The press has often mistakenly pretended
that it could do just that. It has at great moral cost to itself,
encouraged a democracy, still bound to its original premises, to
expect newspapers to supply spontaneously for every organ of
government, for every social problem, the machinery of information
which these do not normally supply themselves. Institutions, having
failed to furnish themselves with instruments of knowledge, have
become a bundle of "problems," which the population as a whole,
reading the press as a whole, is supposed to solve.
The press, in other words, has come to be regarded as an organ of
direct democracy, charged on a much wider scale, and from day to day,
with the function often attributed to the initiative, referendum, and
recall. The Court of Public Opinion, open day and night, is to lay
down the law for everything all the time. It is not workable. And when
you consider the nature of news, it is not even thinkable. For the
news, as we have seen, is precise in proportion to the precision with
which the event is recorded. Unless the event is capable of being
named, measured, given shape, made specific, it either fails to take
on the character of news, or it is subject to the accidents and
prejudices of observation.
Therefore, on the whole, the quality of the news about modern society
is an index of its social organization. The better the institutions,
the more all interests concerned are formally represented, the more
issues are disentangled, the more objective criteria are introduced,
the more perfectly an affair can be presented as news.
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