The news is an account of the overt phases that are interesting,
and the pressure on the newspaper to adhere to this routine comes from
many sides. It comes from the economy of noting only the stereotyped
phase of a situation. It comes from the difficulty of finding
journalists who can see what they have not learned to see. It comes
from the almost unavoidable difficulty of finding sufficient space in
which even the best journalist can make plausible an unconventional
view. It comes from the economic necessity of interesting the reader
quickly, and the economic risk involved in not interesting him at all,
or of offending him by unexpected news insufficiently or clumsily
described. All these difficulties combined make for uncertainty in the
editor when there are dangerous issues at stake, and cause him
naturally to prefer the indisputable fact and a treatment more readily
adapted to the reader's interest. The indisputable fact and the easy
interest, are the strike itself and the reader's inconvenience.
All the subtler and deeper truths are in the present organization of
industry very unreliable truths. They involve judgments about
standards of living, productivity, human rights that are endlessly
debatable in the absence of exact record and quantitative analysis.
And as long as these do not exist in industry, the run of news about
it will tend, as Emerson said, quoting from Isocrates, "to make of
moles mountains, and of mountains moles.
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