But if you
are diagnosing American journalism you cannot ignore it. If what you
care about is "the fair body of truth," you do not commit the gross
logical error of assembling all the instances of unfairness and lying
you can find in one set of newspapers, ignore all the instances you
could easily find in another set, and then assign as the cause of the
lying, the one supposedly common characteristic of the press to which
you have confined your investigation. If you are going to blame
"capitalism" for the faults of the press, you are compelled to prove
that those faults do not exist except where capitalism controls. That
Mr. Sinclair cannot do this, is shown by the fact that while in his
diagnosis he traces everything to capitalism, in his prescription he
ignores both capitalism and anti-capitalism.
One would have supposed that the inability to take any non-capitalist
paper as a model of truthfulness and competence would have caused Mr.
Sinclair, and those who agree with him, to look somewhat more
critically at their assumptions. They would have asked themselves, for
example, where is the fair body of truth, that Big Business
prostitutes, but anti-Big Business does not seem to obtain? For that
question leads, I believe, to the heart of the matter, to the question
of what is news.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE NATURE OF NEWS
1
ALL the reporters in the world working all the hours of the day could
not witness all the happenings in the world.
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