Somebody has said
quite aptly that the newspaper editor has to be re-elected every day.
This casual and one-sided relationship between readers and press is an
anomaly of our civilization. There is nothing else quite like it, and
it is, therefore, hard to compare the press with any other business or
institution. It is not a business pure and simple, partly because the
product is regularly sold below cost, but chiefly because the
community applies one ethical measure to the press and another to
trade or manufacture. Ethically a newspaper is judged as if it were a
church or a school. But if you try to compare it with these you fail;
the taxpayer pays for the public school, the private school is endowed
or supported by tuition fees, there are subsidies and collections for
the church. You cannot compare journalism with law, medicine or
engineering, for in every one of these professions the consumer pays
for the service. A free press, if you judge by the attitude of the
readers, means newspapers that are virtually given away.
Yet the critics of the press are merely voicing the moral standards of
the community, when they expect such an institution to live on the
same plane as that on which the school, the church, and the
disinterested professions are supposed to live. This illustrates again
the concave character of democracy. No need for artificially acquired
information is felt to exist.
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