
prejudices of observation.

Therefore, on the whole, the quality of the news about modern society
is an index of its social organization. The better the institutions,
the more all interests concerned are formally represented, the more
issues are disentangled, the more objective criteria are introduced,
the more perfectly an affair can be presented as news. At its best the
press is a servant and guardian of institutions; at its worst it is a
means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends.
In the degree to which institutions fail to function, the unscrupulous
journalist can fish in troubled waters, and the conscientious one must
gamble with uncertainties.

The press is no substitute for institutions. It 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. It is only when they work by a steady light
of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a
situation intelligible enough for a popular decision. The trouble lies
deeper than the press, and so does the remedy. It lies in social
organization based on a system of analysis and record, and in all the
corollaries of that principle; in the abandonment of the theory of the
omnicompetent citizen, in the decentralization of decision, in the
coordination of decision by comparable record and analysis. If at the
centers of management there is a running audit, which makes work
intelligible to those who do it, and those who superintend it, issues
when they arise are not the mere collisions of the blind. Then, too,
the news is uncovered for the press by a system of intelligence that
is also a check upon the press.

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