“The press of the United States vaunts itself the possessor of great power. It has a power similar in many respects to that of the politician. The politician is a [nominally] representative personage whose force lies in the fact that, after the people have performed the single self-governing act of his election, he does as he pleases. The press is a representative personage for whose erection to influence not even one democratic act is needed or performed. The owner of the press must have money; that answers for the periodic election of the politician. With money the newspaper becomes a representative voice of the people, not because the people chose or established it but because few people have vast sums of money to put into a newspaper and make it stand. The people accept what is given them and it passes for representative because they are unable to put anything really representative in its place.
But the people are thoroughly conscious that the press does not represent them and chafe increasingly under its pretensions to do so. With the concentration of wealth the press becomes less and less representative, less and less truly popular; for it ceases to depend on popular support for existence and depends on bodies of concentrated wealth, its great advertisers. The people recognize this change of of the press center of gravity and feel it distinctly in newspaper treatment of popular issues.
The difference that has taken place is this: Formerly, the newspapers sought to discover and vocalize the sentiments of the people, because if they had not done so it would have wrecked their prosperity; now, they cooly give out as popular opinion whatever it suits them to have pass for public opinion; and as they are entirely independent of the will of the people and do not subsist by the people’s support, it does not affect them or their interest if what they publish as popular will is the strict reverse of it. It was formerly the boast of the press to mold public opinion by educating it, but now it is able to produce at a moment’s notice, overnight, any public opinion that is required without asking or needing the public concurrence. In this sense, public opinion is absolutely controlled by the press. Whatever popular sentiment it desires it manufactures, publishes, announces to be the will of everybody, hears no dissenting voice, and accepts the matter as settled – and so do the people.
The single fault of this press is that the opinion published has no element of the public in it. The popular sentiment which the press thus creates and sends out labeled, “by the people,” is always that sentiment which is agreeable not to the masses of people but to the masses of press capital and the other volumes of concentrated riches from which the press draws its current sustenance. But it is as if these utterances were the public mind, for the press holds the avenues of popular speech and the people are obliged to be mute.”
It is a circumstance of no slight meaning, this total detachment of the press from the people. Its significance is that public opinion is never really even formed – in short, that public opinion has ceased to be a force or to exist. This is certainly startling when we reflect on the decay of the pulpit and platform, the other leading modes of public expression. Whether the press was the main cause, it was a great cause in the decadence of these institutions, for the audiences reached by the press grew so large that in contrast the number addressed by a pulpit or platform orator seemed hardly worth the labor and machinery of gathering them together. The press has even taken to preaching as a business investment, having a corner in its Sunday edition for compact little sermonlets from the pens of the divines, for 5 cents – much less than the rental of a pew – furnishing the public with religion and rescuing it from the Sabbath labor of walking to church.
Rather the greater cause for the decline of the sacred and secular platforms has been the moral shrinkage of those who occupy them. The pastor has declined into an advocate and retainer of the wealthy class, the platform reasoner into a Party politician and monger of prejudice, in each instance forfeiting popular confidence and leaving the field in possession of the press, which at least make thin moral pretensions.
The people are left without a voice. The effect upon them of this loss of speaking is a paralysis of both thinking and action, while those who command the avenues of expression are able to palm off ready-made, self-interested opinions on the people, making the impression upon each reader that although he does not believe this way others do and leading him to act or acquiesce with what he believes to be the majority view.
The main influence of the press comes through this deception. It brazenly proclaims what it calls public sentiment, in which perhaps not a single unit of the public agrees, but all are silent because each dimly fancies that there must be such a sentiment somewhere, not crediting the press with the lying effontery to declare an absolute fiction so shamelessly.
Each citizen asks himself, too, what will be the use if I protest, since the papers will not spread a dissenting note? The people’s mouths are closed with the rivets of necessity for they have no journals of any magnitude through which they are free to speak, the journals that profess to side with the people being conducted by the just the same rules and just the same motives as the others, and differing only in the opinions which they publish as public opinion.
The will of the people never governs these publications of a millionaire capitalist – the will of his capital governs; the prosperity of the capital invested in the plant is the pole star of his newspaper policy, and that is never identical with the prosperity of the people, even if the most skillfully educated brains are employed to prove the identity in daily editorials. By them also something which the people are said to want is daily published in lieu of that which they do want, and success, what can succeed, what they think will succeed, not what ought to succeed, is the dominant criterion of everything that is done.
It ought to be made a proverb that the proprietors of non of the great dailies are in the business for principle any more than for their health; they are in it to prosper and they follow the laws of prosperity; so that a great privately owned sheet which stands out for popular reform is certain to be unsound at the core because of the conditions that govern all private millionaire things. They live by advertisement and sensation. They increase advertisements by increasing sensations. If reform is a prolific sensation, some them seize upon that as their province, not for the reform itself but for the money that is in it; and their advocacy mutilates it because instead of using it as a grand end they are abusing and degrading it as a means to increase sensation, circulation, and advertisement.
The millionaires fill the papers full of their views daily, the people utter nothing, for not an inch of the papers belong to them. Is this freedom of speech? It passes for it, yet in fact the people are as much gagged and suppressed as if the heaviest laws and penalties locked their lips.
The millionaires tailor our thoughts for us, as in Russia the government cuts out the thinking of the Czar’s subjects. There, press autocrats censor what goes in, here, the editors employed by the millionaire owners are the censors. Our way is much better, for it causes no ill feeling; through the marvelous magic of monopoly the people do not feel the hand of censorship, though it works as implacably as if in Russian the Czar owned and edited, as he now censors, all the papers of influence.” – Morrison I. Swift, Imperialism and the Threat of Liberty, 1899; Annals of America Vol. 12, p. 242
