Liberty and the News

1. JOURNALISM AND THE HIGHER LAW

Volume 1, Number 1, of the first American newspaper was pub-

lished in Boston on September 25, 1690. It was called Publick Occur-

rences. The second issue did not appear because the Governor and

Council suppressed it. They found that Benjamin Harris, the editor,

had printed “reflections of a very high nature.”* Even to-day some

of his reflections seem very high indeed. In his prospectus he had

written:

“That something may be done toward the Curing, or at least the

Charming of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us, wherefore

nothing shall be entered, but what we have reason to believe is true,

repairing to the best fountains for our Information. And when there

appears any material mistake in anything that is collected, it shall be

corrected in the next. Moreover, the Publisher of these Occurrences is

willing to engage, that whereas, there are many False Reports, mali-

ciously made, and spread among us, if any well-minded person will

be at the pains to trace any such false Report, so far as to find out and

Convict the First Raiser of it, he will in this Paper (unless just Advice

be given to the contrary) expose the Name of such Person, as A mali-

cious Raiser of a false Report. It is suppos’d that none will dislike this

Proposal, but such as intend to be guilty of so villainous a Crime.”

Everywhere to-day men are conscious that somehow they must

deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school

had prepared them to understand. Increasingly they know that they

cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily

available. Increasingly they are baffled because the facts are not avail-

able; and they are wondering whether government by consent can

survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated

private enterprise. For in an exact sense the present crisis of western

democracy is a crisis in journalism.

I do not agree with those who think that the sole cause is corrup-

tion. There is plenty of corruption, to be sure, moneyed control, caste

pressure, financial and social bribery, ribbons, dinner parties, clubs,

petty politics. The speculators in Russian rubles who lied on the

Paris Bourse about the capture of Petrograd are not the only example

of their species. And yet corruption does not explain the condition of

modern journalism.

Mr. Franklin P. Adams wrote recently: “Now there is much pettiness—

and almost incredible stupidity and ignorance—in the so-called free

press; but it is the pettiness, etc., common to the so-called human

race a pettiness found in musicians, steamfitters, landlords, poets,

and waiters. And when Miss Lowell [who had made the usual aris-

tocratic complaint] speaks of the incurable desire in all American

newspapers to make fun of everything in season and out, we quar-

rel again. There is an incurable desire in American newspapers to

take things much more seriously than they deserve. Does Miss Low-

ell read the ponderous news from Washington? Does she read the

society news? Does she, we wonder, read the newspapers?”

Mr. Adams does read them, and when he writes that the newspa-

pers take things much more seriously than they deserve, he has, as

the mayor’s wife remarked to the queen, said a mouthful. Since the

war, especially, editors have come to believe that their highest duty

is not to report but to instruct, not to print news but to save civiliza-

tion, not to publish what Benjamin Harris calls “the Circumstances

of Publique Affairs, both abroad and at home,” but to keep the na-

tion on the straight and narrow path. Like the Kings of England, they

have elected themselves Defenders of the Faith. “For five years,” says

Mr. Cobb of the New York World, “there has been no free play of pub-

lic opinion in the world. Confronted by the inexorable necessities of

war, governments conscripted public opinion.... They goose-stepped

it. They taught it to stand at attention and salute. ... It sometimes

seems that after the armistice was signed, millions of Americans

must have taken a vow that they would never again do any thinking

for themselves. They were willing to die for their country, but not

willing to think for it.” That minority, which is proudly prepared to

think for it, and not only prepared, but cocksure that it alone knows

how to think for it, has adopted the theory that the public should

know what is good for it.

The work of reporters has thus become confused with the work of

preachers, revivalists, prophets and agitators. The current theory of

American newspaperdom is that an abstraction like the truth and a

grace like fairness must be sacrificed whenever anyone thinks the ne-

cessities of civilization require the sacrifice. To Archbishop Whately’s

dictum that it matters greatly whether you put truth in the first place

or the second, the candid expounder of modern journalism would re-

ply that he put truth second to what he conceived to be the national

interest. Judged simply by their product, men like Mr. Ochs or Vis-

count Northcliffe believe that their respective nations will perish and

civilization decay unless their idea of what is patriotic is permitted to

temper the curiosity of their readers.

They believe that edification is more important than veracity. They

believe it profoundly, violently, relentlessly. They preen themselves

upon it. To patriotism, as they define it from day to day, all other

considerations must yield. That is their pride. And yet what is this

but one more among myriad examples of the doctrine that the end

justifies the means. A more insidiously misleading rule of conduct

was, I believe, never devised among men. It was a plausible rule as

long as men believed that an omniscient and benevolent Providence

taught them what end to seek. But now that men are critically aware

of how their purposes are special to their age, their locality, their

interests, and their limited knowledge, it is blazing arrogance to

sacrifice hard-won standards of credibility to some special purpose.

It is nothing but the doctrine that I want what I want when I want it.

Its monuments are the Inquisition and the invasion of Belgium. It is

the reason given for almost every act of unreason, the law invoked

whenever lawlessness justifies itself. At bottom it is nothing but the

anarchical nature of man imperiously hacking its way through.

Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited

from high places, the most immoral act the immorality of a govern-

ment, so the most destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propa-

ganda by those whose profession it is to report the news. The news

columns are common carriers. When those who control them arro-

gate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences

what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unwork-

able. Public opinion is blockaded. For when a people can no longer

confidently repair ‘to the best fountains for their information,’ then

anyone’s guess and anyone’s rumor, each man’s hope and each man’s

whim becomes the basis of government. All that the sharpest crit-

ics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of

trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, cor-

ruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster, must come to any

people which is denied an assured access to the facts. No one can

manage anything on pap. Neither can a people.

Statesmen may devise policies; they will end in futility, as so many

have recently ended, if the propagandists and censors can put a

painted screen where there should be a window to the world. Few

episodes in recent history are more poignant than that of the British

Prime Minister, sitting at the breakfast table with that morning’s

paper before him protesting that he cannot do the sensible thing

in regard to Russia because a powerful newspaper proprietor has

drugged the public. That incident is a photograph of the supreme

danger which confronts popular government. All other dangers are

contingent upon it, for the news is the chief source of the opinion

by which government now proceeds. So long as there is interposed

between the ordinary citizen and the facts a news organization de-

termining by entirely private and unexamined standards, no matter

how lofty, what he shall know, and hence what he shall believe, no

one will be able to say that the substance of democratic government

is secure. The theory of our constitution, says Mr. Justice Holmes, is

that truth is the only ground upon which men’s wishes safely can be

carried out.? In so far as those who purvey the news make of their

own beliefs a higher law than truth, they are attacking the founda-

tions of our constitutional system. There can be no higher law in

journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.

That I have few illusions as to the difficulty of truthful reporting

anyone can see who reads these pages. If truthfulness were simply a

matter of sincerity the future would be rather simple. But the modern

news problem is not solely a question of the newspaperman’s morals.

It is, as I have tried to show in what follows, the intricate result of a

civilization too extensive for any man’s personal observation. As the

problem is manifold, so must be the remedy. There is no panacea.

But however puzzling the matter may be, there are some things that

anyone may assert about it, and assert without fear of contradiction.

They are that there is a problem of the news which is of absolutely

basic importance to the survival of popular government, and that the

importance of that problem is not vividly realized nor sufficiently

considered.

In a few generations it will seem ludicrous to historians that a

people professing government by the will of the people should have

made no serious effort to guarantee the news without which a gov-

erning opinion cannot exist. “Is it possible,” they will ask, “that at

the beginning of the Twentieth Century nations calling themselves

democracies were content to act on what happened to drift across

their doorsteps; that apart from a few sporadic exposures and out-

cries they made no plans to bring these common carriers under social

control; that they provided no genuine training schools for the men

upon whose sagacity they were dependent; above all that their po-

litical scientists went on year after year writing and lecturing about

government without producing one, one single, significant study of

the process of public opinion?” And then they will recall the cen-

turies in which the Church enjoyed immunity from criticism, and

perhaps they will insist that the news structure of secular society was

not seriously examined for analogous reasons.

When they search into the personal records they will find that

among journalists, as among the clergy, institutionalism had induced

the usual prudence. I have made no criticism in this book which is

not the shoptalk of reporters and editors. But only rarely do news-

papermen take the general public into their confidence. They will

have to sooner or later. It is not enough for them to struggle against

great odds, as many of them are doing, wearing out their souls to do

a particular assignment well. The philosophy of the work itself needs

to be discussed; the news about the news needs to be told. For the

news about the government of the news structure touches the center

of all modern government.

They need not be much concerned if leathery-minded individuals

ask What is Truth of all who plead for the effort of truth in modern

journalism. Jesting Pilate asked the same question, and he also would

not stay for an answer. No doubt an organon of news reporting must

wait upon the development of psychology and political science. But

resistance to the inertias of the profession, heresy to the institution,

and the willingness to be fired rather than write what you do not

believe, these wait on nothing but personal courage. And without

the assistance which they will bring from within the profession itself,

democracy through it will deal with the problem somehow, will

deal with it badly.

The essays which follow are an attempt to describe the character of

the problem, and to indicate headings under which it may be found

useful to look for remedies.

2. WHAT MODERN LIBERTY MEANS

From our recent experience it is clear that the traditional liberties of

speech and opinion rest on no solid foundation. At a time when

the world needs above all other things the activity of generous imag-

inations and the creative leadership of planning and inventive minds,

our thinking is shriveled with panic. Time and energy that should

go to building and restoring are instead consumed in warding off

the pin-pricks of prejudice and fighting a guerilla war against mis-

understanding and intolerance. For suppression is felt, not simply

by the scattered individuals who are actually suppressed. It reaches

back into the steadiest minds, creating tension everywhere; and the

tension of fear produces sterility. Men cease to say what they think;

and when they cease to say it, they soon cease to think it. They think

in reference to their critics and not in reference to the facts. For when

thought becomes socially hazardous, men spend more time wonder-

ing about the hazard than they do in cultivating their thought. Yet

nothing is more certain than that mere bold resistance will not per-

manently liberate men’s minds. The problem is not only greater than

that, but different, and the time is ripe for reconsideration. We have

learned that many of the hard-won rights of man are utterly insecure.

It may be that we cannot make them secure simply by imitating the

earlier champions of liberty.

Something important about the human character was exposed

by Plato when, with the spectacle of Socrates’s death before him, he

founded Utopia on a censorship stricter than any which exists on

this heavily censored planet. His intolerance seems strange. But it

is really the logical expression of an impulse that most of us have

not the candor to recognize. It was the service of Plato to formulate

the dispositions of men in the shape of ideals, and the surest things

we can learn from him are not what we ought to do, but what we

are inclined to do. We are peculiarly inclined to suppress whatever

impugns the security of that to which we have given our allegiance.

If our loyalty is turned to what exists, intolerance begins at its fron-

tiers; if it is turned, as Plato’s was, to Utopia, we shall find Utopia

defended with intolerance.

There are, so far as I can discover, no absolutists of liberty; I can

recall no doctrine of liberty, which, under the acid test, does not

become contingent upon some other ideal. The goal is never liberty,

but liberty for something or other. For liberty is a condition under

which activity takes place, and men’s interests attach themselves

primarily to their activities and what is necessary to fulfill them, not

to the abstract requirements of any activity that might be conceived.

And yet controversialists rarely take this into account. The battle

is fought with banners on which are inscribed absolute and univer-

sal ideals. They are not absolute and universal in fact. No man has

ever thought out an absolute or a universal ideal in politics, for the

simple reason that nobody knows enough, or can know enough, to

do it. But we all use absolutes, because an ideal which seems to ex-

ist apart from time, space, and circumstance has a prestige that no

candid avowal of special purpose can ever have. Looked at from one

point of view universals are part of the fighting apparatus in men.

What they desire enormously they easily come to call God’s will, or

their nation’s purpose. Looked at genetically, these idealizations are

probably born in that spiritual reverie where all men live most of the

time. In reverie there is neither time, space, nor particular reference,

and hope is omnipotent. This omnipotence, which is denied to them

in action, nevertheless illuminates activity with a sense of utter and

irresistible value.

The classic doctrine of liberty consists of absolutes. It consists of

them except at the critical points where the author has come into

contact with objective difficulties. Then he introduces into the argu-

ment, somewhat furtively, a reservation which liquidates its universal

meaning and reduces the exalted plea for liberty in general to a spe-

cial argument for the success of a special purpose.

There are at the present time, for instance, no more fervent cham-

pions of liberty than the western sympathizers with the Russian So-

viet government. Why is it that they are indignant when Mr. Burleson

suppresses a newspaper and complacent when Lenin does? And, vice

versa, why is it that the anti-Bolshevist forces in the world are in favor

of restricting constitutional liberty as a preliminary to establishing

genuine liberty in Russia? Clearly the argument about liberty has lit-

tle actual relation to the existence of it. It is the purpose of the social

conflict, not the freedom of opinion, that lies close to the heart of the

partisans. The word liberty is a weapon and an advertisement, but

certainly not an ideal which transcends all special aims.

If there were any man who believed in liberty apart from partic-

ular purposes, that man would be a hermit contemplating all exis-

tence with a hopeful and neutral eye. For him, in the last analysis,

there could be nothing worth resisting, nothing particularly worth

attaining, nothing particularly worth defending, not even the right

of hermits to contemplate existence with a cold and neutral eye. He

would be loyal simply to the possibilities of the human spirit, even

to those possibilities which most seriously impair its variety and its

health. No such man has yet counted much in the history of politics.

For what every theorist of liberty has meant is that certain types of

behavior and classes of opinion hitherto regulated should be some-

what differently regulated in the future. What each seems to say is

that opinion and action should be free; that liberty is the highest and

most sacred interest of life. But somewhere each of them inserts a

weasel clause to the effect that “of course” the freedom granted shall

not be employed too destructively. It is this clause which checks exu-

berance and reminds us that, in spite of appearances, we are listening

to finite men pleading a special cause.

Among the English classics none are more representative than

Milton’s Areopagitica and the essay On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. Of

living men Mr. Bertrand Russell is perhaps the most outstanding ad-

vocate of liberty. The three together are a formidable set of witnesses.

Yet nothing is easier than to draw texts from each which can be cited

either as an argument for absolute liberty or as an excuse for as much

repression as seems desirable at the moment. Says Milton:

Yet if all cannot be of one mind, as who looks they should be? this

doubtles is more wholsome, more prudent, and more Christian that

many be tolerated, rather than all compell’d.

So much for the generalization. Now for the qualification which

follows immediately upon it.

I mean not tolerated Popery, and open superstition, which as it extir-

pats all religions and civill supremacies, so itself should be extirpat,

provided first that all charitable and compassionat means be used to

win and regain the weak and misled: that also which is impious or evil

absolutely either against faith or maners no law can possibly permit,

that intends not to unlaw it self: but those neighboring differences,

or rather indifferences, are what I speak of, whether in some point of

doctrine or of discipline, which though they may be many, yet need not

interrupt the unity of spirit, if we could but find among us the bond of

peace.

With this as a text one could set up an inquisition. Yet it occurs in

the noblest plea for liberty that exists in the English language. The

critical point in Milton’s thought is revealed by the word “indiffer-

ences.” The area of opinion which he wished to free comprised the

“neighboring differences” of certain Protestant sects, and only these

where they were truly ineffective in manners and morals. Milton, in

short, had come to the conclusion that certain conflicts of doctrine

were sufficiently insignificant to be tolerated. The conclusion de-

pended far less upon his notion of the value of liberty than upon his

conception of God and human nature and the England of his time.

He urged indifference to things that were becoming indifferent.

If we substitute the word indifference for the word liberty, we shall

come much closer to the real intention that lies behind the classic ar-

gument. Liberty is to be permitted where differences are of no great

moment. It is this definition which has generally guided practice.

In times when men feel themselves secure, heresy is cultivated as

the spice of life. During a war liberty disappears as the community

feels itself menaced. When revolution seems to be contagious, heresy-

hunting is a respectable occupation. In other words, when men are

not afraid, they are not afraid of ideas; when they are much afraid,

they are afraid of anything that seems, or can even be made to ap-

pear, seditious. That is why nine-tenths of the effort to live and let

live consists in proving that the thing we wish to have tolerated is

really a matter of indifference.

In Mill this truth reveals itself still more clearly. Though his argu-

ment is surer and completer than Milton’s, the qualification is also

surer and completer.

Such being the reasons which make it imperative that human beings

should be free to form opinions, and to express their opinions with-

out reserve; and such the baneful consequences to the intellectual

and through that to the moral nature of man, unless this liberty is ei-

ther conceded or asserted in spite of prohibition, let us next examine

whether the same reasons do not require that men should be free to

act upon their opinions, to carry these out in their lives, without hin-

drance, either moral or physical, from their fellow men, so long as it

is at their own risk and peril. This last proviso is of course indispensable.

No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the con-

trary, even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which

they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive

instigation to some mischievous act.

“At their own risk and peril.” In other words, at the risk of eternal

damnation. The premise from which Mill argued was that many

opinions then under the ban of society were of no interest to society,

and ought therefore not to be interfered with. The orthodoxy with

which he was at war was chiefly theocratic. It assumed that a man’s

opinions on cosmic affairs might endanger his personal salvation

and make him a dangerous member of society. Mill did not believe

in the theological view, did not fear damnation, and was convinced

that morality did not depend upon the religious sanction. In fact,

he was convinced that a more reasoned morality could be formed

by laying aside theological assumptions. “But no one pretends that

actions should be as free as opinions.” The plain truth is that Mill did

not believe that much action would result from the toleration of those

opinions in which he was most interested.

Political heresy occupied the fringe of his attention, and he uttered

only the most casual comments. So incidental are they, so little do

they impinge on his mind, that the arguments of this staunch apos-

tle of liberty can be used honestly, and in fact are used, to justify

the bulk of the suppressions which have recently occurred. “Even

opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they

are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive in-

stigation to some mischievious act.” Clearly there is no escape here

for Debs or Haywood or obstructors of Liberty Loans. The argu-

ment used is exactly the one employed in sustaining the conviction of

Debs.

In corroboration Mill’s single concrete instance may be cited: “An

opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private

property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated

through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered

orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer,

or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a plac-

ard.”

Clearly Mill’s theory of liberty wore a different complexion when

he considered opinions which might directly affect social order.

Where the stimulus of opinion upon action was effective he could

say with entire complacency, “The liberty of the individual must be

thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other peo-

ple.” Because Mill believed this, it is entirely just to infer that the

distinction drawn between a speech or placard and publication in the

press would soon have broken down for Mill had he lived at a time

when the press really circulated and the art of type-display had made

a newspaper strangely like a placard.

On first acquaintance no man would seem to go further than

Mr. Bertrand Russell in loyalty to what he calls “the unfettered de-

velopment of all the instincts that build up life and fill it with mental

delights.” He calls these instincts “creative”; and against them he sets

off the “possessive impulses.” These, he says, should be restricted by

“a public authority, a repository of practically irresistible force whose

function should be primarily to repress the private use of force.”

Where Milton said no “tolerated Popery,” Mr. Russell says, no toler-

ated “possessive impulses.” Surely he is open to the criticism that,

like every authoritarian who has preceded him, he is interested in the

unfettered development of only that which seems good to him. Those

who think that “enlightened selfishness” produces social harmony

will tolerate more of the possessive impulses, and will be inclined to

put certain of Mr. Russell’s creative impulses under lock and key.

The moral is, not that Milton, Mill, and Bertrand Russell are in-

consistent, or that liberty is to be obtained by arguing for it without

qualifications. The impulse to what we call liberty is as strong in

these three men as it is ever likely to be in our society. The moral is

of another kind. It is that the traditional core of liberty, namely, the

notion of indifference, is too feeble and unreal a doctrine to protect

the purpose of liberty, which is the furnishing of a healthy environ-

ment in which human judgment and inquiry can most successfully

organize human life. Too feeble, because in time of stress nothing

is easier than to insist, and by insistence to convince, that tolerated

indifference is no longer tolerable because it has ceased to be indiffer-

ent.

It is clear that in a society where public opinion has become deci-

sive, nothing that counts in the formation of it can really be a matter

of indifference. When I say “can be,” I am speaking literally. What

men believed about the constitution of heaven became a matter of

indifference when heaven disappeared in metaphysics; but what

they believe about property, government, conscription, taxation, the

origins of the late war, or the origins of the Franco-Prussian War,

or the distribution of Latin culture in the vicinity of copper mines,

constitutes the difference between life and death, prosperity and mis-

fortune, and it will never on this earth be tolerated as indifferent, or

not interfered with, no matter how many noble arguments are made

for liberty, or how many martyrs give their lives for it. If widespread

tolerance of opposing views is to be achieved in modern society, it

will not be simply by fighting the Debs’ cases through the courts, and

certainly not by threatening to upset those courts if they do not yield

to the agitation. The task is fundamentally of another order, requiring

other methods and other theories.

The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions

has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understand-

ing. What he knows of events that matter enormously to him, the

purposes of governments, the aspirations of peoples, the struggle of

classes, he knows at second, third, or fourth hand. He cannot go and

see for himself. Even the things that are near to him have become

too involved for his judgment. I know of no man, even among those

who devote all of their time to watching public affairs, who can even

pretend to keep track, at the same time, of his city government, his

state government, Congress, the departments, the industrial situation,

and the rest of the world. What men who make the study of politics

a vocation cannot do, the man who has an hour a day for newspapers

and talk cannot possibly hope to do. He must seize catchwords and

headlines or nothing.

This vast elaboration of the subject-matter of politics is the root

of the whole problem. News comes from a distance; it comes helter-

skelter, in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not

easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired peo-

ple who must take what is given to them. Any lawyer with a sense

of evidence knows how unreliable such information must necessarily

be.

The taking of testimony in a trial is hedged about with a thou-

sand precautions derived from long experience of the fallibility of

the witness and the prejudices of the jury. We call this, and rightly, a

fundamental phase of human liberty. But in public affairs the stake is

infinitely greater. It involves the lives of millions, and the fortune of

everybody. The jury is the whole community, not even the qualified

voters alone. The jury is everybody who creates public sentiment—

chattering gossips, unscrupulous liars, congenital liars, feeble-minded

people, prostitute minds, corrupting agents. To this jury any testi-

mony is submitted, is submitted in any form, by any anonymous

person, with no test of reliability, no test of credibility, and no penalty

for perjury. If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor’s

cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers in a matter involv-

ing war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if I choose the right

series of lies, be entirely irresponsible. Nobody will punish me if I lie

about Japan, for example. I can announce that every Japanese valet

is a reservist, and every Japanese art store a mobilization center. I

am immune. And if there should be hostilities with Japan, the more

I lied the more popular I should be. If I asserted that the Japanese

secretly drank the blood of children, that Japanese women were un-

chaste, that the Japanese were really not a branch of the human race

after all, I guarantee that most of the newspapers would print it ea-

gerly, and that I could get a hearing in churches all over the country.

And all this for the simple reason that the public, when it is depen-

dent on testimony and protected by no rules of evidence, can act only

on the excitement of its pugnacities and its hopes.

The mechanism of the news-supply has developed without plan,

and there is no one point in it at which one can fix the responsibility

for truth. The fact is that the subdivision of labor is now accompa-

nied by the subdivision of the news-organization. At one end of it

is the eye-witness, at the other, the reader. Between the two is a vast,

expensive transmitting and editing apparatus. This machine works

marvelously well at times, particularly in the rapidity with which it

can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death

of a monarch, or the result of an election. But where the issue is com-

plex, as for example in the matter of the success of a policy, or the

social conditions among a foreign people,—that is to say, where the

real answer is neither yes or no, but subtle, and a matter of balanced

evidence,—the subdivision of the labor involved in the report causes

no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresenta-

tion.

Thus the number of eye-witnesses capable of honest statement

is inadequate and accidental. Yet the reporter making up his news

is dependent upon the eye-witnesses. They may be actors in the

event. Then they can hardly be expected to have perspective. Who,

for example, if he put aside his own likes and dislikes would trust

a Bolshevik’s account of what exists in Soviet Russia or an exiled

Russian prince’s story of what exists in Siberia? Sitting just across

the frontier, say in Stockholm, how is a reporter to write dependable

news when his witnesses consist of emigrés or Bolshevist agents?

At the Peace Conference, news was given out by the agents of the

conferees and the rest leaked through those who were clamoring at

the doors of the Conference. Now the reporter, if he is to earn his

living, must nurse his personal contacts with the eye-witnesses and

privileged informants. If he is openly hostile to those in authority,

he will cease to be a reporter unless there is an opposition party in

the inner circle who can feed him news. Failing that, he will know

precious little of what is going on.

Most people seem to believe that, when they meet a war corre-

spondent or a special writer from the Peace Conference, they have

seen a man who has seen the things he wrote about. Far from it. No-

body, for example, saw this war. Neither the men in the trenches nor

the commanding, general. The men saw their trenches, their billets,

sometimes they saw an enemy trench, but nobody, unless it be the

aviators, saw a battle. What the correspondents saw, occasionally,

was the terrain over which a battle had been fought; but what they

reported day by day was what they were told at press headquarters,

and of that only what they were allowed to tell.

At the Peace Conference the reporters were allowed to meet pe-

riodically the four least important members of the Commission,

men who themselves had considerable difficulty in keeping track of

things, as any reporter who was present will testify. This was supple-

mented by spasmodic personal interviews with the commissioners,

their secretaries, their secretaries’ secretaries, other newspaper men,

and confidential representatives of the President, who stood between

him and the impertinences of curiosity. This and the French press,

than which there is nothing more censored and inspired, a local En-

glish trade-journal of the expatriates, the gossip of the Crillon lobby,

the Majestic, and the other official hotels, constituted the source of

the news upon which American editors and the American people

have had to base one of the most difficult judgments of their history.

I should perhaps add that there were a few correspondents occu-

pying privileged positions with foreign governments. They wore

ribbons in their button-holes to prove it. They were in many ways

the most useful correspondents because they always revealed to the

trained reader just what it was that their governments wished Amer-

ica to believe.

The news accumulated by the reporter from his witnesses has to

be selected, if for no other reason than that the cable facilities are lim-

ited. At the cable office several varieties of censorship intervene. The

legal censorship in Europe is political as well as military, and both

words are elastic. It has been applied, not only to the substance of

the news, but to the mode of presentation, and even to the character

of the type and the position on the page. But the real censorship on

the wires is the cost of transmission. This in itself is enough to limit

any expensive competition or any significant independence. The big

Continental news agencies are subsidized. Censorship operates also

through congestion and the resultant need of a system of priority.

Congestion makes possible good and bad service, and undesirable

messages are not infrequently served badly.

When the report does reach the editor, another series of interven-

tions occurs. The editor is a man who may know all about some-

thing, but he can hardly be expected to know all about everything.

Yet he has to decide the question which is of more importance than

any other in the formation of opinions, the question where attention

is to be directed. In a newspaper the heads are the foci of attention,

the odd corners the fringe; and whether one aspect of the news or

another appears in the center or at the periphery makes all the differ-

ence in the world. The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper

office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion,

clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that

news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy.

For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the

book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only

serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every

day. Now the power to determine each day what shall seem impor-

tant and what shall be neglected is a power unlike any that has been

exercised since the Pope lost his hold on the secular mind.

The ordering is not done by one man, but by a host of men, who

are on the whole curiously unanimous in their selection and in their

emphasis. Once you know the party and social affiliations of a news-

paper, you can predict with considerable certainty the perspective in

which the news will be displayed. This perspective is by no means

altogether deliberate. Though the editor is ever so much more sophis-

ticated than all but a minority of his readers, his own sense of relative

importance is determined by rather standardized constellations of

ideas. He very soon comes to believe that his habitual emphasis is the

only possible one.

Why the editor is possessed by a particular set of ideas is a dif-

ficult question in social psychology, of which no adequate analysis

has been made. But we shall not be far wrong if we say that he deals

with the news in reference to the prevailing mores of his social group.

These mores are of course in a large measure the product of what

previous newspapers have said; and experience shows that, in order

to break out of this circle, it has been necessary at various times to

create new forms of journalism, such as the national monthly, the

critical weekly, the circular, the paid advertisements of ideas, in order

to change the emphasis which had become obsolete and habit-ridden.

Into this extremely refractory, and I think increasingly disservice-

able mechanism, there has been thrown, especially since the outbreak

of war, another monkey-wrench—propaganda. The word, of course,

covers a multitude of sins and a few virtues. The virtues can be easily

separated out, and given another name, either advertisement or ad-

vocacy. Thus, if the National Council of Belgravia wishes to publish

a magazine out of its own funds, under its own imprint, advocat-

ing the annexation of Thrums, no one will object. But if, in support

of that advocacy, it gives to the press stories that are lies about the

atrocities committed in Thrums; or, worse still, if those stories seem

to come from Geneva, or Amsterdam, not from the press-service

of the National Council of Belgravia, then Belgravia is conducting

propaganda. If, after arousing a certain amount of interest in itself,

Belgravia then invites a carefully selected correspondent, or perhaps

a labor leader, to its capital, puts him up at the best hotel, rides him

around in limousines, fawns on him at banquets, lunches with him

very confidentially, and then puts him through a conducted tour so

that he shall see just what will create the desired impression, then

again Belgravia is conducting propaganda. Or if Belgravia happens

to possess the greatest trombone-player in the world, and if she sends

him over to charm the wives of influential husbands, Belgravia is,

in a less objectionable way, perhaps, committing propaganda, and

making fools of the husbands.

Now, the plain fact is that out of the troubled areas of the world

the public receives practically nothing that is not propaganda. Lenin

and his enemies control all the news there is of Russia, and no court

of law would accept any of the testimony as valid in a suit to deter-

mine the possession of a donkey. I am writing many months after

the Armistice. The Senate is at this moment engaged in debating the

question whether it will guarantee the frontiers of Poland; but what

we learn of Poland we learn from the Polish Government and the

Jewish Committee. Judgment on the vexed issues of Europe is simply

out of the question for the average American; and the more cocksure

he is, the more certainly is he the victim of some propaganda.

These instances are drawn from foreign affairs, but the difficulty

at home, although less flagrant, is nevertheless real. Theodore Roo-

sevelt, and Leonard Wood after him, have told us to think nationally.

It is not easy. It is easy to parrot what those people say who live in

a few big cities and who have constituted themselves the only true

and authentic voice of America. But beyond that it is difficult. I live

in New York and I have not the vaguest idea what Brooklyn is in-

terested in. It is possible, with effort, much more effort than most

people can afford to give, for me to know what a few organized bod-

ies like the Non-Partisan League, the National Security League, the

American Federation of Labor, and the Republican National Com-

mittee are up to; but what the unorganized workers, and the unorga-

nized farmers, the shopkeepers, the local bankers and boards of trade

are thinking and feeling, no one has any means of knowing, except

perhaps in a vague way at election time. To think nationally means,

at least, to take into account the major interests and needs and de-

sires of this continental population; and for that each man would

need a staff of secretaries, traveling agents, and a very expensive

press-clipping bureau.

We do not think nationally because the facts that count are not

systematically reported and presented in a form we can digest. Our

most abysmal ignorance occurs where we deal with the immigrant.

If we read his press at all, it is to discover “Bolshevism” in it and to

blacken all immigrants with suspicion. For his culture and his aspi-

rations, for his high gifts of hope and variety, we have neither eyes

nor ears. The immigrant colonies are like holes in the road which we

never notice until we trip over them. Then, because we have no cur-

rent information and no background of facts, we are, of course, the

undiscriminating objects of any agitator who chooses to rant against

“foreigners.”

Now, men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their

environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda.

The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish

only where the audience is deprived of independent access to in-

formation. But where all news comes at second-hand, where all the

testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond

simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the re-

alities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors,

and guesses. The whole reference of thought comes to be what some-

body asserts, not what actually is. Men ask, not whether such and

such a thing occurred in Russia, but whether Mr. Raymond Robins

is at heart more friendly to the Bolsheviki than Mr. Jerome Land-

field. And so, since they are deprived of any trustworthy means of

knowing what is really going on, since everything is on the plane of

assertion and propaganda, they believe whatever fits most comfort-

ably with their prepossessions.

That this breakdown of the means of public knowledge should

occur at a time of immense change is a compounding of the difficulty.

From bewilderment to panic is a short step, as everyone knows who

has watched a crowd when danger threatens. At the present time a

nation easily acts like a crowd. Under the influence of headlines and

panicky print, the contagion of unreason can easily spread through a

settled community. For when the comparatively recent and unstable

nervous organization which makes us capable of responding to real-

ity as it is, and not as we should wish it, is baffled over a continuing

period of time, the more primitive but much stronger instincts are let

loose.

War and Revolution, both of them founded on censorship and pro-

paganda, are the supreme destroyers of realistic thinking, because the

excess of danger and the fearful overstimulation of passion unsettle

disciplined behavior. Both breed fanatics of all kinds, men who, in

the words of Mr. Santayana, have redoubled their effort when they

have forgotten their aim. The effort itself has become the aim. Men

live in their effort, and for a time find great exaltation. They seek

stimulation of their effort rather than direction of it. That is why

both in war and revolution there seems to operate a kind of Gre-

sham’s Law of the emotions, in which leadership passes by a swift

degradation from a Mirabeau to a Robespierre; and in war, from a

high-minded statesmanship to the depths of virulent, hating jingo-

ism.

The cardinal fact always is the loss of contact with objective infor-

mation. Public as well as private reason depends upon it. Not what

somebody says, not what somebody wishes were true, but what is so

beyond all our opining, constitutes the touchstone of our sanity. And

a society which lives at second-hand will commit incredible follies

and countenance inconceivable brutalities if that contact is intermit-

tent and untrustworthy. Demagoguery is a parasite that flourishes

where discrimination fails, and only those who are at grips with

things themselves are impervious to it. For, in the last analysis, the

demagogue, whether of the Right or the Left, is, consciously or un-

consciously an undetected liar.

Many students of politics have concluded that, because public

opinion was unstable, the remedy lay in making government as inde-

pendent of it as possible. The theorists of representative government

have argued persistently from this premise against the believers in

direct legislation. But it appears now that, while they have been mak-

ing their case against direct legislation, rather successfully it seems

to me, they have failed sufficiently to notice the increasing malady of

representative government.

Parliamentary action is becoming notoriously ineffective. In Amer-

ica certainly the concentration of power in the Executive is out of

all proportion either to the intentions of the Fathers or to the ortho-

dox theory of representative government. The cause is fairly clear.

Congress is an assemblage of men selected for local reasons from

districts. It brings to Washington a more or less accurate sense of the

superficial desires of its constituency. In Washington it is supposed to

think nationally and internationally. But for that task its equipment

and its sources of information are hardly better than that of any other

reader of the newspaper. Except for its spasmodic investigating com-

mittees, Congress has no particular way of informing itself. But the

Executive has. The Executive is an elaborate hierarchy reaching to

every part of the nation and to all parts of the world. It has an inde-

pendent machinery, fallible and not too truthworthy, of course, but

nevertheless a machinery of intelligence. It can be informed and it

can act, whereas Congress is not informed and cannot act.

Now the popular theory of representative government is that

the representatives have the information and therefore create the

policy which the executive administers. The more subtle theory is

that the executive initiates the policy which the legislature corrects

in accordance with popular wisdom. But when the legislature is

haphazardly informed, this amounts to very little, and the people

themselves prefer to trust the executive which knows, rather than

the Congress which is vainly trying to know. The result has been

the development of a kind of government which has been harshly

described as plébiscite autocracy, or government by newspapers.

Decisions in the modern state tend to be made by the interaction,

not of Congress and the executive, but of public opinion and the

executive.

Public opinion for this purpose finds itself collected about special

groups which act as extra-legal organs of government. There is a

labor nucleus, a farmers’ nucleus, a prohibition nucleus, a National

Security League nucleus, and so on. These groups conduct a contin-

ual electioneering campaign upon the unformed, exploitable mass

of public opinion. Being special groups, they have special sources of

information, and what they lack in the way of information is often

manufactured. These conflicting pressures beat upon the executive

departments and upon Congress, and formulate the conduct of the

government. The government itself acts in reference to these groups

far more than in reference to the district congressmen. So politics as

it is now played consists in coercing and seducing the representative

by the threat and the appeal of these unofficial groups. Sometimes

they are the allies, sometimes the enemies, of the party in power, but

more and more they are the energy of public affairs. Government

tends to operate by the impact of controlled opinion upon adminis-

tration. This shift in the locus of sovereignty has placed a premium

upon the manufacture of what is usually called consent. No wonder

that the most powerful newspaper proprietor in the English-speaking

world declined a mere government post.

No wonder, too, that the protection of the sources of its opinion

is the basic problem of democracy. Everything else depends upon it.

Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evi-

dence, without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popu-

lar decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation.

That is why I have argued that the older doctrine of liberty was mis-

leading. It did not assume a public opinion that governs. Essentially

it demanded toleration of opinions that were, as Milton said, indif-

ferent. It can guide us little in a world where opinion is sensitive and

decisive.

The axis of the controversy needs to be shifted. The attempt to

draw fine distinctions between “liberty” and “license” is no doubt

part of the day’s work, but it is fundamentally a negative part. It

consists in trying to make opinion responsible to prevailing social

standards, whereas the really important thing is to try and make

opinion increasingly responsible to the facts. There can be no liberty

for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.

Trite as the conclusion may at first seem, it has, I believe, immense

practical consequences, and may perhaps offer an escape from the

logomachy into which the contests of liberty so easily degenerate.

It may be bad to suppress a particular opinion, but the really

deadly thing is to suppress the news. In time of great insecurity,

certain opinions acting on unstable minds may cause infinite dis-

aster. Knowing that such opinions necessarily originate in slender

evidence, that they are propelled more by prejudice from the rear

than by reference to realities, it seems to me that to build the case for

liberty upon the dogma of their unlimited prerogatives is to build

it upon the poorest foundation. For, even though we grant that the

world is best served by the liberty of all opinion, the plain fact is

that men are too busy and too much concerned to fight more than

spasmodically for such liberty. When freedom of opinion is revealed

as freedom of error, illusion, and misinterpretation, it is virtually

impossible to stir up much interest in its behalf. It is the thinnest of

all abstractions and an over-refinement of mere intellectualism. But

people, wide circles of people, are aroused when their curiosity is

baulked. The desire to know, the dislike of being deceived and made

game of, is a really powerful motive, and it is that motive that can

best be enlisted in the cause of freedom.

What, for example, was the one most general criticism of the work

of the Peace Conference? It was that the covenants were not openly

arrived at. This fact stirred Republican Senators, British Labor, the

whole gamut of parties from the Right to the Left. And in the last

analysis lack of information about the Conference was the origin of its

difficulties. Because of the secrecy endless suspicion was aroused; be-

cause of it the world seemed to be presented with a series of accom-

plished facts which it could not reject and did not wish altogether

to accept. It was lack of information which kept public opinion from

affecting the negotiations at the time when intervention would have

counted most and cost least. Publicity occurred when the covenants

were arrived at, with all the emphasis on the at. This is what the Sen-

ate objected to, and this is what alienated much more liberal opinion

than the Senate represents.

In a passage quoted previously in this essay, Milton said that dif-

ferences of opinion, “which though they may be many, yet need not

interrupt the unity of spirit, if we could but find among us the bond

of peace.” There is but one kind of unity possible in a world as di-

verse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than of aim; the unity

of the disciplined experiment. There is but one bond of peace that

is both permanent and enriching: the increasing knowledge of the

world in which experiment occurs. With a common intellectual

method and a common area of valid fact, differences may become

a form of cooperation and cease to be an irreconcilable antagonism.

That, I think, constitutes the meaning of freedom for us. We can-

not successfully define liberty, or accomplish it, by a series of permis-

sions and prohibitions. For that is to ignore the content of opinion

in favor of its form. Above all, it is an attempt to define liberty of

opinion in terms of opinion. It is a circular and sterile logic. A use-

ful definition of liberty is obtainable only by seeking the principle of

liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the pro-

cess by which men educate their response and learn to control their

environment. In this view liberty is the name we give to measures by

which we protect and increase the veracity of the information upon

which we act.

3 LIBERTY AND THE NEWS

The debates about liberty have hitherto all been attempts to de-

termine just when in the series from Right to Left the censorship

should intervene. In the preceding paper I ventured to ask whether

these attempts do not turn on a misconception of the problem. The

conclusion reached was that, in dealing with liberty of opinion, we

were dealing with a subsidiary phase of the whole matter; that, so

long as we were content to argue about the privileges and immuni-

ties of opinion, we were missing the point and trying to make bricks

without straw. We should never succeed even in fixing a standard

of tolerance for opinions, if we concentrated all our attention on the

opinions. For they are derived, not necessarily by reason, to be sure,

but somehow, from the stream of news that reaches the public, and

the protection of that stream is the critical interest in a modern state.

In going behind opinion to the information which it exploits, and in

making the validity of the news our ideal, we shall be fighting the

battle where it is really being fought. We shall be protecting for the

public interest that which all the special interests in the world are

most anxious to corrupt.

As the sources of the news are protected, as the information they

furnish becomes accessible and usable, as our capacity to read that

information is educated, the old problem of tolerance will wear a

new aspect. Many questions which seem hopelessly insoluble now

will cease to seem important enough to be worth solving. Thus the

advocates of a larger freedom always argue that true opinions will

prevail over error; their opponents always claim that you can fool

most of the people most of the time. Both statements are true, but

both are half-truths. True opinions can prevail only if the facts to

which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just

as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.

The sensible procedure in matters affecting the liberty of opin-

ion would be to ensure as impartial an investigation of the facts as

is humanly possible. But it is just this investigation that is denied

us. It is denied us, because we are dependent upon the testimony

of anonymous and untrained and prejudiced witnesses; because the

complexity of the relevant facts is beyond the scope of our hurried

understanding; and finally, because the process we call education

fails so lamentably to educate the sense of evidence or the power of

penetrating to the controlling center of a situation. The task of liberty,

therefore, falls roughly under three heads, protection of the sources

of the news, organization of the news so as to make it comprehensi-

ble, and education of human response.

We need, first, to know what can be done with the existing news-

structure, in order to correct its grosser evils. How far is it useful

to go in fixing personal responsibility for the truthfulness of news?

Much further, I am inclined to think, than we have ever gone. We

ought to know the names of the whole staff of every periodical.

While it is not necessary, or even desirable, that each article should be

signed, each article should be documented, and false documentation

should be illegal. An item of news should always state whether it is

received from one of the great news-agencies, or from a reporter, or

from a press bureau. Particular emphasis should be put on marking

news supplied by press bureaus, whether they are labeled “Geneva,”

or “Stockholm,” or “El Paso.”

One wonders next whether anything can be devised to meet that

great evil of the press, the lie which, once under way, can never be

tracked down. The more scrupulous papers will, of course, print a

retraction when they have unintentionally injured someone; but the

retraction rarely compensates the victim. The law of libel is a clumsy

and expensive instrument, and rather useless to private individuals

or weak organizations because of the gentlemen’s agreement which

obtains in the newspaper world. After all, the remedy for libel is not

money damages, but an undoing of the injury. Would it be possi-

ble then to establish courts of honor in which publishers should be

compelled to meet their accusers and, if found guilty of misrepre-

sentation, ordered to publish the correction in the particular form

and with the prominence specified by the finding of the court? I do

not know. Such courts might prove to be a great nuisance, consum-

ing time and energy and attention, and offering too free a field for

individuals with a persecution mania.

Perhaps a procedure could be devised which would eliminate

most of these inconveniences. Certainly it would be a great gain if

the accountability of publishers could be increased. They exercise

more power over the individual than is healthy, as everybody knows

who has watched the yellow press snooping at keyholes and invad-

ing the privacy of helpless men and women. Even more important

than this, is the utterly reckless power of the press in dealing with

news vitally affecting the friendship of peoples. In a Court of Honor,

possible perhaps only in Utopia, voluntary associations working for

decent relations with other peoples might hale the jingo and the sub-

tle propagandist before a tribunal, to prove the reasonable truth of

his assertion or endure the humiliation of publishing prominently a

finding against his character.

This whole subject is immensely difficult, and full of traps. It

would be well worth an intensive investigation by a group of pub-

lishers, lawyers, and students of public affairs. Because in some form

or other the next generation will attempt to bring the publishing

business under greater social control. There is everywhere an in-

creasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of

being baffled and misled; and wise publishers will not pooh-pooh

these omens. They might well note the history of prohibition, where

a failure to work out a programme of temperance brought about an

undiscriminating taboo. The regulation of the publishing business

is a subtle and elusive matter, and only by an early and sympathetic

effort to deal with great evils can the more sensible minds retain their

control. If publishers and authors themselves do not face the facts

and attempt to deal with them, some day Congress, in a fit of temper,

egged on by an outraged public opinion, will operate on the press

with an ax. For somehow the community must find a way of making

the men who publish news accept responsibility for an honest effort

not to misrepresent the facts.

But the phrase “honest effort” does not take us very far. The prob-

lem here is not different from that which we begin dimly to appre-

hend in the field of government and business administration. The

untrained amateur may mean well, but he knows not how to do well.

Why should he? What are the qualifications for being a surgeon? A

certain minimum of special training. What are the qualifications for

operating daily on the brain and heart of a nation? None. Go some

time and listen to the average run of questions asked in interviews

with Cabinet officers or anywhere else.

I remember one reporter who was detailed to the Peace Con-

ference by a leading news-agency. He came around every day for

“news.” It was a time when Central Europe seemed to be disintegrat-

ing, and great doubt existed as to whether governments would be

found with which to sign a peace. But all that this “reporter” wanted

to know was whether the German fleet, then safely interned at Scapa

Flow, was going to be sunk in the North Sea. He insisted every day

on knowing that. For him it was the German fleet or nothing. Finally,

he could endure it no longer. So he anticipated Admiral Reuther and

announced, in a dispatch to his home papers, that the fleet would be

sunk. And when I say that a million American adults learned all that

they ever learned about the Peace Conference through this reporter, I

am stating a very moderate figure.

He suggests the delicate question raised by the schools of jour-

nalism: how far can we go in turning newspaper enterprise from

a haphazard trade into a disciplined profession? Quite far, I imag-

ine, for it is altogether unthinkable that a society like ours should

remain forever dependent upon untrained accidental witnesses. It is

no answer to say that there have been in the past, and that there are

now, first-rate correspondents. Of course there are. Men like Brails-

ford, Oulahan, Gibbs, Lawrence, Swope, Strunsky, Draper, Hard,

Dillon, Lowry, Levine, Ackerman, Ray Stannard Baker, Frank Cobb,

and William Allen White, know their way about in this world. But

they are eminences on a rather flat plateau. The run of the news is

handled by men of much smaller caliber. It is handled by such men

because reporting is not a dignified profession for which men will

invest the time and cost of an education, but an underpaid, insecure,

anonymous form of drudgery, conducted on catch-as-catch-can prin-

ciples. Merely to talk about the reporter in terms of his real impor-

tance to civilization will make newspaper men laugh. Yet reporting

is a post of peculiar honor. Observation must precede every other

activity, and the public observer (that is, the reporter) is a man of

critical value. No amount of money or effort spent in fitting the right

men for this work could possibly be wasted, for the health of society

depends upon the quality of the information it receives.

Do our schools of journalism, the few we have, make this kind of

training their object, or are they trade-schools designed to fit men for

higher salaries in the existing structure? I do not presume to answer

the question, nor is the answer of great moment when we remember

how small a part these schools now play in actual journalism. But

it is important to know whether it would be worth while to endow

large numbers of schools on the model of those now existing, and

make their diplomas a necessary condition for the practice of report-

ing. It is worth considering. Against the idea lies the fact that it is

difficult to decide just what reporting is—where in the whole mass

of printed matter it begins and ends. No one would wish to set up a

closed guild of reporters and thus exclude invaluable casual report-

ing and writing. If there is anything in the idea at all, it would apply

only to the routine service of the news through large organizations.

Personally I should distrust too much ingenuity of this kind, on

the ground that, while it might correct certain evils, the general ten-

dency would be to turn the control of the news over to unenterpris-

ing stereotyped minds soaked in the traditions of a journalism always

ten years out of date. The better course is to avoid the deceptive short

cuts, and make up our minds to send out into reporting a generation

of men who will by sheer superiority, drive the incompetents out of

business. That means two things. It means a public recognition of

the dignity of such a career, so that it will cease to be the refuge of

the vaguely talented. With this increase of prestige must go a profes-

sional training in journalism in which the ideal of objective testimony

is cardinal. The cynicism of the trade needs to be abandoned, for the

true patterns of the journalistic apprentice are not the slick persons

who scoop the news, but the patient and fearless men of science who

have labored to see what the world really is. It does not matter that

the news is not susceptible of mathematical statement. In fact, just

because news is complex and slippery, good reporting requires the

exercise of the highest of the scientific virtues. They are the habits of

ascribing no more credibility to a statement than it warrants, a nice

sense of the probabilities, and a keen understanding of the quan-

titative importance of particular facts. You can judge the general

reliability of any observer most easily by the estimate he puts upon

the reliability of his own report. If you have no facts of your own

with which to check him, the best rough measurement is to wait and

see whether he is aware of any limitations in himself; whether he

knows that he saw only part of the event he describes; and whether

he has any background of knowledge against which he can set what

he thinks he has seen.

This kind of sophistication is, of course, necessary for the merest

pretense to any education. But for different professions it needs to

be specialized in particular ways. A sound legal training is pervaded

by it, but the skepticism is pointed to the type of case with which the

lawyer deals. The reporter’s work is not carried on under the same

conditions, and therefore requires a different specialization. How he

is to acquire it is, of course, a pedagogical problem requiring an in-

ductive study of the types of witness and the sources of information

with whom the reporter is in contact.

Some time in the future, when men have thoroughly grasped the

role of public opinion in society, scholars will not hesitate to write

treatises on evidence for the use of news-gathering services. No

such treatise exists to-day, because political science has suffered from

that curious prejudice of the scholar which consists in regarding an

irrational phenomenon as not quite worthy of serious study.

Closely akin to an education in the tests of credibility is rigor-

ous discipline in the use of words. It is almost impossible to over-

estimate the confusion in daily life caused by sheer inability to use

language with intention. We talk scornfully of “mere words.” Yet

through words the whole vast process of human communication

takes place. The sights and sounds and meanings of nearly all that

we deal with as “politics,” we learn, not by our own experience, but

through the words of others. If those words are meaningless lumps

charged with emotion, instead of the messengers of fact, all sense of

evidence breaks down. Just so long as big words like Bolshevism,

Americanism, patriotism, pro-Germanism, are used by reporters to

cover anything and anybody that the biggest fool at large wishes to

include, just so long shall we be seeking our course through a fog so

dense that we cannot tell whether we fly upside-down or right-side-

up. It is a measure of our education as a people that so many of us

are perfectly content to live our political lives in this fraudulent envi-

ronment of unanalyzed words. For the reporter, abracadabra is fatal.

So long as he deals in it, he is gullibility itself, seeing nothing of the

world, and living, as it were, in a hall of crazy mirrors.

Only the discipline of a modernized logic can open the door to

reality. An overwhelming part of the dispute about “freedom of opin-

ion” turns on words which mean different things to the censor and

the agitator. So long as the meanings of the words are not dissoci-

ated, the dispute will remain a circular wrangle. Education that shall

make men masters of their vocabulary is one of the central interests

of liberty. For such an education alone can transform the dispute into

debate from similar premises.

A sense of evidence and a power to define words must for the

modern reporter be accompanied by a working knowledge of the

main stratifications and currents of interest. Unless he knows that

“news” of society almost always starts from a special group, he is

doomed to report the surface of events. He will report the ripples

of a passing steamer, and forget the tides and the currents and the

ground-swell. He will report what Kolchak or Lenin says, and see

what they do only when it confirms what he thinks they said. He

will deal with the flicker of events and not with their motive. There

are ways of reading that flicker so as to discern the motive, but they

have not been formulated in the light of recent knowledge. Here is

big work for the student of politics. The good reporter reads events

with an intuition trained by wide personal experience. The poor

reporter cannot read them, because he is not even aware that there is

anything in particular to read.

And then the reporter needs a general sense of what the world

is doing. Emphatically he ought not to be serving a cause, no mat-

ter how good. In his professional activity it is no business of his to

care whose ox is gored. To be sure, when so much reporting is ex

parte, and hostile to insurgent forces, the insurgents in self-defense

send out ex parte reporters of their own. But a community cannot

rest content to learn the truth about the Democrats by reading the

Republican papers, and the truth about the Republicans by reading

the Democratic papers. There is room, and there is need, for disinter-

ested reporting; and if this sounds like a counsel of perfection now,

it is only because the science of public opinion is still at the point

where astronomy was when theological interests proclaimed the

conclusions that all research must vindicate.

While the reporter will serve no cause, he will possess a steady

sense that the chief purpose of “news” is to enable mankind to live

successfully toward the future. He will know that the world is a

process, not by any means always onward and upward, but never

quite the same. As the observer of the signs of change, his value to

society depends upon the prophetic discrimination with which he

selects those signs.

But the news from which he must pick and choose has long since

become too complicated even for the most highly trained reporter.

The work, say, of the government is really a small part of the day’s

news, yet even the wealthiest and most resourceful newspapers fail in

their efforts to report “Washington.” The high lights and the disputes

and sensational incidents are noted, but no one can keep himself

informed about his Congressman or about the individual depart-

ments, by reading the daily press. This failure in no way reflects on

the newspapers. It results from the intricacy and unwieldiness of the

subject-matter. Thus, it is easier to report Congress than it is to report

the departments, because the work of Congress crystallizes crudely

every so often in а roll-call. But administration, although it has be-

come more important than legislation, is hard to follow, because its

results are spread over a longer period of time, and its effects are felt

in ways that no reporter can really measure.

Theoretically Congress is competent to act as the critical eye on

administration. Actually, the investigations of Congress are almost

always planless raids, conducted by men too busy and too little in-

formed to do more than catch the grosser evils, or intrude upon good

work that is not understood. It was a recognition of these difficulties

that was the cause of two very interesting experiments in late years.

One was the establishment of more or less semi-official institutes of

government research; the other, the growth of specialized private

agencies which attempt to give technical summaries of the work of

various branches of the government. Neither experiment has created

much commotion: yet together they illustrate an idea which, prop-

erly developed, will be increasingly valuable to an enlightened public

opinion.

Their principle is simple. They are expert organized reporters.

Having no horror of dullness, no interest in being dramatic, they

can study statistics and orders and reports which are beyond the

digestive powers of a newspaper man or of his readers. The lines of

their growth would seem to be threefold: to make a current record,

to make a running analysis of it, and on the basis of both, to suggest

plans.

Record and analysis require an experimental formulation of stan-

dards by which the work of government can be tested. Such stan-

dards are not to be evolved off-hand out of anyone’s consciousness.

Some have already been worked out experimentally, others still need

to be discovered; all need to be refined and brought into perspective

by the wisdom of experience. Carried out competently, the public

would gradually learn to substitute objective criteria for gossip and

intuitions. One can imagine a public-health service subjected to such

expert criticism. The institute of research publishes the death-rate as

a whole for a period of years. It seems that for a particular season the

rate is bad in certain maladies, that in others the rate of improvement

is not sufficiently rapid. These facts are compared with the expen-

ditures of the service, and with the main lines of its activity. Are the

bad results due to the causes beyond the control of the service? do

they indicate a lack of foresight in asking appropriations for spe-

cial work? or in the absence of novel phenomena, do they point to a

decline of the personnel, or in its morale? If the latter, further analy-

sis may reveal that salaries are too low to attract men of ability, or

that the head of the service by bad management has weakened the

interest of his staff.

When the work of government is analyzed in some such way as

this, the reporter deals with a body of knowledge that has been or-

ganized for his apprehension. In other words, he is able to report the

“news,” because between him and the raw material of government

there has been interposed a more or less expert political intelligence.

He ceases to be the ant, described by William James, whose view of a

building was obtained by crawling over the cracks in the walls.

These political observatories will, I think, be found useful in all

branches of government, national, state, municipal, industrial, and

even in foreign affairs. They should be clearly out of reach either of

the wrath or of the favor of the office-holders. They must, of course,

be endowed, but the endowment should be beyond the immediate

control of the legislature and of the rich patron. Their independence

can be partially protected by the terms of the trust; the rest must be

defended by the ability of the institute to make itself so much the

master of the facts as to be impregnably based on popular confi-

dence.

One would like to think that the universities could be brought into

such a scheme. Were they in close contact with the current record

and analysis, there might well be a genuine “field work” in political

science for the students; and there could be no better directing idea

for their more advanced researches than the formulation of the in-

tellectual methods by which the experience of government could be

brought to usable control. After all, the purpose of studying “politi-

cal science” is to be able to act more effectively in politics, the word

effectively being understood in the largest and, therefore, the ideal

sense. In the universities men should be able to think patiently and

generously for the good of society. If they do not, surely one of the

reasons is that thought terminates in doctor’s theses and brown quar-

terlies, and not in the critical issues of politics.

On first thought, all this may seem rather a curious direction for

an inquiry into the substance of liberty. Yet we have always known,

as a matter of common sense, that there was an intimate connection

between “liberty” and the use of liberty. Every one who has exam-

ined the subject at all has had to conclude that tolerance per se is

an arbitrary line, and that, in practice, the determining factor is the

significance of the opinion to be tolerated. This study is based on

an avowal of that fact. Once it is avowed, there seems to be no way

of evading the conclusion that liberty is not so much permission as

it is the construction of a system of information increasingly inde-

pendent of opinion. In the long run it looks as if opinion could be

made at once free and enlightening only by transferring our interest

from “opinion” to the objective realities from which it springs. This

thought has led us to speculations on ways of protecting and orga-

nizing the stream of news as the source of all opinion that matters.

Obviously these speculations do not pretend to offer a fully consid-

ered or a completed scheme. Their nature forbids it, and I should be

guilty of the very opinionativeness I have condemned, did these es-

says claim to be anything more than tentative indications of the more

important phases of the problem.

Yet I can well imagine their causing a considerable restlessness in

the minds of some readers. Standards, institutes, university research,

schools of journalism, they will argue, may be all right, but they are

a gray business in a vivid world. They blunt the edge of life; they

leave out of account the finely irresponsible opinion thrown out by

the creative mind; they do not protect the indispensable novelty from

philistinism and oppression. These proposals of yours, they will

say, ignore the fact that such an apparatus of knowledge will in the

main be controlled by the complacent and the traditional, and the

execution will inevitably be illiberal.

There is force in the indictment. And yet I am convinced that we

shall accomplish more by fighting for truth than by fighting for our

theories. It is a better loyalty. It is a humbler one, but it is also more

irresistible. Above all it is educative. For the real enemy is ignorance,

from which all of us, conservative, liberal, and revolutionary, suf-

fer. If our effort is concentrated on our desires,—be it our desire to

have and to hold what is good, our desire to remake peacefully, or

our desire to transform suddenly,—we shall divide hopelessly and

irretrievably. We must go back of our opinions to the neutral facts

for unity and refreshment of spirit. To deny this, it seems to me, is to

claim that the mass of men is impervious to education, and to deny

that, is to deny the postulate of democracy, and to seek salvation

in a dictatorship. There is, I am convinced, nothing but misery and

confusion that way. But I am equally convinced that democracy will

degenerate into this dictatorship either of the Right or of the Left, if

it does not become genuinely self-governing. That means, in terms

of public opinion, a resumption of that contact between beliefs and

realities which we have been losing steadily since the small-town

democracy was absorbed into the Great Society.

The administration of public information toward greater accuracy

and more successful analysis is the highway of liberty. It is, I believe,

a matter of first-rate importance that we should fix this in our minds.

Having done so, we may be able to deal more effectively with the

traps and the lies and the special interests which obstruct the road

and drive us astray. Without a clear conception of what the means

of liberty are, the struggle for free speech and free opinion easily

degenerates into a mere contest of opinion.

But realization is not the last step, though it is the first. We need

be under no illusion that the stream of news can be purified simply

by pointing out the value of purity. The existing news-structure may

be made serviceable to democracy along the general lines suggested,

by the training of the journalist, and by the development of expert

record and analysis. But while it may be, it will not be, simply by

saying that it ought to be. Those who are now in control have too

much at stake, and they control the source of reform itself.

Change will come only by the drastic competition of those whose

interests are not represented in the existing news-organization. It

will come only if organized labor and militant liberalism set a pace

which cannot be ignored. Our sanity and, therefore, our safety de-

pend upon this competition, upon fearless and relentless exposure

conducted by self-conscious groups that are now in a minority. It is

for these groups to understand that the satisfaction of advertising

a pet theory is as nothing compared to the publication of the news.

And having realized it, it is for them to combine their resources and

their talent for the development of an authentic news-service which

is invincible because it supplies what the community is begging for

and cannot get.

All the gallant little sheets expressing particular programmes are

at bottom vanity, and in the end, futility, so long as the reporting of

daily news is left in untrained and biased hands. If we are to move

ahead, we must see a great independent journalism, setting standards

for commercial journalism, like those which the splendid English

coéperative societies are setting for commercial business. An enor-

mous amount of money is dribbled away in one fashion or another

on little papers, mass-meetings, and what not. If only some consider-

able portion of it could be set aside to establish a central international

news-agency, we should make progress. We cannot fight the un-

truth which envelops us by parading our opinions. We can do it only

by reporting the facts, and we do not deserve to win if the facts are

against us.

The country is spotted with benevolent foundations of one kind or

another, many of them doing nothing but pay the upkeep of fine

buildings and sinecures. Organized labor spends large sums of

money on politics and strikes which fail because it is impossible to

secure a genuine hearing in public opinion. Could there be a pooling

of money for a news-agency? Not, I imagine, if its object were to fur-

ther a cause. But suppose the plan were for a news-service in which

editorial matter was rigorously excluded, and the work was done

by men who had already won the confidence of the public by their

independence? Then, perhaps.

At any rate, our salvation lies in two things: ultimately, in the infu-

sion of the news-structure by men with a new training and outlook;

immediately, in the concentration of the independent forces against

the complacency and bad service of the routineers. We shall advance

when we have learned humility; when we have learned to seek the

truth, to reveal it and publish it; when we care more for that than for

the privilege of arguing about ideas in a fog of uncertainty.

End