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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77035 ***
+
+
+
+                         LIBERTY _and the_ NEWS
+
+
+                                   BY
+                             WALTER LIPPMANN
+
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                        HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE
+                                  1920
+
+
+                           COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
+                      THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
+
+                           COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
+                     HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.
+
+
+
+
+In writing this tract I have dared to believe that many things
+were possible because of the personal example offered to all who
+practice journalism by Mr. C. P. Scott, for over forty-five years
+editor-in-chief of the _Manchester Guardian_. In the light of his
+career it cannot seem absurd or remote to think of freedom and truth in
+relation to the news.
+
+Two of the essays in this volume, “What Modern Liberty Means” and
+“Liberty and the News” were published originally in the _Atlantic
+Monthly_. I wish to thank Mr. Ellery Sedgwick for the encouragement he
+gave me while writing them, and for permission to reprint them in this
+volume.
+
+                                                                W. L.
+
+ New York City.
+   January 1, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+          Journalism and the Higher Law                      3
+
+          What Modern Liberty Means                         19
+
+          Liberty and the News                              69
+
+
+
+
+                     JOURNALISM AND THE HIGHER LAW
+
+
+Volume 1, Number 1, of the first American newspaper was published in
+Boston on September 25, 1690. It was called _Publick Occurrences_.
+The second issue did not appear because the Governor and Council
+suppressed it. They found that Benjamin Harris, the editor, had printed
+“reflections of a very high nature.”[1] Even to-day some of his
+reflections seem very high indeed. In his prospectus he had written:
+
+  “That something may be done toward the Curing, or at least the
+  Charming of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us,
+  wherefore nothing shall be entered, but what we have reason
+  to believe is true, repairing to the best fountains for our
+  Information. And when there appears any material mistake in
+  anything that is collected, it shall be corrected in the next.
+  Moreover, the Publisher of these Occurrences is willing to engage,
+  that whereas, there are many False Reports, maliciously made, and
+  spread among us, if any well-minded person will be at the pains
+  to trace any such false Report, so far as to find out and Convict
+  the First Raiser of it, he will in this Paper (unless just Advice
+  be given to the contrary) expose the Name of such Person, as A
+  malicious Raiser of a false Report. It is suppos’d that none will
+  dislike this Proposal, but such as intend to be guilty of so
+  villainous a Crime.”
+
+Everywhere to-day men are conscious that somehow they must deal with
+questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared
+them to understand. Increasingly they know that they cannot understand
+them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly
+they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are
+wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the
+manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise. For in
+an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in
+journalism.
+
+I do not agree with those who think that the sole cause is corruption.
+There is plenty of corruption, to be sure, moneyed control, caste
+pressure, financial and social bribery, ribbons, dinner parties, clubs,
+petty politics. The speculators in Russian rubles who lied on the Paris
+Bourse about the capture of Petrograd are not the only example of their
+species. And yet corruption does not explain the condition of modern
+journalism.
+
+Mr. Franklin P. Adams wrote recently: “Now there is much
+pettiness--and almost incredible stupidity and ignorance--in the
+so-called free press; but it is the pettiness, etc., common to the
+so-called human race--a pettiness found in musicians, steamfitters,
+landlords, poets, and waiters. And when Miss Lowell [who had made the
+usual aristocratic complaint] speaks of the incurable desire in all
+American newspapers to make fun of everything in season and out, we
+quarrel again. There is an incurable desire in American newspapers to
+take things much more seriously than they deserve. Does Miss Lowell
+read the ponderous news from Washington? Does she read the society
+news? Does she, we wonder, read the newspapers?”
+
+Mr. Adams does read them, and when he writes that the newspapers
+take things much more seriously than they deserve, he has, as the
+mayor’s wife remarked to the queen, said a mouthful. Since the war,
+especially, editors have come to believe that their highest duty is not
+to report but to instruct, not to print news but to save civilization,
+not to publish what Benjamin Harris calls “the Circumstances of
+Publique Affairs, both abroad and at home,” but to keep the nation on
+the straight and narrow path. Like the Kings of England, they have
+elected themselves Defenders of the Faith. “For five years,” says Mr.
+Cobb of the _New York World_, “there has been no free play of public
+opinion in the world. Confronted by the inexorable necessities of war,
+governments conscripted public opinion.... They goose-stepped it. They
+taught it to stand at attention and salute.... It sometimes seems that
+after the armistice was signed, millions of Americans must have taken a
+vow that they would never again do any thinking for themselves. They
+were willing to die for their country, but not willing to think for
+it.” That minority, which is proudly prepared to think for it, and not
+only prepared, but cocksure that it alone knows how to think for it,
+has adopted the theory that the public should know what is good for it.
+
+The work of reporters has thus become confused with the work of
+preachers, revivalists, prophets and agitators. The current theory of
+American newspaperdom is that an abstraction like the truth and a grace
+like fairness must be sacrificed whenever anyone thinks the necessities
+of civilization require the sacrifice. To Archbishop Whately’s dictum
+that it matters greatly whether you put truth in the first place or
+the second, the candid expounder of modern journalism would reply that
+he put truth second to what he conceived to be the national interest.
+Judged simply by their product, men like Mr. Ochs or Viscount
+Northcliffe believe that their respective nations will perish and
+civilization decay unless their idea of what is patriotic is permitted
+to temper the curiosity of their readers.
+
+They believe that edification is more important than veracity. They
+believe it profoundly, violently, relentlessly. They preen themselves
+upon it. To patriotism, as they define it from day to day, all other
+considerations must yield. That is their pride. And yet what is this
+but one more among myriad examples of the doctrine that the end
+justifies the means. A more insidiously misleading rule of conduct was,
+I believe, never devised among men. It was a plausible rule as long as
+men believed that an omniscient and benevolent Providence taught them
+what end to seek. But now that men are critically aware of how their
+purposes are special to their age, their locality, their interests, and
+their limited knowledge, it is blazing arrogance to sacrifice hard-won
+standards of credibility to some special purpose. It is nothing but
+the doctrine that I want what I want when I want it. Its monuments are
+the Inquisition and the invasion of Belgium. It is the reason given
+for almost every act of unreason, the law invoked whenever lawlessness
+justifies itself. At bottom it is nothing but the anarchical nature of
+man imperiously hacking its way through.
+
+Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited from
+high places, the most immoral act the immorality of a government, so
+the most destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propaganda by
+those whose profession it is to report the news. The news columns are
+common carriers. When those who control them arrogate to themselves
+the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported
+and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable. Public opinion is
+blockaded. For when a people can no longer confidently repair ‘to
+the best fountains for their information,’ then anyone’s guess and
+anyone’s rumor, each man’s hope and each man’s whim becomes the basis
+of government. All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged
+is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news.
+Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and
+ultimate disaster, must come to any people which is denied an assured
+access to the facts. No one can manage anything on pap. Neither can a
+people.
+
+Statesmen may devise policies; they will end in futility, as so
+many have recently ended, if the propagandists and censors can put
+a painted screen where there should be a window to the world. Few
+episodes in recent history are more poignant than that of the British
+Prime Minister, sitting at the breakfast table with that morning’s
+paper before him protesting that he cannot do the sensible thing in
+regard to Russia because a powerful newspaper proprietor has drugged
+the public. That incident is a photograph of the supreme danger which
+confronts popular government. All other dangers are contingent upon it,
+for the news is the chief source of the opinion by which government
+now proceeds. So long as there is interposed between the ordinary
+citizen and the facts a news organization determining by entirely
+private and unexamined standards, no matter how lofty, what he shall
+know, and hence what he shall believe, no one will be able to say that
+the substance of democratic government is secure. The theory of our
+constitution, says Mr. Justice Holmes, is that truth is the only ground
+upon which men’s wishes safely can be carried out.[2] In so far as
+those who purvey the news make of their own beliefs a higher law than
+truth, they are attacking the foundations of our constitutional system.
+There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and
+shame the devil.
+
+That I have few illusions as to the difficulty of truthful reporting
+anyone can see who reads these pages. If truthfulness were simply a
+matter of sincerity the future would be rather simple. But the modern
+news problem is not solely a question of the newspaperman’s morals. It
+is, as I have tried to show in what follows, the intricate result of
+a civilization too extensive for any man’s personal observation. As
+the problem is manifold, so must be the remedy. There is no panacea.
+But however puzzling the matter may be, there are some things that
+anyone may assert about it, and assert without fear of contradiction.
+They are that there _is_ a problem of the news which is of absolutely
+basic importance to the survival of popular government, and that the
+importance of that problem is not vividly realized nor sufficiently
+considered.
+
+In a few generations it will seem ludicrous to historians that a people
+professing government by the will of the people should have made no
+serious effort to guarantee the news without which a governing opinion
+cannot exist. “Is it possible,” they will ask, “that at the beginning
+of the Twentieth Century nations calling themselves democracies were
+content to act on what happened to drift across their doorsteps; that
+apart from a few sporadic exposures and outcries they made no plans to
+bring these common carriers under social control; that they provided
+no genuine training schools for the men upon whose sagacity they were
+dependent; above all that their political scientists went on year after
+year writing and lecturing about government without producing one, one
+single, significant study of the process of public opinion?” And then
+they will recall the centuries in which the Church enjoyed immunity
+from criticism, and perhaps they will insist that the news structure of
+secular society was not seriously examined for analogous reasons.
+
+When they search into the personal records they will find that among
+journalists, as among the clergy, institutionalism had induced the
+usual prudence. I have made no criticism in this book which is not the
+shoptalk of reporters and editors. But only rarely do newspapermen take
+the general public into their confidence. They will have to sooner or
+later. It is not enough for them to struggle against great odds, as
+many of them are doing, wearing out their souls to do a particular
+assignment well. The philosophy of the work itself needs to be
+discussed; the news about the news needs to be told. For the news about
+the government of the news structure touches the center of all modern
+government.
+
+They need not be much concerned if leathery-minded individuals ask What
+is Truth of all who plead for the effort of truth in modern journalism.
+Jesting Pilate asked the same question, and he also would not stay
+for an answer. No doubt an organon of news reporting must wait upon
+the development of psychology and political science. But resistance
+to the inertias of the profession, heresy to the institution, and the
+willingness to be fired rather than write what you do not believe,
+these wait on nothing but personal courage. And without the assistance
+which they will bring from within the profession itself, democracy
+through it will deal with the problem somehow, will deal with it badly.
+
+The essays which follow are an attempt to describe the character of the
+problem, and to indicate headings under which it may be found useful to
+look for remedies.
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[1] “History of American Journalism,” James Melvin Lee, Houghton
+Mifflin Co., 1917, p. 10.
+
+[2] Supreme Court of the United States, No. 316, October term, 1919,
+Jacob Abrams et al., Plaintiffs in Error vs. the United States.
+
+
+
+
+                       WHAT MODERN LIBERTY MEANS
+
+
+From our recent experience it is clear that the traditional liberties
+of speech and opinion rest on no solid foundation. At a time when
+the world needs above all other things the activity of generous
+imaginations and the creative leadership of planning and inventive
+minds, our thinking is shriveled with panic. Time and energy that
+should go to building and restoring are instead consumed in warding
+off the pin-pricks of prejudice and fighting a guerilla war against
+misunderstanding and intolerance. For suppression is felt, not simply
+by the scattered individuals who are actually suppressed. It reaches
+back into the steadiest minds, creating tension everywhere; and the
+tension of fear produces sterility. Men cease to say what they think;
+and when they cease to say it, they soon cease to think it. They think
+in reference to their critics and not in reference to the facts. For
+when thought becomes socially hazardous, men spend more time wondering
+about the hazard than they do in cultivating their thought. Yet nothing
+is more certain than that mere bold resistance will not permanently
+liberate men’s minds. The problem is not only greater than that, but
+different, and the time is ripe for reconsideration. We have learned
+that many of the hard-won rights of man are utterly insecure. It may
+be that we cannot make them secure simply by imitating the earlier
+champions of liberty.
+
+Something important about the human character was exposed by Plato
+when, with the spectacle of Socrates’s death before him, he founded
+Utopia on a censorship stricter than any which exists on this heavily
+censored planet. His intolerance seems strange. But it is really the
+logical expression of an impulse that most of us have not the candor to
+recognize. It was the service of Plato to formulate the dispositions
+of men in the shape of ideals, and the surest things we can learn from
+him are not what we ought to do, but what we are inclined to do. We
+are peculiarly inclined to suppress whatever impugns the security of
+that to which we have given our allegiance. If our loyalty is turned to
+what exists, intolerance begins at its frontiers; if it is turned, as
+Plato’s was, to Utopia, we shall find Utopia defended with intolerance.
+
+There are, so far as I can discover, no absolutists of liberty; I can
+recall no doctrine of liberty, which, under the acid test, does not
+become contingent upon some other ideal. The goal is never liberty, but
+liberty for something or other. For liberty is a condition under which
+activity takes place, and men’s interests attach themselves primarily
+to their activities and what is necessary to fulfill them, not to the
+abstract requirements of any activity that might be conceived.
+
+And yet controversialists rarely take this into account. The battle
+is fought with banners on which are inscribed absolute and universal
+ideals. They are not absolute and universal in fact. No man has ever
+thought out an absolute or a universal ideal in politics, for the
+simple reason that nobody knows enough, or can know enough, to do it.
+But we all use absolutes, because an ideal which seems to exist apart
+from time, space, and circumstance has a prestige that no candid avowal
+of special purpose can ever have. Looked at from one point of view
+universals are part of the fighting apparatus in men. What they desire
+enormously they easily come to call God’s will, or their nation’s
+purpose. Looked at genetically, these idealizations are probably
+born in that spiritual reverie where all men live most of the time.
+In reverie there is neither time, space, nor particular reference,
+and hope is omnipotent. This omnipotence, which is denied to them in
+action, nevertheless illuminates activity with a sense of utter and
+irresistible value.
+
+The classic doctrine of liberty consists of absolutes. It consists
+of them except at the critical points where the author has come into
+contact with objective difficulties. Then he introduces into the
+argument, somewhat furtively, a reservation which liquidates its
+universal meaning and reduces the exalted plea for liberty in general
+to a special argument for the success of a special purpose.
+
+There are at the present time, for instance, no more fervent champions
+of liberty than the western sympathizers with the Russian Soviet
+government. Why is it that they are indignant when Mr. Burleson
+suppresses a newspaper and complacent when Lenin does? And, _vice
+versa_, why is it that the anti-Bolshevist forces in the world are
+in favor of restricting constitutional liberty as a preliminary to
+establishing genuine liberty in Russia? Clearly the argument about
+liberty has little actual relation to the existence of it. It is the
+purpose of the social conflict, not the freedom of opinion, that lies
+close to the heart of the partisans. The word liberty is a weapon and
+an advertisement, but certainly not an ideal which transcends all
+special aims.
+
+If there were any man who believed in liberty apart from particular
+purposes, that man would be a hermit contemplating all existence with
+a hopeful and neutral eye. For him, in the last analysis, there could
+be nothing worth resisting, nothing particularly worth attaining,
+nothing particularly worth defending, not even the right of hermits
+to contemplate existence with a cold and neutral eye. He would be
+loyal simply to the possibilities of the human spirit, even to those
+possibilities which most seriously impair its variety and its health.
+No such man has yet counted much in the history of politics. For
+what every theorist of liberty has meant is that certain types of
+behavior and classes of opinion hitherto regulated should be somewhat
+differently regulated in the future. What each seems to say is that
+opinion and action should be free; that liberty is the highest and
+most sacred interest of life. But somewhere each of them inserts a
+weasel clause to the effect that “of course” the freedom granted
+shall not be employed too destructively. It is this clause which
+checks exuberance and reminds us that, in spite of appearances, we are
+listening to finite men pleading a special cause.
+
+Among the English classics none are more representative than Milton’s
+_Areopagitica_ and the essay _On Liberty_ by John Stuart Mill. Of
+living men Mr. Bertrand Russell is perhaps the most outstanding
+advocate of liberty. The three together are a formidable set of
+witnesses. Yet nothing is easier than to draw texts from each which can
+be cited either as an argument for absolute liberty or as an excuse for
+as much repression as seems desirable at the moment. Says Milton:
+
+  Yet if all cannot be of one mind, as who looks they should be? this
+  doubtles is more wholsome, more prudent, and more Christian that
+  many be tolerated, rather than all compell’d.
+
+So much for the generalization. Now for the qualification which follows
+immediately upon it.
+
+  I mean not tolerated Popery, and open superstition, which as it
+  extirpats all religions and civill supremacies, so itself should
+  be extirpat, provided first that all charitable and compassionat
+  means be used to win and regain the weak and misled: that also
+  which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or maners
+  no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw it self: but
+  those neighboring differences, or rather _indifferences_, are what
+  I speak of, whether in some point of doctrine or of discipline,
+  which though they may be many, yet need not interrupt the unity of
+  spirit, if we could but find among us the bond of peace.
+
+With this as a text one could set up an inquisition. Yet it occurs
+in the noblest plea for liberty that exists in the English language.
+The critical point in Milton’s thought is revealed by the word
+“indifferences.” The area of opinion which he wished to free comprised
+the “neighboring differences” of certain Protestant sects, and only
+these where they were truly ineffective in manners and morals. Milton,
+in short, had come to the conclusion that certain conflicts of doctrine
+were sufficiently insignificant to be tolerated. The conclusion
+depended far less upon his notion of the value of liberty than upon
+his conception of God and human nature and the England of his time. He
+urged indifference to things that were becoming indifferent.
+
+If we substitute the word indifference for the word liberty, we shall
+come much closer to the real intention that lies behind the classic
+argument. Liberty is to be permitted where differences are of no great
+moment. It is this definition which has generally guided practice. In
+times when men feel themselves secure, heresy is cultivated as the
+spice of life. During a war liberty disappears as the community feels
+itself menaced. When revolution seems to be contagious, heresy-hunting
+is a respectable occupation. In other words, when men are not afraid,
+they are not afraid of ideas; when they are much afraid, they are
+afraid of anything that seems, or can even be made to appear,
+seditious. That is why nine-tenths of the effort to live and let live
+consists in proving that the thing we wish to have tolerated is really
+a matter of indifference.
+
+In Mill this truth reveals itself still more clearly. Though his
+argument is surer and completer than Milton’s, the qualification is
+also surer and completer.
+
+  Such being the reasons which make it imperative that human
+  beings should be free to form opinions, and to express their
+  opinions without reserve; and such the baneful consequences to
+  the intellectual and through that to the moral nature of man,
+  unless this liberty is either conceded or asserted in spite of
+  prohibition, let us next examine whether the same reasons do not
+  require that men should be free to act upon their opinions, to
+  carry these out in their lives, without hindrance, either moral
+  or physical, from their fellow men, so long as it is at their own
+  risk and peril. _This last proviso is of course indispensable._
+  No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions.
+  On the contrary, _even opinions lose their immunity_ when the
+  circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute
+  their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act.
+
+“At their own risk and peril.” In other words, at the risk of eternal
+damnation. The premise from which Mill argued was that many opinions
+then under the ban of society were of no interest to society, and ought
+therefore not to be interfered with. The orthodoxy with which he was at
+war was chiefly theocratic. It assumed that a man’s opinions on cosmic
+affairs might endanger his personal salvation and make him a dangerous
+member of society. Mill did not believe in the theological view, did
+not fear damnation, and was convinced that morality did not depend upon
+the religious sanction. In fact, he was convinced that a more reasoned
+morality could be formed by laying aside theological assumptions. “But
+no one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions.” The plain
+truth is that Mill did not believe that much action would result from
+the toleration of those opinions in which he was most interested.
+
+Political heresy occupied the fringe of his attention, and he uttered
+only the most casual comments. So incidental are they, so little do
+they impinge on his mind, that the arguments of this staunch apostle of
+liberty can be used honestly, and in fact are used, to justify the bulk
+of the suppressions which have recently occurred. “Even opinions lose
+their immunity, _when the circumstances_ in which they are expressed
+are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to
+some mischievious act.” Clearly there is no escape here for Debs or
+Haywood or obstructors of Liberty Loans. The argument used is exactly
+the one employed in sustaining the conviction of Debs.
+
+In corroboration Mill’s single concrete instance may be cited: “An
+opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private
+property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated
+through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered
+orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer,
+or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.”
+
+Clearly Mill’s theory of liberty wore a different complexion when he
+considered opinions which might directly affect social order. Where the
+stimulus of opinion upon action was effective he could say with entire
+complacency, “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited;
+he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.” Because Mill
+believed this, it is entirely just to infer that the distinction drawn
+between a speech or placard and publication in the press would soon
+have broken down for Mill had he lived at a time when the press really
+circulated and the art of type-display had made a newspaper strangely
+like a placard.
+
+On first acquaintance no man would seem to go further than Mr. Bertrand
+Russell in loyalty to what he calls “the unfettered development of all
+the instincts that build up life and fill it with mental delights.”
+He calls these instincts “creative”; and against them he sets off the
+“possessive impulses.” These, he says, should be restricted by “a
+public authority, a repository of practically irresistible force whose
+function should be primarily to repress the private use of force.”
+Where Milton said no “tolerated Popery,” Mr. Russell says, no tolerated
+“possessive impulses.” Surely he is open to the criticism that, like
+every authoritarian who has preceded him, he is interested in the
+unfettered development of only that which seems good to him. Those who
+think that “enlightened selfishness” produces social harmony will
+tolerate more of the possessive impulses, and will be inclined to put
+certain of Mr. Russell’s creative impulses under lock and key.
+
+The moral is, not that Milton, Mill, and Bertrand Russell are
+inconsistent, or that liberty is to be obtained by arguing for it
+without qualifications. The impulse to what we call liberty is as
+strong in these three men as it is ever likely to be in our society.
+The moral is of another kind. It is that the traditional core of
+liberty, namely, the notion of indifference, is too feeble and unreal
+a doctrine to protect the purpose of liberty, which is the furnishing
+of a healthy environment in which human judgment and inquiry can most
+successfully organize human life. Too feeble, because in time of stress
+nothing is easier than to insist, and by insistence to convince, that
+tolerated indifference is no longer tolerable because it has ceased to
+be indifferent.
+
+It is clear that in a society where public opinion has become
+decisive, nothing that counts in the formation of it can really be a
+matter of indifference. When I say “can be,” I am speaking literally.
+What men believed about the constitution of heaven became a matter
+of indifference when heaven disappeared in metaphysics; but what
+they believe about property, government, conscription, taxation,
+the origins of the late war, or the origins of the Franco-Prussian
+War, or the distribution of Latin culture in the vicinity of copper
+mines, constitutes the difference between life and death, prosperity
+and misfortune, and it will never on this earth be tolerated as
+indifferent, or not interfered with, no matter how many noble arguments
+are made for liberty, or how many martyrs give their lives for it.
+If widespread tolerance of opposing views is to be achieved in modern
+society, it will not be simply by fighting the Debs’ cases through the
+courts, and certainly not by threatening to upset those courts if they
+do not yield to the agitation. The task is fundamentally of another
+order, requiring other methods and other theories.
+
+The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become
+so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding. What he knows of
+events that matter enormously to him, the purposes of governments, the
+aspirations of peoples, the struggle of classes, he knows at second,
+third, or fourth hand. He cannot go and see for himself. Even the
+things that are near to him have become too involved for his judgment.
+I know of no man, even among those who devote all of their time to
+watching public affairs, who can even pretend to keep track, at the
+same time, of his city government, his state government, Congress, the
+departments, the industrial situation, and the rest of the world. What
+men who make the study of politics a vocation cannot do, the man who
+has an hour a day for newspapers and talk cannot possibly hope to do.
+He must seize catchwords and headlines or nothing.
+
+This vast elaboration of the subject-matter of politics is the root of
+the whole problem. News comes from a distance; it comes helter-skelter,
+in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily
+understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who
+must take what is given to them. Any lawyer with a sense of evidence
+knows how unreliable such information must necessarily be.
+
+The taking of testimony in a trial is hedged about with a thousand
+precautions derived from long experience of the fallibility of the
+witness and the prejudices of the jury. We call this, and rightly, a
+fundamental phase of human liberty. But in public affairs the stake
+is infinitely greater. It involves the lives of millions, and the
+fortune of everybody. The jury is the whole community, not even the
+qualified voters alone. The jury is everybody who creates public
+sentiment--chattering gossips, unscrupulous liars, congenital liars,
+feeble-minded people, prostitute minds, corrupting agents. To this jury
+any testimony is submitted, is submitted in any form, by any anonymous
+person, with no test of reliability, no test of credibility, and no
+penalty for perjury. If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my
+neighbor’s cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers
+in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if
+I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible. Nobody
+will punish me if I lie about Japan, for example. I can announce that
+every Japanese valet is a reservist, and every Japanese art store a
+mobilization center. I am immune. And if there should be hostilities
+with Japan, the more I lied the more popular I should be. If I asserted
+that the Japanese secretly drank the blood of children, that Japanese
+women were unchaste, that the Japanese were really not a branch of the
+human race after all, I guarantee that most of the newspapers would
+print it eagerly, and that I could get a hearing in churches all over
+the country. And all this for the simple reason that the public, when
+it is dependent on testimony and protected by no rules of evidence, can
+act only on the excitement of its pugnacities and its hopes.
+
+The mechanism of the news-supply has developed without plan, and there
+is no one point in it at which one can fix the responsibility for
+truth. The fact is that the subdivision of labor is now accompanied
+by the subdivision of the news-organization. At one end of it is the
+eye-witness, at the other, the reader. Between the two is a vast,
+expensive transmitting and editing apparatus. This machine works
+marvelously well at times, particularly in the rapidity with which
+it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the
+death of a monarch, or the result of an election. But where the
+issue is complex, as for example in the matter of the success of a
+policy, or the social conditions among a foreign people,--that is to
+say, where the real answer is neither yes or no, but subtle, and a
+matter of balanced evidence,--the subdivision of the labor involved in
+the report causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even
+misrepresentation.
+
+Thus the number of eye-witnesses capable of honest statement is
+inadequate and accidental. Yet the reporter making up his news is
+dependent upon the eye-witnesses. They may be actors in the event. Then
+they can hardly be expected to have perspective. Who, for example,
+if he put aside his own likes and dislikes would trust a Bolshevik’s
+account of what exists in Soviet Russia or an exiled Russian prince’s
+story of what exists in Siberia? Sitting just across the frontier,
+say in Stockholm, how is a reporter to write dependable news when his
+witnesses consist of _emigrés_ or Bolshevist agents?
+
+At the Peace Conference, news was given out by the agents of the
+conferees and the rest leaked through those who were clamoring at the
+doors of the Conference. Now the reporter, if he is to earn his living,
+must nurse his personal contacts with the eye-witnesses and privileged
+informants. If he is openly hostile to those in authority, he will
+cease to be a reporter unless there is an opposition party in the inner
+circle who can feed him news. Failing that, he will know precious
+little of what is going on.
+
+Most people seem to believe that, when they meet a war correspondent or
+a special writer from the Peace Conference, they have seen a man who
+has seen the things he wrote about. Far from it. Nobody, for example,
+saw this war. Neither the men in the trenches nor the commanding
+general. The men saw their trenches, their billets, sometimes they saw
+an enemy trench, but nobody, unless it be the aviators, saw a battle.
+What the correspondents saw, occasionally, was the terrain over which
+a battle had been fought; but what they reported day by day was what
+they were told at press headquarters, and of that only what they were
+allowed to tell.
+
+At the Peace Conference the reporters were allowed to meet periodically
+the four least important members of the Commission, men who themselves
+had considerable difficulty in keeping track of things, as any reporter
+who was present will testify. This was supplemented by spasmodic
+personal interviews with the commissioners, their secretaries, their
+secretaries’ secretaries, other newspaper men, and confidential
+representatives of the President, who stood between him and the
+impertinences of curiosity. This and the French press, than which there
+is nothing more censored and inspired, a local English trade-journal
+of the expatriates, the gossip of the Crillon lobby, the Majestic, and
+the other official hotels, constituted the source of the news upon
+which American editors and the American people have had to base one of
+the most difficult judgments of their history. I should perhaps add
+that there were a few correspondents occupying privileged positions
+with foreign governments. They wore ribbons in their button-holes to
+prove it. They were in many ways the most useful correspondents because
+they always revealed to the trained reader just what it was that their
+governments wished America to believe.
+
+The news accumulated by the reporter from his witnesses has to be
+selected, if for no other reason than that the cable facilities are
+limited. At the cable office several varieties of censorship intervene.
+The legal censorship in Europe is political as well as military, and
+both words are elastic. It has been applied, not only to the substance
+of the news, but to the mode of presentation, and even to the character
+of the type and the position on the page. But the real censorship on
+the wires is the cost of transmission. This in itself is enough to
+limit any expensive competition or any significant independence. The
+big Continental news agencies are subsidized. Censorship operates also
+through congestion and the resultant need of a system of priority.
+Congestion makes possible good and bad service, and undesirable
+messages are not infrequently served badly.
+
+When the report does reach the editor, another series of interventions
+occurs. The editor is a man who may know all about something, but he
+can hardly be expected to know all about everything. Yet he has to
+decide the question which is of more importance than any other in the
+formation of opinions, the question where attention is to be directed.
+In a newspaper the heads are the foci of attention, the odd corners the
+fringe; and whether one aspect of the news or another appears in the
+center or at the periphery makes all the difference in the world. The
+news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible
+medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears,
+and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly
+sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in
+all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people
+determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read.
+It is the only book they read every day. Now the power to determine
+each day what shall seem important and what shall be neglected is a
+power unlike any that has been exercised since the Pope lost his hold
+on the secular mind.
+
+The ordering is not done by one man, but by a host of men, who are on
+the whole curiously unanimous in their selection and in their emphasis.
+Once you know the party and social affiliations of a newspaper, you
+can predict with considerable certainty the perspective in which the
+news will be displayed. This perspective is by no means altogether
+deliberate. Though the editor is ever so much more sophisticated than
+all but a minority of his readers, his own sense of relative importance
+is determined by rather standardized constellations of ideas. He very
+soon comes to believe that his habitual emphasis is the only possible
+one.
+
+Why the editor is possessed by a particular set of ideas is a
+difficult question in social psychology, of which no adequate analysis
+has been made. But we shall not be far wrong if we say that he deals
+with the news in reference to the prevailing _mores_ of his social
+group. These _mores_ are of course in a large measure the product of
+what previous newspapers have said; and experience shows that, in order
+to break out of this circle, it has been necessary at various times
+to create new forms of journalism, such as the national monthly, the
+critical weekly, the circular, the paid advertisements of ideas, in
+order to change the emphasis which had become obsolete and habit-ridden.
+
+Into this extremely refractory, and I think increasingly disserviceable
+mechanism, there has been thrown, especially since the outbreak of
+war, another monkey-wrench--propaganda. The word, of course, covers
+a multitude of sins and a few virtues. The virtues can be easily
+separated out, and given another name, either advertisement or
+advocacy. Thus, if the National Council of Belgravia wishes to publish
+a magazine out of its own funds, under its own imprint, advocating
+the annexation of Thrums, no one will object. But if, in support of
+that advocacy, it gives to the press stories that are lies about the
+atrocities committed in Thrums; or, worse still, if those stories
+seem to come from Geneva, or Amsterdam, not from the press-service
+of the National Council of Belgravia, then Belgravia is conducting
+propaganda. If, after arousing a certain amount of interest in itself,
+Belgravia then invites a carefully selected correspondent, or perhaps
+a labor leader, to its capital, puts him up at the best hotel, rides
+him around in limousines, fawns on him at banquets, lunches with him
+very confidentially, and then puts him through a conducted tour so that
+he shall see just what will create the desired impression, then again
+Belgravia is conducting propaganda. Or if Belgravia happens to possess
+the greatest trombone-player in the world, and if she sends him over
+to charm the wives of influential husbands, Belgravia is, in a less
+objectionable way, perhaps, committing propaganda, and making fools of
+the husbands.
+
+Now, the plain fact is that out of the troubled areas of the world
+the public receives practically nothing that is not propaganda. Lenin
+and his enemies control all the news there is of Russia, and no
+court of law would accept any of the testimony as valid in a suit to
+determine the possession of a donkey. I am writing many months after
+the Armistice. The Senate is at this moment engaged in debating the
+question whether it will guarantee the frontiers of Poland; but what
+we learn of Poland we learn from the Polish Government and the Jewish
+Committee. Judgment on the vexed issues of Europe is simply out of the
+question for the average American; and the more cocksure he is, the
+more certainly is he the victim of some propaganda.
+
+These instances are drawn from foreign affairs, but the difficulty at
+home, although less flagrant, is nevertheless real. Theodore Roosevelt,
+and Leonard Wood after him, have told us to think nationally. It is not
+easy. It is easy to parrot what those people say who live in a few big
+cities and who have constituted themselves the only true and authentic
+voice of America. But beyond that it is difficult. I live in New York
+and I have not the vaguest idea what Brooklyn is interested in. It is
+possible, with effort, much more effort than most people can afford to
+give, for me to know what a few organized bodies like the Non-Partisan
+League, the National Security League, the American Federation of
+Labor, and the Republican National Committee are up to; but what the
+unorganized workers, and the unorganized farmers, the shopkeepers, the
+local bankers and boards of trade are thinking and feeling, no one has
+any means of knowing, except perhaps in a vague way at election time.
+To think nationally means, at least, to take into account the major
+interests and needs and desires of this continental population; and for
+that each man would need a staff of secretaries, traveling agents, and
+a very expensive press-clipping bureau.
+
+We do not think nationally because the facts that count are not
+systematically reported and presented in a form we can digest. Our
+most abysmal ignorance occurs where we deal with the immigrant. If
+we read his press at all, it is to discover “Bolshevism” in it and
+to blacken all immigrants with suspicion. For his culture and his
+aspirations, for his high gifts of hope and variety, we have neither
+eyes nor ears. The immigrant colonies are like holes in the road which
+we never notice until we trip over them. Then, because we have no
+current information and no background of facts, we are, of course, the
+undiscriminating objects of any agitator who chooses to rant against
+“foreigners.”
+
+Now, men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their
+environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The
+quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only
+where the audience is deprived of independent access to information.
+But where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony
+is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to
+opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities
+themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.
+The whole reference of thought comes to be what somebody asserts, not
+what actually is. Men ask, not whether such and such a thing occurred
+in Russia, but whether Mr. Raymond Robins is at heart more friendly
+to the Bolsheviki than Mr. Jerome Landfield. And so, since they are
+deprived of any trustworthy means of knowing what is really going on,
+since everything is on the plane of assertion and propaganda, they
+believe whatever fits most comfortably with their prepossessions.
+
+That this breakdown of the means of public knowledge should occur at
+a time of immense change is a compounding of the difficulty. From
+bewilderment to panic is a short step, as everyone knows who has
+watched a crowd when danger threatens. At the present time a nation
+easily acts like a crowd. Under the influence of headlines and panicky
+print, the contagion of unreason can easily spread through a settled
+community. For when the comparatively recent and unstable nervous
+organization which makes us capable of responding to reality as it is,
+and not as we should wish it, is baffled over a continuing period of
+time, the more primitive but much stronger instincts are let loose.
+
+War and Revolution, both of them founded on censorship and propaganda,
+are the supreme destroyers of realistic thinking, because the excess of
+danger and the fearful overstimulation of passion unsettle disciplined
+behavior. Both breed fanatics of all kinds, men who, in the words of
+Mr. Santayana, have redoubled their effort when they have forgotten
+their aim. The effort itself has become the aim. Men live in their
+effort, and for a time find great exaltation. They seek stimulation
+of their effort rather than direction of it. That is why both in war
+and revolution there seems to operate a kind of Gresham’s Law of the
+emotions, in which leadership passes by a swift degradation from a
+Mirabeau to a Robespierre; and in war, from a high-minded statesmanship
+to the depths of virulent, hating jingoism.
+
+The cardinal fact always is the loss of contact with objective
+information. Public as well as private reason depends upon it. Not
+what somebody says, not what somebody wishes were true, but what is
+so beyond all our opining, constitutes the touchstone of our sanity.
+And a society which lives at second-hand will commit incredible
+follies and countenance inconceivable brutalities if that contact
+is intermittent and untrustworthy. Demagoguery is a parasite that
+flourishes where discrimination fails, and only those who are at grips
+with things themselves are impervious to it. For, in the last analysis,
+the demagogue, whether of the Right or the Left, is, consciously or
+unconsciously an undetected liar.
+
+Many students of politics have concluded that, because public opinion
+was unstable, the remedy lay in making government as independent
+of it as possible. The theorists of representative government have
+argued persistently from this premise against the believers in direct
+legislation. But it appears now that, while they have been making their
+case against direct legislation, rather successfully it seems to
+me, they have failed sufficiently to notice the increasing malady of
+representative government.
+
+Parliamentary action is becoming notoriously ineffective. In America
+certainly the concentration of power in the Executive is out of
+all proportion either to the intentions of the Fathers or to the
+orthodox theory of representative government. The cause is fairly
+clear. Congress is an assemblage of men selected for local reasons
+from districts. It brings to Washington a more or less accurate sense
+of the superficial desires of its constituency. In Washington it is
+supposed to think nationally and internationally. But for that task
+its equipment and its sources of information are hardly better than
+that of any other reader of the newspaper. Except for its spasmodic
+investigating committees, Congress has no particular way of informing
+itself. But the Executive has. The Executive is an elaborate hierarchy
+reaching to every part of the nation and to all parts of the world.
+It has an independent machinery, fallible and not too truthworthy,
+of course, but nevertheless a machinery of intelligence. It can be
+informed and it can act, whereas Congress is not informed and cannot
+act.
+
+Now the popular theory of representative government is that the
+representatives have the information and therefore create the policy
+which the executive administers. The more subtle theory is that the
+executive initiates the policy which the legislature corrects in
+accordance with popular wisdom. But when the legislature is haphazardly
+informed, this amounts to very little, and the people themselves prefer
+to trust the executive which knows, rather than the Congress which is
+vainly trying to know. The result has been the development of a kind
+of government which has been harshly described as plebiscite autocracy,
+or government by newspapers. Decisions in the modern state tend to be
+made by the interaction, not of Congress and the executive, but of
+public opinion and the executive.
+
+Public opinion for this purpose finds itself collected about special
+groups which act as extra-legal organs of government. There is a
+labor nucleus, a farmers’ nucleus, a prohibition nucleus, a National
+Security League nucleus, and so on. These groups conduct a continual
+electioneering campaign upon the unformed, exploitable mass of
+public opinion. Being special groups, they have special sources of
+information, and what they lack in the way of information is often
+manufactured. These conflicting pressures beat upon the executive
+departments and upon Congress, and formulate the conduct of the
+government. The government itself acts in reference to these groups
+far more than in reference to the district congressmen. So politics as
+it is now played consists in coercing and seducing the representative
+by the threat and the appeal of these unofficial groups. Sometimes
+they are the allies, sometimes the enemies, of the party in power, but
+more and more they are the energy of public affairs. Government tends
+to operate by the impact of controlled opinion upon administration.
+This shift in the locus of sovereignty has placed a premium upon the
+manufacture of what is usually called consent. No wonder that the most
+powerful newspaper proprietor in the English-speaking world declined a
+mere government post.
+
+No wonder, too, that the protection of the sources of its opinion
+is the basic problem of democracy. Everything else depends upon it.
+Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evidence,
+without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular
+decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation.
+That is why I have argued that the older doctrine of liberty was
+misleading. It did not assume a public opinion that governs.
+Essentially it demanded toleration of opinions that were, as Milton
+said, indifferent. It can guide us little in a world where opinion is
+sensitive and decisive.
+
+The axis of the controversy needs to be shifted. The attempt to draw
+fine distinctions between “liberty” and “license” is no doubt part of
+the day’s work, but it is fundamentally a negative part. It consists
+in trying to make opinion responsible to prevailing social standards,
+whereas the really important thing is to try and make opinion
+increasingly responsible to the facts. There can be no liberty for a
+community which lacks the information by which to detect lies. Trite as
+the conclusion may at first seem, it has, I believe, immense practical
+consequences, and may perhaps offer an escape from the logomachy into
+which the contests of liberty so easily degenerate.
+
+It may be bad to suppress a particular opinion, but the really deadly
+thing is to suppress the news. In time of great insecurity, certain
+opinions acting on unstable minds may cause infinite disaster. Knowing
+that such opinions necessarily originate in slender evidence, that
+they are propelled more by prejudice from the rear than by reference
+to realities, it seems to me that to build the case for liberty upon
+the dogma of their unlimited prerogatives is to build it upon the
+poorest foundation. For, even though we grant that the world is best
+served by the liberty of all opinion, the plain fact is that men are
+too busy and too much concerned to fight more than spasmodically for
+such liberty. When freedom of opinion is revealed as freedom of error,
+illusion, and misinterpretation, it is virtually impossible to stir up
+much interest in its behalf. It is the thinnest of all abstractions and
+an over-refinement of mere intellectualism. But people, wide circles
+of people, are aroused when their curiosity is baulked. The desire
+to know, the dislike of being deceived and made game of, is a really
+powerful motive, and it is that motive that can best be enlisted in the
+cause of freedom.
+
+What, for example, was the one most general criticism of the work
+of the Peace Conference? It was that the covenants were not openly
+arrived at. This fact stirred Republican Senators, British Labor, the
+whole gamut of parties from the Right to the Left. And in the last
+analysis lack of information about the Conference _was_ the origin
+of its difficulties. Because of the secrecy endless suspicion was
+aroused; because of it the world seemed to be presented with a series
+of accomplished facts which it could not reject and did not wish
+altogether to accept. It was lack of information which kept public
+opinion from affecting the negotiations at the time when intervention
+would have counted most and cost least. Publicity occurred when the
+covenants were arrived at, with all the emphasis on the _at_. This
+is what the Senate objected to, and this is what alienated much more
+liberal opinion than the Senate represents.
+
+In a passage quoted previously in this essay, Milton said that
+differences of opinion, “which though they may be many, yet need
+not interrupt the unity of spirit, if we could but find among us the
+bond of peace.” There is but one kind of unity possible in a world as
+diverse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than of aim; the unity
+of the disciplined experiment. There is but one bond of peace that is
+both permanent and enriching: the increasing knowledge of the world in
+which experiment occurs. With a common intellectual method and a common
+area of valid fact, differences may become a form of coöperation and
+cease to be an irreconcilable antagonism.
+
+That, I think, constitutes the meaning of freedom for us. We cannot
+successfully define liberty, or accomplish it, by a series of
+permissions and prohibitions. For that is to ignore the content of
+opinion in favor of its form. Above all, it is an attempt to define
+liberty of opinion in terms of opinion. It is a circular and sterile
+logic. A useful definition of liberty is obtainable only by seeking
+the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is
+to say, in the process by which men educate their response and learn
+to control their environment. In this view liberty is the name we
+give to measures by which we protect and increase the veracity of the
+information upon which we act.
+
+
+
+
+                          LIBERTY AND THE NEWS
+
+
+The debates about liberty have hitherto all been attempts to determine
+just when in the series from Right to Left the censorship should
+intervene. In the preceding paper I ventured to ask whether these
+attempts do not turn on a misconception of the problem. The conclusion
+reached was that, in dealing with liberty of opinion, we were dealing
+with a subsidiary phase of the whole matter; that, so long as we were
+content to argue about the privileges and immunities of opinion,
+we were missing the point and trying to make bricks without straw.
+We should never succeed even in fixing a standard of tolerance for
+opinions, if we concentrated all our attention on the opinions. For
+they are derived, not necessarily by reason, to be sure, but somehow,
+from the stream of news that reaches the public, and the protection
+of that stream is the critical interest in a modern state. In going
+behind opinion to the information which it exploits, and in making
+the validity of the news our ideal, we shall be fighting the battle
+where it is really being fought. We shall be protecting for the public
+interest that which all the special interests in the world are most
+anxious to corrupt.
+
+As the sources of the news are protected, as the information they
+furnish becomes accessible and usable, as our capacity to read that
+information is educated, the old problem of tolerance will wear a new
+aspect. Many questions which seem hopelessly insoluble now will cease
+to seem important enough to be worth solving. Thus the advocates of a
+larger freedom always argue that true opinions will prevail over error;
+their opponents always claim that you can fool most of the people most
+of the time. Both statements are true, but both are half-truths. True
+opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known;
+if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones,
+if not a little more effective.
+
+The sensible procedure in matters affecting the liberty of opinion
+would be to ensure as impartial an investigation of the facts as is
+humanly possible. But it is just this investigation that is denied
+us. It is denied us, because we are dependent upon the testimony
+of anonymous and untrained and prejudiced witnesses; because the
+complexity of the relevant facts is beyond the scope of our hurried
+understanding; and finally, because the process we call education
+fails so lamentably to educate the sense of evidence or the power of
+penetrating to the controlling center of a situation. The task of
+liberty, therefore, falls roughly under three heads, protection of
+the sources of the news, organization of the news so as to make it
+comprehensible, and education of human response.
+
+We need, first, to know what can be done with the existing
+news-structure, in order to correct its grosser evils. How far is it
+useful to go in fixing personal responsibility for the truthfulness of
+news? Much further, I am inclined to think, than we have ever gone. We
+ought to know the names of the whole staff of every periodical. While
+it is not necessary, or even desirable, that each article should be
+signed, each article should be documented, and false documentation
+should be illegal. An item of news should always state whether it
+is received from one of the great news-agencies, or from a reporter,
+or from a press bureau. Particular emphasis should be put on marking
+news supplied by press bureaus, whether they are labeled “Geneva,” or
+“Stockholm,” or “El Paso.”
+
+One wonders next whether anything can be devised to meet that great
+evil of the press, the lie which, once under way, can never be tracked
+down. The more scrupulous papers will, of course, print a retraction
+when they have unintentionally injured someone; but the retraction
+rarely compensates the victim. The law of libel is a clumsy and
+expensive instrument, and rather useless to private individuals or weak
+organizations because of the gentlemen’s agreement which obtains in the
+newspaper world. After all, the remedy for libel is not money damages,
+but an undoing of the injury. Would it be possible then to establish
+courts of honor in which publishers should be compelled to meet their
+accusers and, if found guilty of misrepresentation, ordered to publish
+the correction in the particular form and with the prominence specified
+by the finding of the court? I do not know. Such courts might prove
+to be a great nuisance, consuming time and energy and attention, and
+offering too free a field for individuals with a persecution mania.
+
+Perhaps a procedure could be devised which would eliminate most of
+these inconveniences. Certainly it would be a great gain if the
+accountability of publishers could be increased. They exercise more
+power over the individual than is healthy, as everybody knows who
+has watched the yellow press snooping at keyholes and invading the
+privacy of helpless men and women. Even more important than this, is
+the utterly reckless power of the press in dealing with news vitally
+affecting the friendship of peoples. In a Court of Honor, possible
+perhaps only in Utopia, voluntary associations working for decent
+relations with other peoples might hale the jingo and the subtle
+propagandist before a tribunal, to prove the reasonable truth of his
+assertion or endure the humiliation of publishing prominently a finding
+against his character.
+
+This whole subject is immensely difficult, and full of traps. It would
+be well worth an intensive investigation by a group of publishers,
+lawyers, and students of public affairs. Because in some form or other
+the next generation will attempt to bring the publishing business under
+greater social control. There is everywhere an increasingly angry
+disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and
+misled; and wise publishers will not pooh-pooh these omens. They might
+well note the history of prohibition, where a failure to work out a
+programme of temperance brought about an undiscriminating taboo. The
+regulation of the publishing business is a subtle and elusive matter,
+and only by an early and sympathetic effort to deal with great evils
+can the more sensible minds retain their control. If publishers and
+authors themselves do not face the facts and attempt to deal with
+them, some day Congress, in a fit of temper, egged on by an outraged
+public opinion, will operate on the press with an ax. For somehow the
+community must find a way of making the men who publish news accept
+responsibility for an honest effort not to misrepresent the facts.
+
+But the phrase “honest effort” does not take us very far. The problem
+here is not different from that which we begin dimly to apprehend in
+the field of government and business administration. The untrained
+amateur may mean well, but he knows not how to do well. Why should he?
+What are the qualifications for being a surgeon? A certain minimum of
+special training. What are the qualifications for operating daily on
+the brain and heart of a nation? None. Go some time and listen to the
+average run of questions asked in interviews with Cabinet officers--or
+anywhere else.
+
+I remember one reporter who was detailed to the Peace Conference by
+a leading news-agency. He came around every day for “news.” It was a
+time when Central Europe seemed to be disintegrating, and great doubt
+existed as to whether governments would be found with which to sign
+a peace. But all that this “reporter” wanted to know was whether the
+German fleet, then safely interned at Scapa Flow, was going to be sunk
+in the North Sea. He insisted every day on knowing that. For him it was
+the German fleet or nothing. Finally, he could endure it no longer. So
+he anticipated Admiral Reuther and announced, in a dispatch to his home
+papers, that the fleet would be sunk. And when I say that a million
+American adults learned all that they ever learned about the Peace
+Conference through this reporter, I am stating a very moderate figure.
+
+He suggests the delicate question raised by the schools of journalism:
+how far can we go in turning newspaper enterprise from a haphazard
+trade into a disciplined profession? Quite far, I imagine, for it is
+altogether unthinkable that a society like ours should remain forever
+dependent upon untrained accidental witnesses. It is no answer to say
+that there have been in the past, and that there are now, first-rate
+correspondents. Of course there are. Men like Brailsford, Oulahan,
+Gibbs, Lawrence, Swope, Strunsky, Draper, Hard, Dillon, Lowry, Levine,
+Ackerman, Ray Stannard Baker, Frank Cobb, and William Allen White,
+know their way about in this world. But they are eminences on a rather
+flat plateau. The run of the news is handled by men of much smaller
+caliber. It is handled by such men because reporting is not a dignified
+profession for which men will invest the time and cost of an education,
+but an underpaid, insecure, anonymous form of drudgery, conducted on
+catch-as-catch-can principles. Merely to talk about the reporter in
+terms of his real importance to civilization will make newspaper men
+laugh. Yet reporting is a post of peculiar honor. Observation must
+precede every other activity, and the public observer (that is, the
+reporter) is a man of critical value. No amount of money or effort
+spent in fitting the right men for this work could possibly be wasted,
+for the health of society depends upon the quality of the information
+it receives.
+
+Do our schools of journalism, the few we have, make this kind of
+training their object, or are they trade-schools designed to fit men
+for higher salaries in the existing structure? I do not presume to
+answer the question, nor is the answer of great moment when we remember
+how small a part these schools now play in actual journalism. But it
+is important to know whether it would be worth while to endow large
+numbers of schools on the model of those now existing, and make their
+diplomas a necessary condition for the practice of reporting. It is
+worth considering. Against the idea lies the fact that it is difficult
+to decide just what reporting is--where in the whole mass of printed
+matter it begins and ends. No one would wish to set up a closed guild
+of reporters and thus exclude invaluable casual reporting and writing.
+If there is anything in the idea at all, it would apply only to the
+routine service of the news through large organizations.
+
+Personally I should distrust too much ingenuity of this kind, on the
+ground that, while it might correct certain evils, the general tendency
+would be to turn the control of the news over to unenterprising
+stereotyped minds soaked in the traditions of a journalism always ten
+years out of date. The better course is to avoid the deceptive short
+cuts, and make up our minds to send out into reporting a generation
+of men who will by sheer superiority, drive the incompetents out of
+business. That means two things. It means a public recognition of the
+dignity of such a career, so that it will cease to be the refuge of the
+vaguely talented. With this increase of prestige must go a professional
+training in journalism in which the ideal of objective testimony is
+cardinal. The cynicism of the trade needs to be abandoned, for the
+true patterns of the journalistic apprentice are not the slick persons
+who scoop the news, but the patient and fearless men of science who
+have labored to see what the world really is. It does not matter that
+the news is not susceptible of mathematical statement. In fact, just
+because news is complex and slippery, good reporting requires the
+exercise of the highest of the scientific virtues. They are the habits
+of ascribing no more credibility to a statement than it warrants,
+a nice sense of the probabilities, and a keen understanding of the
+quantitative importance of particular facts. You can judge the general
+reliability of any observer most easily by the estimate he puts upon
+the reliability of his own report. If you have no facts of your own
+with which to check him, the best rough measurement is to wait and see
+whether he is aware of any limitations in himself; whether he knows
+that he saw only part of the event he describes; and whether he has any
+background of knowledge against which he can set what he thinks he has
+seen.
+
+This kind of sophistication is, of course, necessary for the merest
+pretense to any education. But for different professions it needs to
+be specialized in particular ways. A sound legal training is pervaded
+by it, but the skepticism is pointed to the type of case with which
+the lawyer deals. The reporter’s work is not carried on under the same
+conditions, and therefore requires a different specialization. How he
+is to acquire it is, of course, a pedagogical problem requiring an
+inductive study of the types of witness and the sources of information
+with whom the reporter is in contact.
+
+Some time in the future, when men have thoroughly grasped the rôle
+of public opinion in society, scholars will not hesitate to write
+treatises on evidence for the use of news-gathering services. No such
+treatise exists to-day, because political science has suffered from
+that curious prejudice of the scholar which consists in regarding an
+irrational phenomenon as not quite worthy of serious study.
+
+Closely akin to an education in the tests of credibility is rigorous
+discipline in the use of words. It is almost impossible to
+overestimate the confusion in daily life caused by sheer inability
+to use language with intention. We talk scornfully of “mere words.”
+Yet through words the whole vast process of human communication takes
+place. The sights and sounds and meanings of nearly all that we deal
+with as “politics,” we learn, not by our own experience, but through
+the words of others. If those words are meaningless lumps charged with
+emotion, instead of the messengers of fact, all sense of evidence
+breaks down. Just so long as big words like Bolshevism, Americanism,
+patriotism, pro-Germanism, are used by reporters to cover anything and
+anybody that the biggest fool at large wishes to include, just so long
+shall we be seeking our course through a fog so dense that we cannot
+tell whether we fly upside-down or right-side-up. It is a measure of
+our education as a people that so many of us are perfectly content to
+live our political lives in this fraudulent environment of unanalyzed
+words. For the reporter, abracadabra is fatal. So long as he deals in
+it, he is gullibility itself, seeing nothing of the world, and living,
+as it were, in a hall of crazy mirrors.
+
+Only the discipline of a modernized logic can open the door to reality.
+An overwhelming part of the dispute about “freedom of opinion” turns on
+words which mean different things to the censor and the agitator. So
+long as the meanings of the words are not dissociated, the dispute will
+remain a circular wrangle. Education that shall make men masters of
+their vocabulary is one of the central interests of liberty. For such
+an education alone can transform the dispute into debate from similar
+premises.
+
+A sense of evidence and a power to define words must for the
+modern reporter be accompanied by a working knowledge of the main
+stratifications and currents of interest. Unless he knows that “news”
+of society almost always starts from a special group, he is doomed to
+report the surface of events. He will report the ripples of a passing
+steamer, and forget the tides and the currents and the ground-swell. He
+will report what Kolchak or Lenin says, and see what they do only when
+it confirms what he thinks they said. He will deal with the flicker
+of events and not with their motive. There are ways of reading that
+flicker so as to discern the motive, but they have not been formulated
+in the light of recent knowledge. Here is big work for the student of
+politics. The good reporter reads events with an intuition trained by
+wide personal experience. The poor reporter cannot read them, because
+he is not even aware that there is anything in particular to read.
+
+And then the reporter needs a general sense of what the world is doing.
+Emphatically he ought not to be serving a cause, no matter how good. In
+his professional activity it is no business of his to care whose ox is
+gored. To be sure, when so much reporting is _ex parte_, and hostile to
+insurgent forces, the insurgents in self-defense send out _ex parte_
+reporters of their own. But a community cannot rest content to learn
+the truth about the Democrats by reading the Republican papers, and
+the truth about the Republicans by reading the Democratic papers.
+There is room, and there is need, for disinterested reporting; and if
+this sounds like a counsel of perfection now, it is only because the
+science of public opinion is still at the point where astronomy was
+when theological interests proclaimed the conclusions that all research
+must vindicate.
+
+While the reporter will serve no cause, he will possess a steady
+sense that the chief purpose of “news” is to enable mankind to live
+successfully toward the future. He will know that the world is a
+process, not by any means always onward and upward, but never quite
+the same. As the observer of the signs of change, his value to society
+depends upon the prophetic discrimination with which he selects those
+signs.
+
+But the news from which he must pick and choose has long since become
+too complicated even for the most highly trained reporter. The work,
+say, of the government is really a small part of the day’s news, yet
+even the wealthiest and most resourceful newspapers fail in their
+efforts to report “Washington.” The high lights and the disputes and
+sensational incidents are noted, but no one can keep himself informed
+about his Congressman or about the individual departments, by reading
+the daily press. This failure in no way reflects on the newspapers.
+It results from the intricacy and unwieldiness of the subject-matter.
+Thus, it is easier to report Congress than it is to report the
+departments, because the work of Congress crystallizes crudely every so
+often in a roll-call. But administration, although it has become more
+important than legislation, is hard to follow, because its results are
+spread over a longer period of time, and its effects are felt in ways
+that no reporter can really measure.
+
+Theoretically Congress is competent to act as the critical eye on
+administration. Actually, the investigations Of Congress are almost
+always planless raids, conducted by men too busy and too little
+informed to do more than catch the grosser evils, or intrude upon good
+work that is not understood. It was a recognition of these difficulties
+that was the cause of two very interesting experiments in late years.
+One was the establishment of more or less semi-official institutes
+of government research; the other, the growth of specialized private
+agencies which attempt to give technical summaries of the work of
+various branches of the government. Neither experiment has created
+much commotion: yet together they illustrate an idea which, properly
+developed, will be increasingly valuable to an enlightened public
+opinion.
+
+Their principle is simple. They are expert organized reporters. Having
+no horror of dullness, no interest in being dramatic, they can study
+statistics and orders and reports which are beyond the digestive powers
+of a newspaper man or of his readers. The lines of their growth would
+seem to be threefold: to make a current record, to make a running
+analysis of it, and on the basis of both, to suggest plans.
+
+Record and analysis require an experimental formulation of standards by
+which the work of government can be tested. Such standards are not to
+be evolved off-hand out of anyone’s consciousness. Some have already
+been worked out experimentally, others still need to be discovered;
+all need to be refined and brought into perspective by the wisdom of
+experience. Carried out competently, the public would gradually learn
+to substitute objective criteria for gossip and intuitions. One can
+imagine a public-health service subjected to such expert criticism.
+The institute of research publishes the death-rate as a whole for a
+period of years. It seems that for a particular season the rate is bad
+in certain maladies, that in others the rate of improvement is not
+sufficiently rapid. These facts are compared with the expenditures
+of the service, and with the main lines of its activity. Are the bad
+results due to the causes beyond the control of the service? do they
+indicate a lack of foresight in asking appropriations for special work?
+or in the absence of novel phenomena, do they point to a decline of the
+personnel, or in its morale? If the latter, further analysis may reveal
+that salaries are too low to attract men of ability, or that the head
+of the service by bad management has weakened the interest of his staff.
+
+When the work of government is analyzed in some such way as this, the
+reporter deals with a body of knowledge that has been organized for
+his apprehension. In other words, he is able to report the “news,”
+because between him and the raw material of government there has been
+interposed a more or less expert political intelligence. He ceases to
+be the ant, described by William James, whose view of a building was
+obtained by crawling over the cracks in the walls.
+
+These political observatories will, I think, be found useful in all
+branches of government, national, state, municipal, industrial, and
+even in foreign affairs. They should be clearly out of reach either of
+the wrath or of the favor of the office-holders. They must, of course,
+be endowed, but the endowment should be beyond the immediate control
+of the legislature and of the rich patron. Their independence can
+be partially protected by the terms of the trust; the rest must be
+defended by the ability of the institute to make itself so much the
+master of the facts as to be impregnably based on popular confidence.
+
+One would like to think that the universities could be brought into
+such a scheme. Were they in close contact with the current record and
+analysis, there might well be a genuine “field work” in political
+science for the students; and there could be no better directing
+idea for their more advanced researches than the formulation of the
+intellectual methods by which the experience of government could
+be brought to usable control. After all, the purpose of studying
+“political science” is to be able to act more effectively in politics,
+the word effectively being understood in the largest and, therefore,
+the ideal sense. In the universities men should be able to think
+patiently and generously for the good of society. If they do not,
+surely one of the reasons is that thought terminates in doctor’s theses
+and brown quarterlies, and not in the critical issues of politics.
+
+On first thought, all this may seem rather a curious direction for
+an inquiry into the substance of liberty. Yet we have always known,
+as a matter of common sense, that there was an intimate connection
+between “liberty” and the use of liberty. Every one who has examined
+the subject at all has had to conclude that tolerance _per se_ is an
+arbitrary line, and that, in practice, the determining factor is the
+significance of the opinion to be tolerated. This study is based on an
+avowal of that fact. Once it is avowed, there seems to be no way of
+evading the conclusion that liberty is not so much permission as it is
+the construction of a system of information increasingly independent of
+opinion. In the long run it looks as if opinion could be made at once
+free and enlightening only by transferring our interest from “opinion”
+to the objective realities from which it springs. This thought has led
+us to speculations on ways of protecting and organizing the stream
+of news as the source of all opinion that matters. Obviously these
+speculations do not pretend to offer a fully considered or a completed
+scheme. Their nature forbids it, and I should be guilty of the very
+opinionativeness I have condemned, did these essays claim to be
+anything more than tentative indications of the more important phases
+of the problem.
+
+Yet I can well imagine their causing a considerable restlessness in the
+minds of some readers. Standards, institutes, university research,
+schools of journalism, they will argue, may be all right, but they are
+a gray business in a vivid world. They blunt the edge of life; they
+leave out of account the finely irresponsible opinion thrown out by
+the creative mind; they do not protect the indispensable novelty from
+philistinism and oppression. These proposals of yours, they will say,
+ignore the fact that such an apparatus of knowledge will in the main
+be controlled by the complacent and the traditional, and the execution
+will inevitably be illiberal.
+
+There is force in the indictment. And yet I am convinced that we
+shall accomplish more by fighting for truth than by fighting for
+our theories. It is a better loyalty. It is a humbler one, but it
+is also more irresistible. Above all it is educative. For the real
+enemy is ignorance, from which all of us, conservative, liberal,
+and revolutionary, suffer. If our effort is concentrated on our
+desires,--be it our desire to have and to hold what is good, our desire
+to remake peacefully, or our desire to transform suddenly,--we shall
+divide hopelessly and irretrievably. We must go back of our opinions to
+the neutral facts for unity and refreshment of spirit. To deny this,
+it seems to me, is to claim that the mass of men is impervious to
+education, and to deny that, is to deny the postulate of democracy, and
+to seek salvation in a dictatorship. There is, I am convinced, nothing
+but misery and confusion that way. But I am equally convinced that
+democracy will degenerate into this dictatorship either of the Right
+or of the Left, if it does not become genuinely self-governing. That
+means, in terms of public opinion, a resumption of that contact between
+beliefs and realities which we have been losing steadily since the
+small-town democracy was absorbed into the Great Society.
+
+The administration of public information toward greater accuracy and
+more successful analysis is the highway of liberty. It is, I believe,
+a matter of first-rate importance that we should fix this in our
+minds. Having done so, we may be able to deal more effectively with
+the traps and the lies and the special interests which obstruct the
+road and drive us astray. Without a clear conception of what the means
+of liberty are, the struggle for free speech and free opinion easily
+degenerates into a mere contest of opinion.
+
+But realization is not the last step, though it is the first. We need
+be under no illusion that the stream of news can be purified simply by
+pointing out the value of purity. The existing news-structure may be
+made serviceable to democracy along the general lines suggested, by the
+training of the journalist, and by the development of expert record and
+analysis. But while it may be, it will not be, simply by saying that it
+ought to be. Those who are now in control have too much at stake, and
+they control the source of reform itself.
+
+Change will come only by the drastic competition of those whose
+interests are not represented in the existing news-organization. It
+will come only if organized labor and militant liberalism set a pace
+which cannot be ignored. Our sanity and, therefore, our safety depend
+upon this competition, upon fearless and relentless exposure conducted
+by self-conscious groups that are now in a minority. It is for these
+groups to understand that the satisfaction of advertising a pet theory
+is as nothing compared to the publication of the news. And having
+realized it, it is for them to combine their resources and their talent
+for the development of an authentic news-service which is invincible
+because it supplies what the community is begging for and cannot get.
+
+All the gallant little sheets expressing particular programmes are
+at bottom vanity, and in the end, futility, so long as the reporting
+of daily news is left in untrained and biased hands. If we are to
+move ahead, we must see a great independent journalism, setting
+standards for commercial journalism, like those which the splendid
+English coöperative societies are setting for commercial business. An
+enormous amount of money is dribbled away in one fashion or another on
+little papers, mass-meetings, and what not. If only some considerable
+portion of it could be set aside to establish a central international
+news-agency, we should make progress. We cannot fight the untruth which
+envelops us by parading our opinions. We can do it only by reporting
+the facts, and we do not deserve to win if the facts are against us.
+
+The country is spotted with benevolent foundations of one kind or
+another, many of them doing nothing but pay the upkeep of fine
+buildings and sinecures. Organized labor spends large sums of money on
+politics and strikes which fail because it is impossible to secure a
+genuine hearing in public opinion. Could there be a pooling of money
+for a news-agency? Not, I imagine, if its object were to further a
+cause. But suppose the plan were for a news-service in which editorial
+matter was rigorously excluded, and the work was done by men who had
+already won the confidence of the public by their independence? Then,
+perhaps.
+
+At any rate, our salvation lies in two things: ultimately, in the
+infusion of the news-structure by men with a new training and outlook;
+immediately, in the concentration of the independent forces against
+the complacency and bad service of the routineers. We shall advance
+when we have learned humility; when we have learned to seek the truth,
+to reveal it and publish it; when we care more for that than for the
+privilege of arguing about ideas in a fog of uncertainty.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77035 ***