If the press is not so universally wicked, nor so deeply conspiring,
as Mr. Sinclair would have us believe, it is very much more frail than
the democratic theory has as yet admitted. It is too frail to carry
the whole burden of popular sovereignty, to supply spontaneously the
truth which democrats hoped was inborn. And when we expect it to
supply such a body of truth we employ a misleading standard of
judgment. We misunderstand the limited nature of news, the illimitable
complexity of society; we overestimate our own endurance, public
spirit, and all-round competence. We suppose an appetite for
uninteresting truths which is not discovered by any honest analysis of
our own tastes.
If the newspapers, then, are to be charged with the duty of
translating the whole public life of mankind, so that every adult can
arrive at an opinion on every moot topic, they fail, they are bound to
fail, in any future one can conceive they will continue to fail. It is
not possible to assume that a world, carried on by division of labor
and distribution of authority, can be governed by universal opinions
in the whole population. Unconsciously the theory sets up the single
reader as theoretically omnicompetent, and puts upon the press the
burden of accomplishing whatever representative government, industrial
organization, and diplomacy have failed to accomplish. Acting upon
everybody for thirty minutes in twenty-four hours, the press is asked
to create a mystical force called Public Opinion that will take up the
slack in public institutions.
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