We shall
prove that on this point the newspaper lied. We shall prove that on
that point Mr. Sinclair's account lied. We shall demonstrate that Mr.
Sinclair lied when he said that somebody lied, and that somebody lied
when he said Mr. Sinclair lied. We shall vent our feelings, but we
shall vent them into air.
The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and
truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished.
[Footnote: When I wrote _Liberty and the News,_ I did not
understand this distinction clearly enough to state it, but _cf._
p. 89 ff.] The function of news is to signalize an event, the function
of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into
relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men
can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take
recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body
of news coincide. That is a comparatively small part of the whole
field of human interest. In this sector, and only in this sector, the
tests of the news are sufficiently exact to make the charges of
perversion or suppression more than a partisan judgment. There is no
defense, no extenuation, no excuse whatever, for stating six times
that Lenin is dead, when the only information the paper possesses is a
report that he is dead from a source repeatedly shown to be
unreliable.
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