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Title: Liberty and the news
Author: Walter Lippmann
Release date: October 12, 2025 [eBook #77035]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920
Credits: Sean/IB@DP
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIBERTY AND THE NEWS ***
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.
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