Between Judge Gary's assertion that the
unions will destroy American institutions, and Mr. Gomper's assertion
that they are agencies of the rights of man, the choice has, in large
measure, to be governed by the will to believe.
The task of deflating these controversies, and reducing them to a
point where they can be reported as news, is not a task which the
reporter can perform. It is possible and necessary for journalists to
bring home to people the uncertain character of the truth on which
their opinions are founded, and by criticism and agitation to prod
social science into making more usable formulations of social facts,
and to prod statesmen into establishing more visible institutions. The
press, in other words, can fight for the extension of reportable
truth. But as social truth is organized to-day, the press is not
constituted to furnish from one edition to the next the amount of
knowledge which the democratic theory of public opinion demands. This
is not due to the Brass Check, as the quality of news in radical
papers shows, but to the fact that the press deals with a society in
which the governing forces are so imperfectly recorded. The theory
that the press can itself record those forces is false. It can
normally record only what has been recorded for it by the working of
institutions. Everything else is argument and opinion, and fluctuates
with the vicissitudes, the self-consciousness, and the courage of the
human mind.
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