In the first instance, therefore, the news is not a mirror of social
conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself. The
news does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the ground, but
it may tell you when the first sprout breaks through the surface. It
may even tell you what somebody says is happening to the seed under
ground. It may tell you that the sprout did not come up at the time it
was expected. The more points, then, at which any happening can be
fixed, objectified, measured, named, the more points there are at
which news can occur.
So, if some day a legislature, having exhausted all other ways of
improving mankind, should forbid the scoring of baseball games, it
might still be possible to play some sort of game in which the umpire
decided according to his own sense of fair play how long the game
should last, when each team should go to bat, and who should be
regarded as the winner. If that game were reported in the newspapers
it would consist of a record of the umpire's decisions, plus the
reporter's impression of the hoots and cheers of the crowd, plus at
best a vague account of how certain men, who had no specified position
on the field moved around for a few hours on an unmarked piece of sod.
The more you try to imagine the logic of so absurd a predicament, the
more clear it becomes that for the purposes of newsgathering, (let
alone the purposes of playing the game) it is impossible to do much
without an apparatus and rules for naming, scoring, recording.
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