Dissertation Committee: Professor Neil Postman, Chair Professor Christine Nystrom Professor Henry Perkinson

THE IMPOSSIBLE PRESS: AMERICAN JOURNALISM AND THE DECLINE OF PUBLIC LIFE

Jay Rosen

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions New York University 1986

© 1986 Jay Rosen

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my classmates in the Media Ecology Program for their comraderie through four years of study: Moshe Botwinik, Amando Riverol, Myrna Frommer, John Bell, Susan Maushart Noone and Margot Hardenberg. Thanks also to Barbara O'Brien for her help and Jane Baum for her friendship and support. Professor Terrence Moran helped me to think more clearly about many things. Special thanks go to my friend and colleague Joe Harris, whose wit, intelligence and gift for talk sustained me over the course of this project. Professor Henry Perkinson has been the inspiration for whatever I have learned about being a scholar, for he is not only that but also an exemplary man. My deepest thanks go to Professors Christine Nystrom and Neil Postman, who together performed that miracle of teaching, in which the student seems to discover everything for himself because he has quietly been shown where--and how--to look. Their genorosity has been too large to acknowledge in words.

Finally, I thank Ellen Alt for her love.

No more than the kings before them should the people be hedged with divinity. Like all princes and rulers, like all sovereigns, they are ill-served by flattery and adulation. And they are betrayed by the servile hypocrisy which tells them that what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, can be determined by their votes.

You give us twenty-two minutes, we'll give you the world.

INTRODUCTION

JOURNALISM AS A TRANSACTION

In 1950 Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, spoke at the University of Missouri on "The Responsibilities of Maturity." This is what he told his audience of professional journalists:

We have two choices. We can report, and define, and explain, in honest perspective, the great issues which are now before the world; or we can ignore and minimize these issues and divert our readers to less important, but no doubt more entertaining, matters. My vote goes for the paper that informs.

By "the paper that informs" Sulzberger no doubt meant a journal which features important information and serious analysis. In "voting for" such a paper--a paper like his own--Sulzberger made an interesting assumption. He assumed that "a paper that informs" is a statement about the kind of journalism practiced by the newspaper. In Sulzberger's view, a paper which presents information and analysis is a "paper that informs," while one offering diverting feature stories is a "paper that entertains." But there is something missing from these otherwise reasonable statements: the people who read the newspaper. We may be reminded here of the teacher's lament, "I taught good but those kids sure didn't learn." If Sulzberger was speaking about the undergraduate curriculum and said, "My vote goes to the course that instructs," we would hope that he had in mind the students who are to be instructed. We would hope, for example, that he would not equate adequate instructional materials with a "course that instructs." For to do so would be to show an impoverished view of education, in which the learning experience of the student is ignored while school policy and teaching strategies receive all the attention. Similarly, it is an impoverished view of journalism which states that "providing information" equals a "paper than informs."

In his remarkable little book, Origins of Western Literacy, Eric Havelock points out what he thinks to be an obvious fact: that a historian interested in literacy as a social condition must trace the history of reading, not the history of writing. Of course the point is obvious once stated; but it is easy to overlook because the history of reading vanishes as it is being made, whereas the history of writing is at least partially recorded. Havelock admits that the history of reading is difficult to recover from written records. But the prominence of writing in the historian's materials "should not be used as an excuse for ignoring" reading, he argues (18-9). A similar point can be made about the history of journalism as a social institution. What are we really interested in when we examine the press of an earlier era? What was printed, or what was read? If our aim is more than antiquarian, the content of the press must be regarded as only a clue to a larger history: the history, not of what the press has done, but of what people have done with the press. Here is where the social significance of journalism lies: in the uses made of journalism by the people who found a use for it.

What Arthur Hays Sulzberger ignored in his remarks to fellow journalists is frequently ignored by press historians, as well. Journalism is not an activity conducted soley by journalists; or, to put it another way, journalism is communication and communication is something that takes place between people. It is not an action but a transaction. A transactional history of journalism would be a very different thing from, say, the history of newspapers. Instead of "how did the newspaper change?" the question would be "how did communication between the newspaper and its readership change?" The present study seeks to make a contribution to this second approach. It is concerned not with the press alone but with the press and the audience democracy assumes for it-- namely, the public.

It should be said at the outset that "the public" is not a thing in the world. It is not, for example, coincident with the people who read newspapers. Those readers may be brought to the newspaper for reasons having nothing to do with their public role as citizens. Because the press may be essential to citizenship does not mean that patrons of the press are essentially citizens. They may be mostly consumers, sports fans, investors or lonely hearts looking for a little advice. But the public cannot be considered wholly apart from the newspaper either. As we shall see in Chapter One, the very idea of a democratic public has been bound up with the press since at least the founding of the American republic.

What the public is, how we ought to think of it, is the point at issue in this study. So we cannot simply give an "operational definition" of the public and proceed from there. Our interest is in the idea of the public as the body to whom the press communicates. We will attempt to examine the history of that idea as it meets up with changes in the form of the newspaper and in the communication environment generally. Thus we are interested not only in the public as a body of citizens but in public life as the atmosphere in which that body is assumed to conduct its business. Our method will be to compare what is said about press and public with what we can discover about the way the newspaper has communicated at different points in its history. Do statements about press and public reflect the way the newspaper communicates? Or do they disort and ignore the communication transaction sponsored by the press?

Do they take into account the changing conditions of public life? Or do they pass over those changes and assume a communication environment which may no longer exist? In posing these sorts of questions, we will be particularly interested in the most common assumption about made about press and public: that, by presenting information, the press "informs the public." One way to define the study that follows is to call it a critical review of the meaning and validity of this assumption, conducted at different points in press history.

The study is divided into two parts. Part One is comprised of the first five chapters and is entitled "The Making of the Modern Public." It is about the challenge modern conditions pose for traditional conceptions of press and public. Here the most important development is the rise of a new press in the mid-nineteenth century. The penny papers, a cheap, popular form of journalism introduced in the 1830s, became the basis of the modern American press. We will examine the problems this new form of journalism posed for the assumption that "the press informs the public." Part Two is called "The Public and the Professionalized Press." It is about the attitude the press took toward the public as it grew into a recognized profession after the turn of th century. Included are the ideas of two outstanding critics of that attitude, who are also the two most important thinkers on the subject of press and public, Walter Lippmann and John Dewey.

Chapter One inquires into the origins of the idea that the job of the press is to inform the public. Chapter Two introduces the revolution in journalism caused by the penny papers. Chapter Three examines the utopian ideas about press and public which arose from that revolution, particularly after it absorbed the invention of the telegraph. Chapter Four examines an opposite tendency: the dark view of the masses which the popular newspaper inspired. Chapter Five attempts to explain some of these developments by focusing on a peculiar fact about the modern public: that it is gathered together without actually meeting. Chapter Six, which begins Part Two of the study, traces the rise of the professional attitude in journalism after the turn of the century, paying particular attention to the way in which the public was construed by an emerging profession of journalism. Chapter Seven examines Walter Lippmann's view of press and public, contrasting it with the professional attitude. Chapter Eight does the same for John Dewey. Finally, the conclusion takes up the question: how should the public be thought of today?

There is one more point which needs to be made before beginning the study. The press will be equated with the newspaper press throughout most of the study, although television is frequently brought into the discussion. There are two main reasons for this. First, for most of the periods discussed television would not yet have made an appearence. Second, the origin of ideas about press and public is all in the history of the newspaper press. A new vocabulary for discussing press and public has not accompanied the rise of television, which is an interesting fact in itself. In any event, the study hopes to show that certain weaknesses in common assumptions about press and public are even more glaring in the case of television, a point which will be explored later in the study.

We begin, then, with the following question: how did the notion arise that it is the function of the press to inform the public?

PART ONE

THE MAKING OF THE MODERN PUBLIC

CHAPTER ONE

DEMOCRACY AND DISTANCE

The idea that the function of the press is to inform the public appears to come from democracy itself, to be a kind of deduction one is entitled to make from the premise of government by the people. As Frank Luther Mott, the senior historian of American journalism put it: "Whenever the ultimate decisions depend on the will of the people, it is obviously necessary, if these decisions are to made intelligently, that they should be based on adequate popular knowledge of events and conditions" (News In America 5). The press, of course, is the means by which an "adequate knowledge" of public affairs is to be gained, and on that basis freedom of the press is said to be essential to democratic government (Siebert et al. 5).

But why should the issue arise whether people have "adequate knowledge of events and conditions," and why should the press--specifically, the newspaper--be put forward as the answer? How does the problem of "informing the public" originate, and what is it about newspapers that makes them the obvious solution?

News: a function of distance

These questions may seem simple-minded, but even a passing acquaintence with the history of the press shows they are not. For example, before the penny papers of the 1830s, newspapers provided almost no local news (Mott, American Journalism 51, 197; Schudson, Discovering the News 27-28). Deaths, marriages, shipping data and an occasional murder were the only exceptions; there was almost no coverage of public affairs, no enterprising reporting on town government or regular exchange of opinion on local issues. And yet "government by the people" existed at the local level-- indeed, the small town that meets to discuss its problems and conduct its business is our most vivid image of democracy at work. Why is it that a newspaper vigorously reporting the affairs of the local community was not necessary to eighteenth century town government?

The answer, of course, is that the size of the community naturally made for an "informed public." People could see with their eyes and hear with their ears most everything they needed to know (Schlesinger 60). As the New England Courant said of an occurence on the streets of Boston, "There were too many spectators there to make it now a piece of public news" (qtd. in Mott, American Journalism 51). It is only when the community reaches a certain size, and events unfolding in one section are unlikely to reach another, that news distributed through a newspaper becomes in any way a necessity.

The point can be stated more generally: News arrives from a distance. It crosses the space between individuals and events. As the German communication theorist Karl Knies put it, "News is the communication of an event which occured away from the location of the recepient" (qtd. in Hardt 82). It follows, then, that the history of news is a history of the "awayness" of things, a story of those changes in the scale of social organization which create gaps between people and events. News and newspapers have no vital role in a community until the distances which create a demand for news are themselves created and worked into the scale of daily life. So it is not democracy as a principle that demands an enterprising press, but democracy extended over distance-- in a word, a republic. And "news hunger" is not, as Mott contends, "fundamental in human nature" (News in America 1). People begin to hunger for news when events extend out beyond the sense of sight and the normal progression of word of mouth. The first people to hunger for news in this way were the Romans, whose empire extended far beyond the reach of the spoken word. Political economist Karl Bucher, another German scholar with an interest in news, observed that

Only when Roman supremacy had embraced or subjected to its influence all the countries of the Mediterranean was there need of some means by which the ruling class who had gone to the provinces as officials, tax-farmers and in other occupations, might receive the current news of the capital. It is significant that Caesar, the creator of the military monarchy and of the administrative centralization of Rome, is regarded as the founder of the first contrivance resembling a newspaper.

The Sociologist Helen MacGill Hughes makes the same point in analyzing the origins of news: "Whenever trade and government has taken men away from home, the successful prosecution of their affairs has required them to know what was going on in their head offices. This is the condition that makes news imperative and gives it value and which, in the first place, gave rise to its regular collection" (2). So the first function of news is not to "inform the public" but to keep centers in touch with margins. Before anyone thought to publish (or demand) a newspaper there were professional letter-writers who kept statesmen and wealthy merchants informed of events in distance places. News was for those who controlled empires.

The Imagined Community

When news is thought of in relation to distance, there is suddenly more to explain about the relationship between press and public. It is no longer enough to say, "The press has the job of informing the public," for an earlier question presents itself: How does a public that requires a press come to be formed? What are the conditions which put the community as a whole in the position of the statesman and merchant who must "keep in touch" through the news? In the history of the American press this point can be fixed rather precisely. It was the creation of a union out of thirteen far-flung colonies that first brought into existence a public whose scale demanded communciation through newspapers. The demand for a press to serve this new public was both an empirical fact--it spurred the growth of newspapers in the mid-eighteenth century--and a logical necessity, in the sense that representative government extended over such a distance could not be imagined without some means to inform the people of actions taken in their name. (The relationship between these two notions of "demand" is itself interesting, for it turns out that the kind of press the logic of democracy demands is not always in demand in an empirical sense, a fact to be explored in later chapters.)

The public whose scale implied a free and enterprising press was, in effect, signed into law with the Constitution. But it first began to emerge in the struggle for independence from British rule, which created a community of colonists absolutely dependent on newspapers for word of its existence. One of the problems for leaders of the patriot cause before the Revolution was a communications problem-- how to "make thirteen clocks strike as one," as John Adams put it (qtd. in Schlesinger 13). The real American Revolution, Arthur Schlesinger notes, was the gradual shift in sentiment against the mother country throughout the thirteen colonies, which the war itself only capped off (4). The inhabitants of one town had to be infected with the same feeling that was rising in another, and this feeling had to coalesce around certain abstract principles that were said to cross distance and unite all colonists-- indeed, all men.

"A massive politicization of the populace was underway," Richard D. Brown observes, "Generally accustomed to some participation in local politics, people now became informed and concerned with provincial and imperial issues" (79). Here was the beginning of the public the Constitution later institutionalized: the point at which Americans began to think of themselves as belonging to an abstract union of free men, rather than as subjects of England, inhabitants of Boston, or members of a particular clan. It was not that these other identities were wiped away, but that a new one was born, what Brown calls the modern notion of citizenship. "A citizen, whatever his ancestry or personal history, was a bearer of the ideology of liberty," he notes, "Commitment to such abstractions was supplanting traditional loyalties to local villages, kinfolk and social superiors" (80).

The newspapers of the period undoubtedly played a large part in creating this commitment to an invisible community of the like-minded. Schlesinger points out that while the patriot cause had no coordinated propaganda effort it somehow managed to unite opinion across the colonies, partly because of common grievances but also because of effective communication from town to town, much of it through the newspaper. The newspaper, he notes, synthesized all other forms of protest and propaganda and encouraged their spread.

It trumpeted the doings of Whig committees, publicized the rallies and mobbings, promoted partisan fast days and anniversaries, blazoned patriotic speeches and toasts, popularized anti-British slogans, gave wide currency to ballads and broadsides, furthered the persecution of tories, reprinted London news of the government's intentions concerning America and, in general, created an atmosphere of distrust and enmity that made reconciliation increasingly difficult.

At this stage the press was not yet "informing the public" but helping to create the public it would later be expected to inform-- if we mean by that public a body of citizens who require the press to "keep in touch" with events affecting their interests. For before such a body could emerge the press had to convince the colonists that they had common interests and that events in one community therefore meant something to the inhabitants of another. News of uprisings in other places enlarged the world of the colonists, creating a "need to know" which could only be satisfied by more news. Here, then, is one reason why the relationship between press and public can never be as simple as saying, "The press informs the public." Forming a public is just as likely the effect of news as informing.

To be clear on this point: The sort of public for which a press is required begins to be formed when the interests of a community are extended beyond the scale of face to face relations and the organic spread of news typical of gossip. Hughes describes the condition of the community before this extension of scale:

In the smaller world of local concerns, in the countryside, the village, and the neighborhood, gossip circulated the news of interesting events among the illiterate—and others. Its scope was smaller, being the geographical range of the peasant and the villager. Word of mouth was its natural and spontaneous medium. It had no superstructure of professional newsgatherer and purchaser and no cash value.

As we have seen, the first people to demand news were merchants and statesmen whose affairs extended far enough in space to require contact with distant events. The effect of the Revolution, then, was to extend everyone's affairs from center to margin, from a relatively self-contained world where word of mouth could prevail to a larger universe in which one's interests were being defended and attacked by proxy, so to speak. For any community a rumor of war is the always the biggest news because it threatens to extend so many lives so far in space. An event that extends the community in this fashion "makes news" in the sense that it opens up new distances for news to cross.

Without a doubt the greatest news making event ever was the signing of the Constitution, which instantly made the inhabitants of the American states citizens of a nation. The dimensions of the new nation and the form of government envisoned for it implied a whole range of new distances across which news would have to travel. Suddenly one had to elect national leaders, debate national issues and keep in touch with events unfolding at a distant capital (Brown 97). It would be another century before the full implications of national citizenship were felt, but what the Revolution had begun the Constitution institutionalized: a world in which every citizen had not only political interests but political duties extending far beyond the local community-- a world which could only be reached through the news. To get some idea of the Constitution's effect, imagine today a document making every person on earth a citizen in a democratic world government. Think of the new bureaus that would have to be opened up, the number of journalists that would now be in demand, the new range of "issues" that would require public attention, the interest one would have to take in events that literally did not exist before. Think of all the opinions one would have to have\!

Public and republic

The framers of the Constitution (and their opponents) were aware that a public of unprecedented scale had suddenly been brought into being (Brown 91). And so the question arose: Was the new nation too big to be governed in the manner provided for in the Constitution? In The Federalist No. 14 James Madison decided to consider that question directly. Those who doubted that the Constitution could function over such distances were confusing a democracy with a republic, Madison argued.¹

As the natural limit of a democracy is that distance from the central point, which will just permit the most remote citizens to assemble as often as their public functions demand, and will include no greater number than can join in these functions; so the natural limit of a republic, is that distance from the centre, which will barely allow the representatives of the people to meet as often as may be necessary for the administration of public affairs.

The United States do not exceed the natural limit of a republic, Madison contended; and to prove it he went on to calculate the number of miles the most distant representatives would have to travel. His proof of the republic's viability assumes that when the boundaries of a democracy are pushed out from the local community to a larger territory, the crossing of distance becomes the limiting factor. For the republic to be workable, Madison reasoned, transportation had to be good enough to enable representatives to meet as often as necessary.

But the territory separating legislators was not the only distance a republic opened up. There was also the distance between representatives and their constituents, between a new national government and local communities that before had been largely self governing. Moreover, this distance was a mental as well as a physical fact: being out of sight, the republic could easily be out of mind as well. Here it was not transportation but communication that determined the "natural limit" of the republic. A free and enterprising press would be required to cross the gap separating a national government from the daily lives of citizens. Madison drew this conclusion in his arguments against the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798, which threatened to give the national government broad powers of censorship. Is it not obvious, he asked, that the government should be restrained from regulating the press in any manner, considering "the peculiar distance of the seat of its proceedings from the great body of its constituents; and the peculiar difficulty of circulating an adequate knowledge of them through any other channel?" (qtd. in Meyer 336\) With the creation of a federal republic, the problem of communication thus progressed from how to make "thirteen clocks strike as one" to how an adequate knowledge of government was to be distributed across the "peculiar distance" of the new nation. The strategic question of uniting the colonies against the crown became the larger issue of informing the people, not for action against a common enemy but for the important duties of citizenship.

Government: a homespun affair

We have so far discussed the creation of the public as a legal entity. Yet almost everyone who has thought seriously about the nature of popular government has thought it wise to point out that laws creating "government by the people" do not create people who are willing or able to govern themselves (Becker 48). Henry Steele Commager, for example:

Madison's observation that ultimate reliance must be not on "external principles" but on the "internal structure" of government was profound, but even it did not penetrate to the heart of the matter. Ultimate reliance was on the virtue, the intelligence, and the sophistication of the people.

The Constitution may have signed into law a public of unprecedented scale; but the people who were to form that public were obviously not the creation of legal documents-- they were products of their history. To ask, then, how the idea of a public originated is also to ask about the culture of eighteenth century America. It is to inquire into "the virtue, the intelligence, and the sophistication of the people" as cultural facts (rather than legal premises.) Obviously an adequate cultural history of the period is beyond the scope of the present study. The most that can be done here is to observe what others have observed about the character of the people who formed the first newspaper public, and to suggest some historical reasons for assumptions that were made about them.

In writing Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville declared his subject to be, not democratic government, but what he called "custom," meaning the cast of mind and the type of character democracy tends to produce (1: 299). Expressed finally in law, democracy in America was at bottom a cultural condition, a way of life made possible by the peculiar circumstances of the country's growth and preserved in the habits and expectations of the people (1: 322). The story of that way of life has been told many times: American democracy originated in the small settlements of the New World, where people came together to clear the land and form a government among themselves, pledging to protect the public order and work in common for the common good. Unhampered by tradition yet forced by the harsh environment to coooperate with each other, the early settlers tempered an independence of mind and spirit with a strong sense of social duty, a love of liberty with a practical knowledge of government, a dedication to principle with the difficult lessons of frontier living. The delicate balance finallly achieved by the Constitution was preceded and made possible by this balance of traits in the character of the people, without which, Tocqueville believed, no democratic government could be safe (1: 325).

Of all the achievements America might parade before the world, Tocqueville said, the one to be truly admired was the way in which the Constitution was adopted, a triumph of invention and restraint "at a solemn moment, when the national power abdicated, as it were, its authority." The glory of the American Revolution has been largely imagined, he wrote; many nations have performed more valiantly in time of war.

But it is new in the history of society to see a great people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself when apprised by the legislature that the wheels of government are stopped, to see it carefully examine the exent of the evil, and patiently wait two whole years until a remedy is discovered, to which it voluntarily submits without its costing a tear or drop of blood from mankind.

No law could have produced such patience and common sense, Tocqueville observed. The only way to account for the miracle of the Constitution was to note the course American democracy had taken from its beginings in the self governing town to the final formation of the republic. In Europe, he noted, government had "commenced in the superior ranks of society and was gradually and imperfectly communicated to the different members of the social body." But in America, "the township was organized before the county, the county before the state, the state before the union" (1: 40). This peculiar history allowed a model of citizenship originating in the local community to progress in a similar fashion from town to state to nation, leading the historian Carl Becker to observe that Americans have always considered government "essentially a homespun affair, a convenient committee appointed by the people to perform certain specified communal services" (16). Anyone could serve on the committee, for all were competent to understand the needs of the community and skilled at solving problems. John Adams said of America before the Revolution that its division into townships, each empowered to "assemble, choose officers, make laws, mend roads and twenty other things, gives every man an opportunity... and makes knowledge and dexterity at public buisness common" (qtd. in Commager 128). Much of what we still mean by "the public," the very language we use in discussing "public opinion" and the "public mood," shows the trace of America's small town origins. The image of a competent, informed community of citizens has been adapted to describe ever larger political units, from the colony to the nation to the entire world. As we will see in later chapters, this tendency to speak of larger structures in terms of a village environment has also shaped ideas about the press and its functions.

Work and the rights of citizenship

For Tocqueville, the belief that the art of government could be practiced by all was one of the identifying features of American democracy. It governed expectations at every level of social intercourse, from the family to the nation to the state (1: 418). What was so novel about the idea was not the principle of self-government, which the Greeks had enacted in the polis, but the extension of that principle across longer distances than antiquity could ever have imagined. We have already examined how the American republic stretched across the physical territory of the states. But it also stretched across certain social distinctions that had been essential to the concept of self rule in antiquity. Upholders of the patriot cause frequently compared the American experiment to that of the Greeks (Commager 103). "What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude," said Tom Paine (qtd. in Commager 36). But while the Greeks allowed every citizen the right to particpate in public affairs, they also limited the class of citizens to a privileged minority. The most important privilege was freedom from work and more generally from the realm of necessesity. As Hannah Arendt observes in The Human Condition, the Greeks believed that those who were forced to work could never be free citizens of the state, for the laborer shared with lower creatures the limitations imposed on his condition by the body (24). Citizenship, of course, was an activity of the mind. The equality of citizens in the polis was therefore created by the massive inequalities in Greek society. Freedom to reason and legislate were literally the products of slavery, and the political realm was a protected assembly of equals "in which neither rule nor being ruled existed" (Arendt 31).

The colonists may have been inspired by the Greeks (and some, of course, did own slaves), but the American experiment with democracy was of a very different character. The average man was presumed able to participate in government. In order to be a citizen he did not have to be "freed" from work or the struggle to advance in the world. Citizenship could be practiced in one's spare time, so to speak. Endowed by nature with reason and the right to govern himself, the common man could enter the political realm whenever necessary, sure of his skills and his standing there. True, the founding fathers limited the rights of citizenship to property-owning adult white males, but these property-owning adult white males were nonetheless not the members of a leisure class. They worked for a living, and also found time to govern themselves. This is a combination that would not have occured to the Greeks. As John Dewey observes, "Aristotle could not conceive of a body of citizens competent to carry on politics consisting of other than those who had lesiure, that is, those who were relieved from all other occupations, especially that of making a livelihood" (Public and its Problems 138).

Today, the familiar "man in the street" interview shows how naturally we equate the rights and duties of citizenship with a busy life of labor. The man in the street is in the street because he is on his way to work or returning home. Pausing to give his opinions on the issues of the day, he feels no hesitation in passing from private concerns to the realm of politics and public affairs. For Arendt, this is a distinctly modern attitude; the Greeks would have found the passage impossible (31). It is important to note that news is what makes the citizen-as-worker idea feasible. News appears to allow working people knowledge of events which their work prevents them from witnessing. It is news that passes through the man in the street to come out in the form of opinion. Here, then, is another sense in which the public created by the Constitution logically demanded a free and enterprising press. In ancient Greece, what citizens "do" is act like citizens together. (Arendt 177). They speak and listen; they make their appearence in the polis before an audience of equals in order to exercise the supremely human faculty of reason. In America, citizens have always had other things to do; they enter the political realm when it becomes necessary to act politically-- characteristically, to vote. A public that works at business other than public business creates a mental distance between private life and public affairs. Across this distance news travels. "Informing the public" as an essential function in a democracy therefore arises when the title of citizen is extended to those who labor at duties other than citizenship; or, to look at it another way, when the work of the world is distributed from the laboring classes to the ruling classes so that sharp distinctions between the two begin to dissolve. Thus, Tocqueville concluded that the press becomes more important as social conditions become more equal (2: 114).

Jefferson's dilemma

The citizen as a worker who takes time out for politics is today represented by the man in the street, but in the eighteenth century the ideal was the man in the fields. Both Madison and Jefferson thought farmers were the hope of the republic because the nature of their work demanded a general competence and gave every man a stake in the preservation of order. "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens," Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Jay, "They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds."² Jefferson believed that "such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which, in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private."³

While in principle every man was considered able to particpate in government, in practice some lives made for better citizens than others, Jefferson thought. The environment of the city was hostile to the health of the republic because it introduced into social relations the "casualties and caprice" of trade, crowded people together in relations of dependence and generally corrupted the body politic by making some people subservient and others wildly ambitious. "The mobs of the cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body," he concluded in his Notes on the State of Viriginia.⁴

The view of the city as crowded and corrupt has a long history in Western thought, and there is nothing particularly distinctive about Jefferson's version of it. What is significant is his realization that the conditions which encouraged a competent and independent citizenry were, after all, impermanent, capable of being undone by social changes no one could control. In an introduction to Jefferson's writings John Dewey amplified this point. The American experiment with representative government benefited from many fortunate accidents and acts of providence, Dewey wrote. These included the wide ocean separating America from Europe, the Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberties which did not have to be discovered anew, the many competing religions which prevented a single church from dominating, the great stetches of land and rich resources which allowed freedom of movement, the independent spirit developed on the frontier, and so on. Jefferson understood these advantages, Dewey observed, "Even so, he had fears for the future when the country would be urbanized and industrialized, though upon the whole, he says, he tended by temperment to take counsel of his hopes rather than his fears" (Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson 19-20).

As almost everyone knows, Jefferson's native trust in the people was also coupled with a desire to improve their minds through education. In his Second Inagural Address, he told his audience to "bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable."⁵ Of course, it was not the burden of education to bring reason to the masses but simply to bring it out, for Jefferson was a child of the Enlightenment who believed that reason was God's design revealed in the nature of man.⁶

Though the good sense of the people would emerge in the long run, he believed, there would always be errors and false steps along the way. The way to prevent them from becoming too serious was to give the people "full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people."⁷ The press, then, was part of Jefferson's plan for improving the minds of the people, and he stuck to this plan even though the newspapers of his day performed scandalously, in his estimation.⁸

Jefferson's reputation as an upholder of press freedom and an advocate of popular education is certainly deserved, but its bulk tends to overshadow another approach he had to improving the public mind. This was to limit the size of the world which that mind had to judge. The way he proposed to do this was to divide each state into small political units resembling the New England parish. These would be so limited in scope that every citizen would feel responsible for their administration and would gain the experience of self government in a practical way. The small units Jefferson called wards:

Each ward would thus be a small republic within itself, and every man in the State would thus become an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important, and entirely within his competence. The wit of man cannot devise a more solid basis for a free, durable and well-administered republic.

In Jefferson's scheme the wards would be given as much of the work of government as they could reasonably manage, passing on whatever larger responsibilities remained to higher political units such as the county, state and nation (Adams xiii). Dewey notes that it was the extension of the scale of government past the dimensions of local life that Jefferson wanted to minimize at all costs-- not "government" (or the Federal government) per se (22). The danger was a machinery that exceeded the grasp of the average man's mind. That mind could be taught to grasp more, but just as important was the need to keep the demands on it modest. This is an approach to "informing the public" which has had very little force in American thought. The idea that "keeping the public informed" means more than providing information, that it could also mean limiting the range of things the public has to be informed about, has rarely occured to anyone other than Jefferson, for whom these things went hand in hand.⁹ Late in his life, Jefferson said there were two subjects he would "claim a right to further" for as long as he was alive: "the public education, and the sub-division of the counties into wards. I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks."¹⁰

The reason for this long digression into Jefferson's thought can now be made clear. Jefferson believed that "informing the public" would be a difficult task even for a scrupulous press free of government interference. The difficulties concerned not only the performance of newspapers--which Jefferson found atrocious--but also the composition of the public and the dimensions of the world it had to be informed about. His first and most famous solution was to educate the people and to encourage a flow of information to them through the press. But his second solution was more interesting: to somehow preserve a world whose citizens were self informing. That is why he admired the farmer's world so much, and that of the New England towns: they produced competent citizens by their very nature. The farmer was the ideal of the independent citizen, the New England parish that of the independent community. What both were independent from were the conditions which extend the scale of the community and make it dependent on news. Both, in other words, were bulwarks against the "awayness" of things.

In attempting to preserve these worlds Jefferson was in effect reversing the logic of the republic whose future he had so much in mind. For as his friend Madison recognized, the very idea of a republic was that it extended the "natural limit" of the self contained town. In a similar way, Jefferson appeared to be holding back history when he suggested that America should remain a nation of farmers and "keep our workmen in Europe" by importing rather than manufacturing whatever goods were needed.¹¹ Trade and industry, the growth of cities and the reach of a national government over the heads of citizens were all on the horizon, and since he was not blind to these facts Jefferson had a third solution to the problem of "informing the public"-- faith. The people were to be educated, their public duties limited in scope as long as possible, but in the end they were simply to be trusted, for the only alternative to trusting their good sense was force (Dewey, Living Thoughts 18, 24).

As a champion of the press Jefferson is an odd figure indeed. For he sought to preserve a scale small enough to require no press at all. He did so not because he distrusted the press (although he did), but rather because he understood that if an "informed public" existed in his day, it existed not as a result of a free press, but as a social condition, a way of life made possible by certain advantages Americans had enjoyed. As a social condition it could pass from the stage of history; and it would pass, he thought, if the open spaces filled up and the country became urbanized, or if the scale of government outgrew the grasp of the average man.

Communication as cause and cure

For the present study, the important points are two: first, that all the possibilities Jefferson feared actually came to pass in the second half of the nineteenth century; second, that their coming is what enabled the press to grow into a powerful institution touching everyone's life. The mobs of the city may have threatened the health of the republic, but they were the ones who purchased newspapers when the modern press began to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century. Industrialization and urbanization may have done away with the generally competent citizen and made for a population of dependents, yet the same forces made mass production of newspapers a possiblity-- not only by introducing the machinery necessary for large circulations, but also by spurring the growth of the advertising which financed the development of the modern newspaper. Similarly, the gradual expansion of Federal responsibilities undoubtedly made for a less informed public, in the sense that the scale of the national government grew too large to relate easily to daily life. Yet this same growth made the press an indispensable part of national politics and gave American journalists a permanent function in government which the rest of the world still finds astonishing. As the world of the small town and the indepedent farmer disappeared from American life, so did the possibility of assuming a naturally informed public composed of competent citizens who could and did make the "ultimate decisions," as Mott put it earlier in this chapter. If such a public ever existed, it was not the one the press was to address when it began to assume its modern shape in the 1830s.

Like Jefferson, Tocqueville understood that the conditions favoring the American experiment with democracy were impermanent, and when they changed the character of citizenship would change as well. He predicted the difficulties Americans would have when their world outgrew the secure environment of the small town:

The country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they inhabit, for that soil is to them an inanimate clod; nor in the usages of their forefathers, which they have learned to regard as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they doubt; nor in the laws, which do not originate in their own authority, nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise. The country is lost to their senses; they can discover it neither under its own nor under borrowed features, and they retire into a narrow and unenlightened prejudice. (1: 242-3)

Tocqueville is simply saying that as the nation grows bigger, it becomes "lost to the senses" and citizens begin to understand it, not on its true scale, but according to the limited horizon of their personal experience. We are accustomed to thinking that the press can prevent this retreat into ignorance and prejudice. After all, is this not the function of the free flow of information, the reason we give special protection to the carriers of news? Is it not the purpose of a free press to breach the gap opened up between the scale of the nation and the "self-informing" village environment? What the present chapter has tried to show is that the bridging of such a gap is not simply a matter of providing enough information to keep people in touch with distant events. For the situation is more complex than that. Prior to the precious functions of news in a free society, news is function of other things, especially the extension of the community's affairs in space. The doctrine of a free press would obviously insist that, as the nation grows bigger and more complex, the function of the press is to restore the shape of the country in the eyes of its citizens, and to do so accurately and fairly. But the press is also a function of the changes which give the country a "dim and dubious" shape in the first place. And so is communication in general.

Here we come upon an intruiging problem in press history and communication theory. As communication media are called on to inform the citizen of events he cannot witness himself, they are simultaneously involved in enlarging the world of unwitnessable events. We have already seen how this worked during the Revolution. By spreading word of rising sentiment against the mother country, the press helped create a community whose interests extended across the colonies and whose status could only be told through the news. News of the Revolution created a revolution in the need for news. The same was true for printed material in general; it enlarged the world of the colonist and brought word of an enlarged world. Tocqueville, for example, pointed out that while the press helped to create a world of political equals, it also provided a voice to those lost in its midst. "Equality sets men apart and weakens them," he wrote, "but the press places a powerful weapon within every man's reach, which the loneliest of them all may use... Printing has accelerated the progress of equality, and it is also one of its best correctives" (2: 324-25). In a similar way, it might be said that communication enlarges the problem of an uninformed public even as it appears to provide its solution. Perhaps the clearest example of this dialectic at work will be examined in future chapters: the growth of the telegraph, which brought news of distant events while at the same time making such distances a fact of life.

Summary

This chapter began by arguing that news is a function of distance. A public which requires a press to "keep in touch" therefore cannot be assumed to always exist. Instead, it arises when the community's affairs are extended over a distance across which news must travel. In America such a public was formally brought into existence by the Constitution, which gave every citizen political duties extending far beyond the local community and its organic methods for informing the citizen. Eighteenth century America had good reason to believe that its citizens would not be lost in the wider environment of the republic, for the way the country was settled had bred independence and competence into the character of the people-- or at least the belief in these. Among the results was the notion that every citizen was capable of governing not only himself, but the community as well, since government was basically a "homespun affair." This idea persisted despite the fact that, unlike the Greeks, Americans have always had work to do other than the work of citizenship.

But the conditions favorable to a competent citizenry were social conditions, which meant that they were subject to change. Jefferson in particular had fears for the day the country would become urbanized and industrialized, and he tried preserve a smaller scale by building into the structure of government a limit on the demands of the average man's mind. His idea of the ward was an attempt to imagine a political unit for which a press would not be necessary, a community small enough to be self informing. This was almost an order for history to stop, for Jefferson could see that an urban, industrialized country and a large and distant national government were all coming to pass. The irony is that their coming is what enabled the press to grow in size and prestige, which suggests the intruiging possibility that the conditions undermining a naturally competent public are also those making for a powerful press.

This more or less reverses the way we are taught to think about press and public. We are taught to equate a stronger, larger and more widely available press with a more informed public, but it may be that the arrival of one brings the decline of the other. A more developed press and a less informed public may go hand in hand, not because this new press prints lies or leaves out information--the perennial concerns of press commentary--but rather because "informing the public" involves more than the facts necessary to be informed. It involves the world one is to be informed about and the scale of events in that world. In the next chapter this line of thought meets the arrival of the modern newspaper.

CHAPTER TWO

TWO VIEWS OF NEWS

History presents a most fortunate fact to the student of American journalism: the sharp line separating the modern newspaper from its predecessors. Neither the meaning nor the cause of the revolution of the 1830s is entirely clear, but that it was a revolution is beyond dispute. Within a few years the newspaper had transformed itself from a special interest journal serving a limited class of merchants and public men to a mass medium capable of reaching every citizen in the community. From a selling system which priced a copy of the paper at six cents available only to yearly subscribers came a street sale system which delivered the paper everywhere in the city for the magic price of a penny. The staid business of stock prices, ship schedules, speeches and official announcements gave way to sensational accounts of murders and scandals, outrageous invasions of private worlds, offbeat sketches of everyday life and a general tone of wonder and amusement that had been completely absent from the jounalism of the day.

Incredible as it seems, local news was almost unheard of in the six cent journals; it took the penny papers of the 1830s to discover that people wanted to learn about events in their own environment. Advertisements in the commercial press were long and dull and frequently went unchanged for weeks at a time; it took the penny papers to declare that ads were a form of news, and therefore had to vary each day to be interesting. Reporting was virtually an unknown art; the penny papers discovered that news had to be found by men who knew where to look. Finally, the huge circulations of the penny press provided the capital to finance astonishing feats of newsgathering that began to bring the ends of the earth in contact with one another.

The changes begun by the penny papers marked out the course American journalism was to follow into the twentieth century: more and more enterprise in the gathering of information, the development of a specialized reporting profession, the gradual decline in the influence of the editorial and a rise in the importance of news, the increasing independence of the newspaper from politicians and political parties, bigger and bigger circulations made possible by new methods of mass appeal, and with those circulations an increasingly rationalized advertising system that became the finanical footing of the newspaper. As Michael Schudson points out in Discovering the News:

There were rural papers, hundreds of them, but the papers which set the standard for journalism then and passed on their legacy to the present were urban. There were party papers, there were socialist papers and labor papers, there were business papers, but, again, the papers to which modern journalism clearly traces its roots were the middle-class penny papers.

Given the importance of the penny press, one might expect to find a number of explanations competing among historians for the right to rule textbooks and guide future inquiry. One might anticipate different schools of thought on the question of why the cheap papers emerged when they did, each leading to a different view of the modern newspaper. By now there should perhaps be a revisionist history of the penny papers, or several such histories. One finds almost none of this. It is not that a single explanation dominates the field, leaving students of the press free to tackle other problems. What characterizes the field is an aversion to large organizing concepts which would connect the progress of news and newspapers to broader cultural patterns. Much of journalism history is simply a chronicle, in which the major events seemingly cause themselves.¹

It is significant that Frank Luther Mott thought it necessary to say in the introduction to his standard history of the press that "the only safe generalization about journalism is that no generalization about it is safe" (American Journalism vii). The same might be said for any area of social inquiry. One is always faced with too many particulars, too much that can never be known and too much knowledge that can never be assimilated. To mention such a commonplace is merely to restate the problem of the scholar sitting down to write: no generalization is safe. So why would a writer mention it, if not to announce an intention to avoid the problem of generalizing? In coming across Mott's remark, Schudson was correct to point out that "no generalization is safe, but we live by them and with them" (Discovering the News 42). Similarly, in an article criticizing the timidity of press historians, Allan Nevins observes that "the superabundance of jumbled, disparate and mainly trivial details in the files places on the writer a burden of assortment and synthesis under which most men break down." But press history is so thoroughly connected to the movement of larger social forces that one has no choice, Nevins argues. If the student of journalism "does not fix on the right principles of selection and synthesis he might as well throw himself into a vat of printer's ink" (413).

But what are the right principles? According to James Carey, the way to discover them and to cure the defects of press history as a whole is to reconstrue the development of the press as a chapter in a larger, only partially written history of how people have made sense of their world. In an essay on "The Problem of Journalism History" Carey writes:

Journalism is essentially a state of consciousness, a way of apprehending, of experienceing the world. The central idea in journalism history is the "idea of a report" and the changing notions of what is taken to be an adequate report of the world. Because we are a news saturated people it may seem strange to argue that the desire to know, understand and experience the world by getting news or reports about it is really a rather strange appetite.

Carey's suggestion is to "de-naturalize" the demand for news. Instead of seeing news as an obvious necessity, something humans require each day as they require sleep or food, we can ask how it is historically that most people come to demand a daily newspaper. Here the penny papers occupy a critical place in press history, for they not only popularized the press, putting a daily paper in the hands of the common man for the first time; they also set in motion the development of the modern newspaper, chiefly by discovering the popular appeal of the human interest story.

In the first chapter, we concluded that news is a function of distance; it arises as a social necessity when the scale of events in a community is extended beyond the reach of word of mouth. We then posed the following problem for the relation between press and public: the extension in scale which gives birth to news as a social artifact is also the eclipse of certain advantages American democracy enjoyed in its formative period-- in particular, the rooting of politics in a local, mostly agrarian environment where every citizen could grasp the meaning of political events and feel like a particpant in them. In this chapter we delve further into this contradiction by examining the rise of the penny papers. Our goal will not be to simply describe changes in the form of the newspaper but to connect these to changes in the scale of everyday life, especially to the rise of the city, that environment whose character and size Jefferson feared. If it is true that the rise of the press is also the decline of a village environment and the political life it allowed, then there should be a sense in which a bigger, more powerful, more modern press means a less informed, less active, less capable public-- not because the information carried by this new press is unreliable or incomplete compared to its predecessor, but rather because the conditions making for an informed, competent public are not primarily characteristics of the press. They are social conditions involving the "awayness" of things. What relation did the penny papers have to the "awayness of things?" That is the question the present chapter addresses. Here history does the student of the press another good turn. The penny papers did not appear everywhere at once but only in the largest cities, and first in New York, the largest. The initial connections, then, will have to be between the city as a human (and, in certain important respects, inhuman) environment and the newspaper as a report (and a part) of that envionment. Let us see where this approach takes us.

The breaking apart of the common world

In 1784 William Bradford, a Philadelphia printer and the proprietor of the Merchants' Coffee-House, announced that his establishment would provide a new service.

To prevent the many disappointments that daily happen to returned citizens, or others, enquiring for friends, connections, or those that they may have business with; the subscriber has opened a book, as A City Register, alphabetically arranged, at the bar of the Coffee-House, where any gentlemen now resident in the City, either as a housekeeper or a lodger, or those who may hereafter arrive may insert their names and place of residence.

What Bradford was offering was a form of news-- word of who was in town and where they could be reached. While central meeting places like inns and taverns had always provided such information, they had done it through word of mouth. New in town, a stranger would wander in and inquire after his connection. The need for a written register arises when there are too many connections, too many strangers, too many arrivals and departures for the community to maintain through speech and memory a record of its inhabitants. Here is a fundamental condition of city living: no one knows who the inhabitants are, or, at any given time, where they can be found. What held for people also held for ships. For years Bradford had kept a log in which captains could enter their names, the names of their vessels, the port from which they sailed and any other information which might interest merchants (A.M. Lee 46). Such a log becomes necessary when a port grows to a certain size and its traffic becomes too heavy, its day too busy for each ship to be sighted or for news of its arrival to spread through word of mouth. The need for news in these examples arises from conditions of ignorance (or, as Bradford put it, from "the many disappointments which daily happen to returned citizens") created by the scale of the city as a human environment.

Urbanization represents a kind of breaking apart of the common space in which people once dwelled, a division of the community into many separate worlds which the city dweller may or may not inhabit at different times throughout the day. Thus, where people once worked and lived within sighting (or shouting) distance of any arriving ship, in the city they begin to lose this totality of vision; a public event is no longer public in the same way for all. That the space of the common world has been split apart is obvious to us when we look out over the city from a tower or skyscraper. The thrill of the panorama is the restoration of a total view; the city is suddenly intelligble again, and we can connect the parts to make a whole.² But to get such a view we must abandon the streets for the tower: back on the ground the panorama dissolves, the common world breaks apart into the private space of each inhabitant. What happens to space happens to the social group as well. It can no longer keep track of all the inhabitants and pass judgment on their actions, a fact which has always made the city a refuge for the artist and the deviant. In the city the special status of the stranger becomes generalized. He is no longer a visitor but a member, his presence is not an event but a condition of urban life. In Richard Sennett's clever phrasing, the city is a place "where strangers are likely to meet" (39).

With these conditions a new sort of "awayness" enters the character of daily life. People are now separated from one another not by physical space--they are more compressed than ever--but by a psycho-social distance that turns cohabitants into strangers. Events unfold at a distance that is not primarily spatial but mental: one is near to, but not aware of, all sorts of occurences. Here, then, is an important paradox of city life: people and events are both distant and near. As Louis Wirth put it in a famous essay on urban living, "The contacts of the city may indeed be face to face, but they are nevertheless impersonal, superficial, transitory and segmental" (12). Thus the familiar modern lament: "alone in the crowd."

If personal isolation and physical closeness are ingredients for the urban angst, they are also the formula for a city newspaper. The complexity, fragmentation and incoherence of urban life create the need for news, while the nearness of the inhabitants to each other makes possible a central newsgathering operation and a distribution system that does not have to range too far to cover its territory.

Today, the unraveling of the central city into far-flung suburbs is undoing the logic of the city newspaper. Papers based in large cities are losing circulation to the suburban dailies, which are based closer to where people live. This shift has already spelled the death of the afternoon newspaper in most major cities (Smith, Goodbye Gutenberg 30-31, 69-71).

Separating the news from the newspaper

What William Bradford discovered was that the scale of commerce in Philadelphia had created the need for new forms of news. Because of the new distances governing daily life conections had been broken, meetings missed; merchants were operating without the knowledge they needed. Bradford also understood that Philadelphians in need of this news were near enough to each other to meet at a central place-- the Merchants' Coffee-house. Nearness to, ignorance of these are the conditions of city life that make possible new forms of journalism.

The historical significance of the coffee-house is that it offered a variety of daily journalism before the appearence of the daily newspaper. Bradford himself was a printer and the publisher of a weekly, the Pennsylvania Journal. One suspects he would have gone to a daily if he thought the city could support such an enterprise. While his coffee-house began its news service to merchants in 1754, the first dailies did not appear until 1785, after which they gradually took over the journalistic functions of the coffee house (A.M. Lee 45). The interval of thirty years suggests one point where the history of the news departs from the history of the newspaper.

Let us be certain the distinction is clear. News is a social artifact. Wherever there are distances of a certain type governing everyday life, a need for news is created. The German economist Karl Knies noted that emmigration always steps up the flow of written communication because it extends the family unit in space and creates a new demand to "stay in touch" (qtd. in Hardt 84). This is an example of the social conditions to which news is a response. The letters which pour across the seas in time of war are also a rudimentary form of news, created by the same conditions which require businessmen to learn of distant events which may affect their interests. The problem news solves is therefore a social problem, having to do with the contact human beings must maintain with an enviornment extended in space. Newspapers, on the other hand, are an outgrowth of the printing press. The first problem they must solve is an economic one: how to produce a product whose sale will at least offset the cost of printing the paper (Hardt 104). Different solutions to this problem have given us different forms for the newspaper: the party press is one solution, the commercial journals for the merchant class another, the mass circulation newspaper another, and so on.³ To simply furnish the news has never solved the economic problem of the newspaper. There has always had to be something else-- government printing contracts, political party subsidies, advertising revenues, all of which have helped to support the basically unprofitable business of gathering and distributing news. In this sense there has never been an independent press.⁴ To find exceptions to this rule one must reduce the newspaper, which circulates generally, to the news-letter, which circulates privately. Since the seventeenth century there have been wealthy patrons willing to pay enough for news to offset the costs of its collection and transmission, but part of what they are paying for is exclusivity-- the fact that the news is not published.⁵

Once the social problem of news has been separated logically from the economic problem of publishing a newspaper, a new way of interpreting the significance of the penny papers becomes possible. For the penny press was a revolution in both news and newspapering. New forms of news were introduced and a new form for the newspaper was invented. The social problem involving contact with an extended environment was solved in a new way, while the economic problem of supporting the capital costs of the printing press also gained a new solution. The factor essential to both revolutions was the density and scale of the city.

The logic of local news

With the rise of the city a new fact entered daily life and revolutionized journalism: the immediate environment became unfamiliar. This is what the six-cent journals had not fully understood. They served a class of readers, mostly political men and merchants, whose affairs were extended in space in the traditional sense. The political man, for example, naturally looked to the capital for the latest news. Historian James Melvin Lee notes that among political newspapers the "most important piece of news was always a report of the official proceedings of Washington." Ignoring events in the local community, the editors of political papers would publish the routine details of Congressional debates, often printing long-winded speeches verbatim. They "evidently thought that which came from Washington had additional news value because of its source," Lee observes (145). The businessmen was similarly interested in news from afar; his investments were bound to be affected by events he was not able to witness or hear about in time. It was simply in the nature of commerce to produce this sort of need for news, for as Marshall McLuhan once observed, "Money is action at a distance, both in space and in time" (Understanding Media 136).

An early hint that the immediate environment had become unfamiliar came with the coffee house, whose log recorded nearby events that had escaped the notice of the merchant. This was the beginning of local news, which before had been a contradiction in terms. The logic of local news originates in the urban paradox: the fact that the city's inhabitants are near to but yet distant from events unfolding around them. The daily newspaper began when it became economically feasible to publish the local news previously available at the coffee house. Its first function was to provide merchants with up-to-date shipping news and prices current, information which came from the very streets on which the merchants walked (Mott, American Journalism 118). The first dailies thus took advantage of those special conditions the urban audience shares: proximity to, ignorance of, each other. But as we have said several times, these papers were limited to a certain class of readers. What the success of the penny papers eventually demonstrated was that merchants were not the only city dwellers isolated from events unfolding in their immediate environment. This had become a general condition of urban life, and it could therefore provide the logic for new forms of news and--because the new audience was so large--a new solution to the economic problem of the newspaper. Let us examine the revolution in news first.

What was so different about the kind of news the penny papers presented? To begin with, it was aimed at a different sort of reader: the mechanics, artisans and shopkeepers, members of what Schudson calls "a rising middle class," who found little to interest them in the commercial and political journals (Discovering the News 56). These readers had been excluded from the established press not only by subject matter but also by price. As Issac Pray noted, "Even slander was slow in sale at sixpence" (184). Part of the formula for the penny papers was borrowed from the London Morning Herald, which had built a huge circulation in the 1820s by featuring humorous sketches of police courts and sensational accounts of criminal trials (Mott, American Journalism 22; Bleyer 156). The New York Sun, the first successful penny paper, combined these borrowed features with short, sprightly items of local interest, often with a moral lesson stated or implied, together with shocking accounts of prodigies and monstrosities. Editorially, the Sun delivered its opinion on such topics as public drunkenness, dueling and gambling, the sort of "issues" that were likely to interest its readership (Bleyer 164). The contrast with the sixpenny papers was dramatic; they had been dominated by shipping news, stock prices, reprints of speeches and elaborately argued editorials called "leaders," part of the in-fighting typical of party politics at the time.

The penny papers were an immediate hit. The Sun appeared on September 3, 1833, and within four months had a circulation of 5,000, more than any other paper in New York. From this point on the cheap press would far outdistance its rival in circulation, achieving levels undreamed of by the six cent journals: over 20,000 in 1836, 30,000 in the 1850s and 60,000 in the 1860s (Mott, American Journalism 222, 234, 237).

Human interest: a childish desire?

How to account for the miracle of the penny press? Edward P. Mitchell, the Sun's editor-in-chief, attributed the paper's success to "the abolishment of the conventional measures of news importance" and "the substitution of the absolute standard of real interest to human beings" (qtd. in Bleyer 303). Let us examine what this means. In practice there is no doubt about what it meant: a deliberate shift away from politics and public affairs, which, of course, had been one of the mainstays of the sixpenny journals. It has frequently been observed that the penny papers declared themselves independent from political parties, and almost every opening prospectus for a cheap paper goes out of its way to make that point; but this generalization, while true, understates the case considerably. In word and deed the penny papers declared themselves independent not only from political parties but from politics itself, from the assumption that political affairs had an automatic claim on people's attention. As Bleyer observes:

Day dismissed briefly, or entirely excluded, political news, the doings of Congress and of the state legislature, the political speeches, as well as editorials on political and economic questions, to all of which the sixpenny papers devoted most of their space. In the matter of politics, the Sun, like most of the penny papers that followed it, was not only neutral but quite unconcerned.

In the first chapter we heard Jefferson argue, in one of his most famous statements on the press, that "the people are the only censors of their governors." They may err, Jefferson wrote, but the only way to prevent their errors from becoming too serious was to "give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should pentrate the whole mass of the people." To reach the point where it did, in fact, "penetrate the whole mass of the people," the newspaper of the nineteenth century had to reject politics and public affairs. It became the popular medium Jefferson envisioned only by abandoning the functions he had envisoned for it. (And it could take this step only because of the scale and character of the city, the environment Jefferson thought would be the ruin of the republic.) Thus, the image of a public informed through newspapers, so vivid to democrats then and now, is something of a mirage in press history. It is difficult to square with the means by which the press actually began to reach a general audience. As Bleyer observed, the secret of the Sun and its imitators was in "appealing to the emotions of the masses, rather than to their intellects..." (164). This was surely not what Jefferson had in mind.

Yet as soon as we have said this a problem presents itself. The simple opposition between the emotions and the intellect, the instincts and the intelligence, the irrational and rational sides of man--a theme found throughout press history and, indeed, through much of Western thought--threatens to prevent any understanding of how the methods of mass apppeal actually function, and how they differ, as communication, from the sort of news that is said to "inform" people. A cloud of pejoratives hangs over the forms of news popularized by the penny papers, indeed, over those items in the press of any period that are merely "interesting" rather than "important." In her study of the human interest element in journalism, Hughes writes, "Human interest is the interest of the laymen. It is, moreover, the interest of the unsophisticated, the young and the childish" (215).

Using these terms, it is easy to explain the success of the penny papers in the 1830s, or the "Yellow Journalism" of the 1890s, or something like People magazine today: most people are not mature enough to demand the higher forms of journalism. They require the immediate and therefore childish satisfactions of human interest stories, refusing, because of temperment, upbringing, or sheer lack of self-control, to develop adult habits of reading and thinking. They would rather "let themselves go," as Schudson has phrased this opposition, rather than "control themselves" by reading of politics and public affairs.⁶ As an 1896 editorial in the Nation put it:

The note of the press today which most needs changing is childishness. Even if the papers are clean and decent, they are fit only for the nursery. The pictures are childish; the intelligence is mainly for boys and girls. The "good stories" are trivial, and are intended chiefly for junior clerks and laborers. The observations on public as distinguished from party affairs, are quite juvenile. The abuse is mostly boyish or street abuse, with neither rhyme nor reason to it. What is wanted in the way of reform is mainly maturity, the preparation of the paper for grown people engaged in serious occupations. Gravity either in discussing or in managing our affairs is fast vanishing under the journalistic influence. We laugh over everything; make fun of everybody, and think it will "all come out right in the end," just like ill-bred children who hate to have their games interrupted.

Under this sort of reasoning, the press would improve if journalists and readers would begin acting like grown-ups. The weaknesses of mass journalism are moral weaknesses, a giving in to temptation or a refusal to face up to adult responsibilities. As a sociological understanding of the methods of mass appeal, this view obviously has severe limitations. In the end it is not all that different from "explaining" structural unemployment by referring to the laziness of the unemployed.

Just as the information the press provides (or fails to provide) is not the determining factor in whether the public is informed, neither is the maturity or temperment of the citizen a sufficient explanation for how well the press informs the public. In both cases, what needs to be understood are the social conditions which give rise to different forms of news and govern their uses. In the case of the penny papers and the human interest story, we need to ask what the communication functions of the human interest item are in a city environment: what do these stories do for people? And we need to ask how the social utility of the merely "interesting" differs from that of information.

The journalist as dramatist

What exactly is a human interest story? Let us take a typical item from the Sun's popular police court sketches and see how it works.

Catharine McBride was brought in for stealing a frock. Catharine said she had just served out 6 months on Blackwell's Island, and she wouldn't be sent back again for the best glass of punch that ever was made. Her husband, when she last left the penitentiary, took her to a boarding house in Essex St., but the rascal got made at her, pulled her hair, pinched her arm, and kicked her out of bed. She was determined not to bear such treatment as this, and so got drunk and stole the frock out of pure spite. Committed.

What is of interest here? What makes this a reportable item? The typical Sun reader would not know Mrs. McBride, nor really care about what happens to her. She is not a member of a community small enough to have an interest in the conduct of each of its members. Although the item sounds like gossip, its functions are very different. Gossip communicates what is known but cannot be told about the members of a community. It is a kind of adjustment mechanism which releases the pressure on public appearences by providing a common but more or less secret means of distributing knowledge incompatible with the "front" people maintain for friends and neighbors. In Erving Goffman's terms, gossip is "backstage" talk which has the function of keeping "front-stage" performances apparently free from scandal (106-140). In a village environment, the "keeping up" or maintenance of appearences is a function the entire community performs in order to stay together as a community. For when a life is damaged by publicity, many other lives are affected: a family history is at stake, and that family's history is connected to everyones else's, all of them reflecting, for good or ill, on the reputation of the town and thus on the self-image of each of its members. In this sense every town is "our town," a place where everyone's business is "our business." Because gossip threatens so deeply the health and history of the community its characteristic expression is a whisper. What is a whisper? Speech without voice, content from which the distributing power of a medium has been withdrawn. Gossip, then, can never be published: that is what makes it gossip.

But in the city the terrible power of gossip dissipates. Strangers do not hold over one another the community's power to judge. Lives are not intertwined in precious histories to which every family has contributed. A domestic tragedy is not a tragedy for everyone but only for those directly involved, and these poor souls form a tiny minority. "Detachment is therefore achieved in the city," Hughes remarks, "where even the deepest tragedies are events in the lives of persons unseen and quite unknown to the majority of readers" (150). (Thus, the penny papers were the first to publish the names of bankrupt persons, an unthinkable act in a village environment.) In a small town newspaper, Hughes notes, the "human" behavior of animals is often the subject of human interest stories, for animals "have no interests and no reputations" to protect (152). In the city, where the people involved are not known to each other, the item of gossip can safely be published. But its social functions then change. Where it once served to maintain social order by releasing pressure on appearences, it now dramatizes the social order by presenting symbolic instances of its collapse and restoration. As Robert Park puts it, the incident "ceases to be a record of the doings of individual men and women and becomes an impersonal account of manners and life" (Society 93). Here "impersonal" means "symbolic." The information is no longer important as information; it does not tell people about events in particular lives. Instead, it becomes material for a little domestic tragedy. The wife becomes all wives, the drunk all drunks: the particular begins to signify the typical. As the information in gossip changes functions and becomes the material of art, what had been a community of participants with an interest in the outcome of events is also transformed. The community of actors becomes an audience whose interest is that of a spectator at a play, waiting to see what will happen on stage.

The archtypal human interest story is a crime, not because a fascination with crime and criminals is "fundamental in human nature," as Mott would put it, but because the nature of drama is that it requires an incident, a disturbance, a conflict, some departure from the procession of ordinary events whose outcome will provide the occasion for telling a story. Even if the night is relatively peaceful the journalist as dramatist will hunt down some odd incident or disturbance. For one cannot dramatize the peace without first having it broken in some way. As a writer for the North American Review noted in 1885:

A million people behave themselves, but that is no news. Nobody thinks of reporting that, of saying anything about it. But if one contemptible man, any miserable tramp, anywhere in America, commits a meanness, they not only note the fact, but tell us all about it.

The complaint here is an interesting one: a million instances of law-abiding behavior go unnoticed, while one crime gets all the attention. When the function of news is to inform people about actual conditions "out there" in the world of events, the million-to-one ratio is a measure of inaccuracy. The news has failed to bring an empirical truth to light-- the fact that most people behave themselves. But when the function of news is essentially dramatic, the same ratio becomes the very logic of the form: it is exactly the million-to-one relationship which makes the crime of interest. And it is interesting not as a description of social reality but as a dramatization of it. Thus, the press, as the Review notes, must "tell us all about it." Indeed, the telling is the point of the exercise. For only as the tale is told do we learn that Catharine McBride got drunk and stole the frock "out of pure spite." Only then is our dramatic interest satisified. (The deferral of this satisfaction, the elimination of the event as the starting point for drama and its resolution as the end, is what made Beckett's Waiting for Godot such a radical idea for a play. By staging a drama in which "nothing happens" Beckett upended the logic of the theatre, thereby revealing its apparently natural forms as historical conventions whose time, he thought, had come. At an earlier stage of press history waiting for events to occur was a common experience, not one a dramatist had to provide. Publick Occurrences, the first newspaper published in America, announced on September 25, 1690 that it would appear monthly, "or, if any Glut of Occurences happen, oftener" (qtd. in Mott, American Journalism 9). Whether something would happen was still a question in 1690-- chances were it would not. The daily newspaper could not appear until the city offered an environment in which something was always happening, with the police court as the one place where "a glut of occurrences" was sure to collect. That something has happened, that the pattern of stillness has been disturbed and action taken in the world, that each day, each hour, will inevitably bring its news-- this is the deepest and most basic assumption in modern journalism, amounting almost to a form of faith. The teletype machines clattering away in the newsroom reaffirm this faith, telling anyone who happens to be around that events are constantly unfolding. Were the machines to grow silent the only possible explanation would be a mechanical failure: that the world might stop producing events is unthinkable. Even more than theatre, the conventions of journalism depend on the inevitability of something happening, of the surface being disturbed. Thus, the news is to said to "break." That it will break is the premise on which a modern press is built.)

The old newsroom formula, "when dog bites man, that's not news; when man bites dog, that's news" illustrates the dependence of the news on the variation from routine. Man biting dog provides the occasion for dramatizing the fact that ordinarily it is dogs that go around biting men. Other news items published in the Sun exhibit the same logic. Reports on a child prodigy or a man with seven toes are extremely direct ways of dramatizing the ordinary limits of human ability or, in an even more basic fashion, the normal design of the human body. Again, the appetite for these tales is not fundamental in human nature like the sex drive or the hunger for food. It develops historically, and until we have a social history of human amusements we will not understand fully why it developed when it did. Yet if there is something fundamentally human about these items, it is the way they allow meaning to be made. Here we can simply mention the structuralist insight that meaning, in language and in everything else, is constructed by the play of differences.⁷

Information and the need to act

What have we said so far? That human interest items may superficially resemble an item of gossip in a small town but in fact have a very different function in a city. That function is to dramatize the social order by telling a story about its disturbance. The information in the story is not important because it refers to actual people and their movements in the world of events, but rather because it provides the material for the art of the human interest item. It literally "makes a good story." A good story will always involve some disturbance or break in the pattern of ordinary events not because journalists (or their audiences) are perverse, but because journalists are acting as dramatists and the nature of drama is to begin with some such break. Thus one writer's formula for news: "News is any event which varies from the reader's picture of the normal and accustomed world" (Irwin, Propaganda and the News 47). It can be argued that meaning in general requires a conflict, an opposition, something to create the play of differences. A crime is the typical human interest story since it represents a kind of generic instance of the surface being broken: a "disturbance of the peace" in its most basic form. The crime story does not empirically describe social reality but furnishes the material for enacting a drama about it. H.D. Duncan calls this type of ritual a "sociodrama," which, for modern man, is typically mounted through the mass media. In the sociodrama mounted by crime, the values of the community are given life, made meaningful to people, through the symbolic threat posed to them by the criminal. For Duncan, the sociodrama demonstrates that "people do not want information about, but identification with, community life. In drama they participate" (34).

Information about, identification with-- two types of news, two uses for information, two different roles for the journalist, two attitudes toward the world on the part of the audience, two kinds of communication. These are the distinctions we need to make in understanding the significance of human interest news and the revolution of the 1830s, not the simple opposition between a child's desires and an adult's. Let us explore these distinctions further.

We have already observed a number of times that the need for news arises when events unfold at a distance. Implicit in this understanding of news has been the connection between information and action. Word of events unfolding at a distance is necessary in order to adjust action to the current state of affairs. Thus, the wealthy merchant and the statesman are the first to require news because they must control action across the space of their empires. But the human interest item makes this connection between information and action problematic. As Park observes in the introduction to Hughes's book,

Items like these are interesting not because there is anything to be done about them, not anything that is urgent enough at any rate to require a revision of one's attitudes. On the contrary they are merely suggestive and seem to project us out of the world of temporal and local affairs into the timeless world of ideas and fancies. (x)

The reason the human interest item seems to exist in a timeless realm is that its meaning resides not in a series of events unfolding "out there" in the world, but in the relationships among the participants and events internal to the story. Roland Barthes makes this point in an essay on what is called in French a fait-divers, which for us is a filler item. Barthes asks us to consider two murders, one a political assassination, the other an ordinary street crime.

In the first, (the assasination), the event (the murder) necessarily refers to an extensive situation outside itself, previous to and around it: "politics"; such news cannot be understood immediately, it can be defined only in relation to a knowledge external to the event, which is political knowledge, however confused; in short, a murder escapes the fait-divers whenever it is exogenuous, proceeding from an already known world... Thus an assasination is always by definition partial information; the fait-divers, on the contrary, is total news, or more precisely, immanent; it contains all its knowledge in itself; no need to know anything about the world in order to consume a fait-divers; it refers formally to nothing but itself... ("Structure of the Fait-Divers" 186\)

Barthes goes on to show how this internal meaning-making (or "immanence") operates in a typical filler item. The item announces that the Palace of Justice has just been cleaned ("That is insignificant," he notes, not even worth an inch of space) for the first time in more than a century. "That becomes a fait-divers," he concludes. Why? Because the two facts, the cleaning of the Palace on the one hand, its infrequency on the other, work together to make for a little story; they create an intelligible meaning, (the way figure and ground make each other intelligible) which can then be elaborated upon. It is this simple structure which identifies the logic of the filler item, not any reference to a larger world of events. "What matters," Barthes says, "is not the terms themselves, the contigent way in which they are saturated (by a murder, a fire, a theft, etc.), but the relation which unites them." Since it is the odd or irregular relation between two facts which brings the filler item into existence, there can be no simple fait-divers, constituted by the peristence of a regular, expected fact. Some break or eruption is required. "The simple is not notable," Barthes concludes (187). Thus, the prodigy and the crime, two basic forms of variation from the expected or persistent pattern, are in Barthes's scheme the typical filler items (189).

Of course, the "important" news of the world, the news we think of as serious and informative, also requires an event to be told. In this sense it is no less dependent than the filler item on some variation from routine. But here the event obtains its meaning in a different way. It is interpreted in light of its relationship to an ongoing situation. Hughes observes that this sort of news "is a phase of action" defined by what comes before and after. "It enters at a crucial moment when something is in process, still unfinished and to be acted upon in the immediate present by a revision of actions or attitudes" (58). But in order for news to function as a "phase of action," (whether this action is material or mental) more than the item of news is required. This is what Barthes meant in saying that political news is always "partial information." An understanding of the events that are "in process" is required for the item to become a piece of information. To be informed by a piece of news one must already be informed enough to know why a piece of news is news: the item itself is not enough. Hughes notes that followers of a sport or experts on the stock market share this status.

The news is meaningful to the fan and the expert as symptoms are to a physician; he takes account of it by revising his attitudes or by planning practical measures to meet it almost as soon as he has heard it. But when the reader does not know how to act, the news is sensational.

Symptoms are meaningful to a physician because he has a structural understanding of the human body which allows him to give "events" like a hacking cough or a chest pain some place in an overall picture of a person's health. Symptoms become symptoms of something only in light of this ordered knowledge which predates the event. For the baseball fan the ordered knowledge consists of the rules of the sport, which make the reports of games played the previous day meaningful. In a similar way, the follower of the stock market knows how the market works: particular events like the day's prices can therefore have a meaning. In addition to this structural understanding--the means to know--the fan, the expert and the physician have a need to know. They feel themselves participants in an ongoing situation: the pennant race, the investment business, the health of a patient. To participate they must act and revise their actions in light of new information. (That is how one "follows" a pennant race, for example.) These actions may be symbolic; they may involve a change of mind or a revision of attitudes. The essential characteristic is not their materiality or concreteness but their contingent quality, the need to continually revise, refigure, reimagine the status of things in light of the latest information about them.

Rethinking the idea of information

This is a mode of being in the world which is anything but natural. People have not always felt a sense of urgency about events, for they have not always understood their world as continually in need of revision. Nor do they necessarily feel this way just because they are presented with the information necessary to act on the feeling. The first people to experience the world in this way were the statesmen and merchants who controlled empires extended in space. The need to control action at a distance is the first and surest demand for news as information. That is why commerce and war have been the spur to most of the advances in newsgathering. And that is why governments and corporations today spend large amounts of money to gather news that would not interest a mass audience. A history of the demand for news would have to include a history of this feeling of controlling action at a distance through a steady supply of fresh data, and the still incomplete spread of that feeling from emperors to ordinary citizens. To trace the development of such an attitude would help begin the project James Carey spoke about: the reconstruction of press history as a study of how "the idea of a report" came to establish itself in modern consciousness.

In the seventeenth, eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries, news was commonly referred to as "intelligence," which, as Anthony Smith notes, was information

passed on from one person in the know to another, a term that contained overtones of diplomatic knowledge garnered in high places and sent along reliable routes to the offices of the editor. "Intelligence" was passed from the well-informed to the well informed. (Goodbye Gutenberg 163\)

To equate news with information is so common and natural that it is easy to overlook how much information is required for news to function as information. Strictly speaking, no one has ever understood anything about the world by reading newspapers. Rather, one reads newspapers--if one reads for information--because one already understands the world and wants to update that understanding by adding fresh data. For the news to perform a function anything like "informing the public," the public must share at least three things. One, a structural understanding, an ordered knowledge which enables individual events to be placed in some sort of meaningful relation to an ongoing reality; two, in addition to the means to make meaning, the need to do so, some feeling of participation in or control over events that would require a continually updated awareness of the world; three, the element of contigency, a situation in which outcomes are not wholly predictable, where the event, when it occurs, signifies the separation of the actual from the merely potential. Thus Park notes that typical news items like births, deaths and weddings always make news, since they "are the expected things," but "at the same time the unpredictable things" (Society 82). Structure, action, contigency-- these are the three conditions necessary for news to function as information. The more people who particpate in these conditions the bigger the item of news becomes. In an interesting aside, Hughes remarks that, theoretically, the biggest piece of news imaginable is the end of the world (61). Here is an "event" which impinges on everyone's ordered understanding of the world, which affects everyone's actions and which is totally unpredictable. Thus the recent parody of the New York Post which featured the end of the world as the lead story. The headline: "Kaboom."

A more common example is provided by the weather. Everyone understands enough about it to interpret a weather prediction and everyone feels involved enough with the weather to have at least a vague interest in its outcome. That is why the weather is the ultimate conversation maker: if two people do not have that in common they are literally living in different worlds. Membership in the community of weather-watchers and competence in that community is virtually automatic. Also, the weather retains an element of unpredictablity about it: each day the actual must be distinguished from the merely potential. Thus, the weather is the only story that appears on the front page all the time and a weather disaster is always urgent news for the community involved. But notice what happens when one of our three conditions is absent. News of a weather disaster in a far away place removes the element of particpation: it is no longer "the weather" above our heads but someone else's weather, and it no longer requires a revision of plans the way the local weather might. And yet it may be still be interesting. A new way of participating in the news thus presents itself. The questions are no longer "how will I get to work?" or "how should I dress today?" but "where will the people go now that their homes are destroyed?" and "how will daily life be restored?" in short, "how will the story come out in the end?"

This sort of interest in events has undoubtedly been encouraged by improved communication technologies, which bring news from far away places without bringing the conditions necessary for news to function as information. In fact, they may undermine those conditions, by, for example, heightening the feeling of powerlessness over distant events. Any history of the press which focuses on the expansion of the information-gathering network is therefore incomplete unless it also examines changes in the ability of the audience to receive information as information. What is really needed is a revamped understanding of what information is, or rather, where it can be located. We are accustomed to thinking of information as something that is "in" the news, as long as the news is relatively complete and accurate. But it is perhaps wiser to think of information as being "in" any social context which gives to updated reports the quality of making a difference for future action. Again, war is an archtypal case. War creates a context in which any piece of data can be information, because so much is riding on every change in the status of events. The prevalence of rumors during wartime testifies to the strength of war as an information-creating context; rumors turn everything into information, even data that is unreliable or made up.

Drama vs. structure

Where news retains the connection to action, relatively minor events make a difference and are still of interest. Locally, the arrival of a rainstorm is news, since it is somewhat unpredictable and may affect the daily lives of the inhabitants. But when news loses the connection to action and people participate merely as spectators the minor event is no longer interesting. It is only the spectacular weather disaster which warrants the designation of news for people outside the locality: a rainstorm in Louisiana has no news value anywhere else. The more distant the connection to decisions made in daily life, the bigger and more dramatic the event must be to hold any interest. This is the root of sensationalism: not a perverse appetite for the crude and spectacular, but the increasing difficulty of interesting a population which does not act on its world in a way which requires a constant supply of fresh information. In sensationalism, one of the three conditions necessary for news to inform people predominates-- contigency. The odd, the unexpected, the spectacular are news simply because they depart from the norm. So while it is true that all forms of news depend on the event, some forms are more dependent than others. Where there is no need to act on the basis of fresh information the event carries the whole burden of newsworthiness, and must therefore inflate itself to absurd proportions. At the opposite extreme is the equally absurd world of the paranoid, who believes that everything that happens affects his fate and, in his delusions of grandeur, sees his own actions as monumentally decisive. Insanely connected to a contigent world, the paranoid interprets every event, no matter how trifling, as news: everything makes a difference. Just the opposite condition gives rise to sensationalism: the difficulty of making a difference.⁸

To take an interest in the dramatic and the spectacular is one form of contact with the world, one way of learning about what is happening "out there." One assumes the role of the spectator at a play or a passing parade, (a form of interaction for which television later becomes the ideal medium.) The film critic Stanley Cavell, in discussing television's weakness for the spectacular, observed that the bias of the medium alone does not explain this tendency. More than television's preference for pictures and action is involved.

For what would have to be explained... is exactly our continued attraction by events, our will to understand our lives, or to take interest in them, from their dramas rather than from their stabilities, from the incident and the accident rather than from the resident, from their themes rather than from their structures-- to theatricalize ourselves. But this is something that Thoreau, for one, held against the interest in reading newspapers a century and a half ago, an interest he described as amounting virtually to an addiction.

What needs to be explained, Cavell suggests, is why people choose one form of understanding over another; why they prefer drama over structure, the odd twist in the offbeat over a stable understanding updated by fresh data. As he notes, the problems raised by this choice begin not with the carnival atmosphere of television but with the rise of the newspaper as a mass medium. If the dramatic appeal of the human interest story was behind the success of the penny press, then what explains this "will to understand" the world through drama as opposed to structure?

Symptoms and symbols

To answer to this question we will have to examine further the three conditions necessary for news to function as information: structure, action, contigency. The first is an ordered understanding of the world which allows events to be placed in relation to one another and therefore to refer to an unfolding reality "out there." There are many ways to illustrate this idea. In baseball this ordered knowledge consists of the rules of the game. In the stock market it involves a basic grasp of the principles of finance and a knowledge of how the market operates. In medicine the analogy can be made to the physician's structural understanding of the human body which allows various "events" in the health of the patient to take on medical meaning. In politics it might be the content of what was once called "civics," that is, a grasp of the structure of government. A political ideology consciously held could also provide this sort of framework for interpretation. In each case the important feature is a relation between structure and event which allows the event to take on meaning as a symptom of a changing situation. The simplest example of this sort of relation involves the interpretation of sense data. Thunder becomes a symptom of rain because humans have learned to associate one with the other. Before that learning takes place there is no information value to thunder. (Indeed, we might say that the sound of thunder is at that point merely sensational.) Perhaps the most complicated relation between structure and event is found in language, where the speaker's knowledge of grammar allows individual "events" occuring within that language to take on meaning. Again, without this structural grasp of the principles of the language the information value of events approaches zero. Thus we say that a strange language "makes no sense."

When news functions as information it resembles what Susanne K. Langer calls a "natural sign."

A natural sign is a part of a greater event, or of a complex condition, and to an experienced observer it signifies the rest of that situation of which it is a notable feature. It is a symptom of a state of affairs.

That news is a symptom produced by the situation is the root of all claims to objectivity. Whether the situation is a natural one (like the weather) or a human artifact (like the stock market), news is thought of as an outcome of an organic process that produces the event irrespective of the actions of the observer. Here again the weather is the most basic form of news because it literally is a natural sign, whereas other situations are merely treated as natural systems. Thus, a day of trading on the stock market "naturally" produces the prices which are a symptom of the progress of the market and the economy as a whole.⁹ As we have said, the interpretation of these signs depends on the ordered knowledge of the observer (Langer 58-9). But their production does not. In this sense the news "breaks" each day as naturally as the light of morning. It arises from the day's activity, not from the actions of journalists. All notions of objectivity begin with the non-involvement of the journalist in the process that produces signs. In the same way that a doctor does not "produce" the hacking cough he notices in a patient, the journalist, it is thought, does not produce the events about which he furnishes reports. We will of course have reason to question this assumption when we examine the reporting profession in future chapters.

In contrast to news as sign (or symptom) is news as symbol. The function of a symbol, Langer argues, is to make possible not a reaction to an event but a conception of it. Symbols allow us to think about things when the things are not present. "Signs announce their objects" to the perceiver, she writes, "whereas symbols lead him to conceive their objects" (emphasis in original 61). The referent for a symbol, then, is not an object or event in the physical world but the human conception of it-- that is what the symbol "means." The difference between sign and symbol involves the second criterion necessary for news to function as information: the need to act. For signs are a prelude to action. They indicate the present state of affairs for those who must act and revise their actions in light of new information. Symbols, on the other hand, are tools for contemplation outside the sphere of action. They enable thought and meaning and all the symbolic functions of art to arise. The human interest item functions not as a symptom of the underlying state of affairs, but as a symbol of human behavior. It is not a prelude to action but an occassion for thought or feeling, an opportunity to symphathize with Mrs. McBride, whose husband "kicked her out of bed" and who then got drunk "out of pure spite." What the human interest item symbolizes is not an unfolding world of events, each contigent on the other, but the human comedy played out again. Gossip, on the other hand, is a sign: it announces what is happening in the community and invites a revision of attitudes in light of new information.

The historical problem raised by the penny papers can thus be phrased in a new way. If it is true that the rise of the cheap press is also the rise of the human interest item, of the "interesting" over the "important," and of news as symbol over news as symptom, then what needs to be investigated are the social conditions which produce a need for one as opposed to the other. When do people need symbols? When do they need signs? Part of the answer has already been provided: they need signs when they are actors in a situation that is constantly changing. Signs inform them about the present state of affairs and invite a revision of attitudes or actions in light of that information. When people perceive themselves as actors in such a setting they will tend to demand news that functions as a sign. But when do they need symbols? Specifically, what is it about urban life in the mid-nineteenth century that would produce a need for new symbols? And how is it that the mass circulation newspaper came to furnish those symbols?

The city as passing spectacle

In his intoduction to Hughes's study of the human interest story, Park observed that: "One may, in an idle moment, read the newspaper with the same interest that one looks out the window at the moving throng in a crowded street" (ix). The comparision is a useful one. In the newspaper the world passes by like a parade, inviting the eye of the spectator to fall on whatever captures its fancy. This is a mode of involvement typical of city life and particularly the life of the streets. The world is experienced as a passing spectacle, which offers a wonderful variety of forms and styles and an infinite amount of detail to be taken in and decoded. One participates, but as a spectator. The great boulevards of Paris were desiged in the mid-nineteenth century with just this sort of experience in mind. The critic Marshall Berman writes:

What did the boulevards do to the people who came to fill them? Baudelaire shows us some of the most striking things. For lovers, like the ones in "The Eyes of the Poor," the boulevards created a new primal scene: a space where they could be private in public, intimately together without being physically alone. Moving along the boulevard, caught up in its immense and endless flux, they could feel their love more vividly than ever as the still point of a turning world. They could display their love before the boulevard's endless parade of strangers--indeed, within a generation Paris would be world famous for this sort of amorous display--and draw different forms of joy from them all. They could weave veils of fantasy around the multitude of passers-by: who were these people, where did they come from and where were they going, and what did they want, whom did they love? The more they saw of others and showed themselves to others--the more they particpated in the extended "family of eyes"--the richer became their vision of themselves.

Berman is quoted at length because the passage describes so many elements of the urban experience: the constant contact with strange people and the wonder and amusement they invite; the surge of power that the scale of the city, especially its architecture, sends through every resident, whatever his status; the sense of constant movement and change, of endless activity eluding the widest eyes; the fantastic surfaces of city life, available at a glance to anyone but in the end not to be deciphered, since they conceal the uncountable private worlds from which all these strangers have emerged; and, above all, the paradoxical feeling of intimacy and distance, of participating in a great project and yet have no power to direct its course, of being a party to but yet apart from the great spectacle of the city. To this experience the newspaper began to speak. In discovering the appeal of the human interest story, the penny papers were offering up the urban environment in transmuted form: the fear of sudden danger striking from nowhere encouraged by the dark streets found safe expression in the murder story and, later, in the black headline warning of crisis; the "veil of fantasy" woven around the parade of strangers was parted by the newspaper's daily accounts of domestic tragedies; the power and wealth of the city as a whole was focused on the exploits of the powerful, wealthy and glamorous people who made up "society," their private worlds now opened up for public view by insistent reporters. The extremes of city life, high and low, took on names and dates, locations and brief histories; they were personified and thus made more real to the persons who experienced them.

The newspaper, in other words, took to the streets. For one thing, it was sold there, becoming a commodity that contribued to the urban spectacle; for another, it told the story of the streets in a public way, penetrating hidden worlds and reflecting in its own urgency the powerful sensations the city had loosed on each of its inhabitants. Smith notes that in the the nineteenth century "the newspaper was a mental highway through which the imagery of the city traveled." It brought people inside the urban experience for a look around.

The newspaper's readers learned from its text the layers of status and prestige within a newly constructed society; they were daily shown the abyss of disgrace into which the criminal, the drunkard, the bankrupt, could fall. The newspaper proposed the makeshift realities of society, where no other medium of homogeneity existed. (Goodbye Gutenberg 28\)

In other words, the sense of what it means to live in the city was provided by the newspaper, which summed up--symbolically--the vastness and weirdness of a world which had exploded in scale to the point where no single spectator could take it all in (Wirth 17). As the outer world lost its solidity so did the inner. The most basic facts were now things to be discovered. Who am I? Where do I place myself in this vast spectacle? How do I dress? How do I act? How do I think of myself? Who are my neighbors? Of what community am I a member? Everything is thrown into doubt because nothing is settled and everything seems possible. In describing this aspect of city life Berman quotes a passage from Rousseau's romantic novel The New Eloise, in which the young hero moves to the city and, in an anguished mood, writes to his beloved:

I'm beginning to feel the drunkeness that this agitated, tumultuous life plunges you into. With such a multitude of objects passing before my eyes, I'm getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my heart, yet all of them together disturb my feelings, so that I forget what I am and who I belong to.

These conditions of doubt about basic issues like personal identity and one's place in the community created the need for new symbolic forms which would "inform" people, not about events in a distant environment, but about the life they were living now, in the dizzying world of the city. People were suddenly distant from themselves--in a word, they were alienated--and they needed "news" which would speak to this condition, as well as to the wonderful vibrancy of urban life and their own sense of participation in it, however slight. In his study of Robert Park and the Chicago school of sociology, Fred Matthews observes that the city "made the essential dynamics of human behavior" problematic and therefore available for viewing. "In more traditional communities," he notes, "the network of social relations was not a problem but a fact." It maintained itself through custom. But in the industrial city "the constant conditions of strangeness, the fact that so many relationships were new, shifting and impersonal, meant that the processes of social control were no longer concealed under the cake of custom but laid bare for dissection" (121). Sociology eventually took advantage of the great social drama the city opened for view, but the journalist, says Matthews, was there first, fulfilling the role of "informal and intuitive sociologist," a human medium who acted "as eyes, ears and moral censor for the audience removed by size and distance from the direct exercise of these traditional communal roles." Where the community as a whole had once surveyed the activity of its members, giving each one his standing in the social network, the newspaper now helped perform this function and the moral duty which went with it. (Of course the two were somewhat in conflict. As the North American Review noted in 1885, "The editorials often grieve over the alleged decline of family morals, and the frequency of divorce; while, in the same issue, the reporters are left free to turn the revelations of the police and divorce courts into the juciest kind of jest" \[Savage 150\].) A small community could literally keep track of everyone; but in the city this was plainly impossible (Park, Society 93). The suverying of activity thus took place through symbols, people and events who stood for larger themes, who could represent the city to a mass audience and in whom the audience could see reflected some aspect of their experience.

Summary

We can now propose some tentative answers to our pair of questions: When do people need news as sign? When do they need news as symbol? They require news as sign when they feel themselves actors in a constantly shifting world, where events take on meaning by confirming the actual happening and separating it from the merely potential. In order for news to function this way, more than information about events is required. This is why the content of the newspaper is not a sure guide to how well it "informs the public," for the "informability" of the audience involves more than the amount of information it is presented with. Events must be contigent, unpredictable; they must bear upon action and require some revision of plans or attitudes; and they must be able to be placed within some structural understanding of the environment which sets them in relation to one another. Historical changes in the sort of information provided by the press are therefore connected to larger histories that reach beyond the development of the newspaper. One would have to ask, for example, what groups of people have historically participated in the conditions necessary for news to function as information? How do broad social changes like urbanization, industrialization, and democratization affect the composition of these groups? More specifically, what is the effect of improvements in communication technology on the number and sort of people capable of demanding news as information? How does the newspaper itself affect the spread of the conditions which make its own information functions possible? Does it encourage the possibility that people will feel themselves actors in a contigent world? Or does it inhibit that possibility by, for example, exaggerating feelings of powerlessness? Does the newspaper's coverage of world affairs educate people and expand their grasp on the environment, making it easier to place events in some meaningful relation to one another? Or does it make that process more difficult by describing events out of context and shifting from one crisis to the next?

All these questions grow out of a distinction that needs to be made explicit: furnishing information is not the same as informing people. One is a technical question involving the sending of messages. The other is a social question involving the way people act and understand themselves acting in a world that may or may not require fresh reports of its current status. Progress in solving the technical problem of sending messages has no simple relation to the conditions which make the information functions of news possible. In understanding those functions, the important question is not how much information people have, or even "are people informed?" but rather: what makes people informable? If part of the revolution of the penny press was a shift from "information" to "human interest," then one explanation may lie in the informability of the audience. Compared to the merchants and public men who were the patrons of the commercial press, the buyers of the penny papers were not informable in the same way. They did not act in a world which required the same kind of updated reports about business, politics and public affairs, and so their news took other forms.

Those other forms we have broadly characterized as symbolic. The human interest stories of the penny press served new symbolic functions brought about by the expanded scale of the city as a social environment. It is obvious that the penny papers succeeded because a mass audience was "interested" in the stories they had to tell. But the important question is: why was that audience interested? The answer we have suggested so far is that the conditions of urban life create a new experience that is both frightening and liberating, which throws into doubt the identity of the indvidual by weakening the traditional bonds of the community, while at the same time infusing everyday life with drama and spectacle typlified by the boulevard's parade of passing strangers. The world widens and blooms, becoming a place of infinite possibility, but at the same time it narrows and turns back on itself: the man in the street is encased in his own limited world, cut off from the old bonds of community and unable to command a comprehensive view of his environment. The human interest story spoke to this new fact of life. It put a wider world in the hands of the average man, giving him glimpses into lives he could not live himself, but which he could sense being lived in his midst.

CHAPTER THREE

THE UNIVERSAL TOWN MEETING

In the previous chapter we examined the environment in which the modern newspaper first appeared-- the city. We concluded that the city as a social structure created the need for a new form of news, the human interest story, which helped to orient and entertain the new urban masses. These functions are not the same as the information functions classically associated with the press. Human interest stories do not refer to an unfolding world of events in which action must be taken on the basis of fresh data. They do not, in other words, "inform the public." But neither are they merely the expression of a childish desire to be shocked and entertained. The human interest story originates in the breaking apart of the communal environment, in the disappearence of the world Jefferson thought most favorable to democracy. The penny papers became a popular medium by exploiting the value of the human interest item, in effect capitalizing on the loss of coherence which the transition to an urban environment implies. In this chapter we explore the vision of press and public which grew out of this success-- a vision which, as we shall see, ignored the contradictions inherent in the rise of a modern press.

Perhaps the most successful human interest story ever, and certainly the most important one in the rise of the penny press, was not a story at all but a hoax-- the "Great Moon Hoax" perpetrated by the Sun in 1835\. The Sun reported one day that an immense new telescope employed by Sir John Hershcell at the Cape of Good Hope had shown evidence of men on the moon. Over the next week increasingly sensational accounts of Hershcell's "discoveries" filled the pages of the paper, stirring up so much interest that even the staid six-cent journals began picking up the story, as did European papers. The stunt climaxed with descriptions of winged creatures the Sun called "man-bats," which were said to be inhabiting the moon (Hughes 185). Eventually the man who had written the story for the Sun confessed to a rival paper and the hoax was exposed. Other papers berated the Sun for its conduct, but most people seemed to think it was all in good fun (Mott, American Journalism 226).

Perhaps, as Hughes argues, the Great Moon Hoax simply appealed to a universal interest in the heavens, something "that everyone has speculated on at one time or another" (186). But there is another way to interpret the incident-- as a logical extension of the Sun's approach to the human drama of the city. Like the city spectacle, the moon is both distant and near, easy to see, impossible to know.

That is what makes it a mystery. Moreover, what the hoax described is how life is lived on the moon, exactly the appeal of other human interest stories written closer to home. The Sun was in the business of widening the world of its readers, of astonishing and delighting them by giving detail to the dim apprehension of other lives being lived in their midst. Why not take the logical step to the moon and describe life as it is lived there? In this sense, it is not surprising that the common man refused to be outraged by the falsehoods in the hoax. For if the stories were scientifically false, they were humanly true: that is, their aim was true. They hit a spot on the popular imagination and held on.

Accuracy, then, is a relative term. When news functions as information, something resembling scientific standards can prevail: accuracy proves itelf in the physical world. Either it happened this way, or it did not. But when the functions of news are symbolic, (and the motives of the press commercial) accuracy is a statement about the audience and what it needs or desires or expects from its reports. Some stories fit themselves accurately to the interests of the audience, others do not. This is undoubtedly what William Randolph Hearst meant when he distinguished the really interesting news from the "merely important" (qtd. in Hughes 57). One of the most significant histories to be uncovered in the study of the press is therefore the history of the means by which the interests of the audience are judged-- in short, the history of feedback in journalism. For it is the closeness of this "fit" with the audience, and not a fidelity to fact, which has spelled success in the newspaper business.

Street sales as feedback

No one understood this better than James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald and undoubtedly the most important figure in the rise of the mass circulation newspaper. In an 1866 profile of Bennett reviewing his long and tumultuous career, the North American Review noted that he began the Herald by working sixteen hour days as the paper's only reporter, editor, salesman and make-up man, rushing out to gather the news in the day and back to the office to put it into print at night:

He converted himsef, as it were, into a medium through which the gossip, scandal, fun, and nonsense of this great town were daily conveyed back to it for its amusement; just as a certain popular preacher is reported to do, who spends six days in circulating among his parishoners, and on the seventh tells them all that they have taught him.

Here is another way of phrasing the distinction we elaborated in the previous chapter. In publishing whatever "gossip, scandal, fun and nonsense" he could find, Bennett made the newspaper a medium through which the city could communicate with itself. A kind of circularity thus enters the relation between journalism and its audience: Bennett gives back to the city the human comedy it stages each day.

In contrast to this circular flow, news as information moves in a linear fashion from margin to center, from distant front to home office, from the scene of action to the breakfast table. It is what Smith referred to as "intelligence," word of what is happening in the outer world. As soon as intelligence begins to conform not to the shape of events but to the habits or expectations of the person receiving it, it is useless as intelligence. In fact, it is dangerous. Just this possibility has provided the intruige in any number of spy novels: the chance that intelligence is not flowing in a linear fashion from margin to center but has been short circuited and given a human plan. That the agency may be unknowingly communicating with itself through reports falsified in a deliberate fashion offers the novelist a ready-made drama, for the nature of intelligence work is that it depends on information produced "naturally," that is, without regard for its intended audience. Human interest news is not innocent of its audience in this way.

Nor was Bennett. He had a feel for what would excite, amuse and enrage. But he had something ultimately more important than that: his sales figures, a daily measure of his success in enabling the city to communicate with itself. The significance of the mass circulation newspaper sold on the streets is not simply in the number of papers sold and the scale of the enterprise, but in the information value of the sales themselves. For the first time, a sense of what the audience desired to read in its newspaper could be gained by daily trial and error. And there were plenty of errors, papers begun on a hunch and gone in a few weeks, wrong guesses and false starts that disappeared from the streets with hardly a trace and passed out of press history before they could enter it.¹ A century before there was market research or statistics there was this elementary form of feedback, in which the audience sent daily messages to the newspaper about what messages to send, simply by buying or refusing to buy the paper.² As Frank M. O'Brien wrote in his study of the Sun:

The assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia did not sell an extra paper, but the hanging of Foster, the "car-hook" murderer, sent the sales up seventeen thousand. The deaths of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Alexander T. Stewart had no effect on the Sun's circulation, the passing of Napolean III raised it only one thousand for the day, and the death of Pius IX caused only four thousand irregular readers to buy the paper, but the execution of Dolan, a murderer now practically forgotten, sent the sales up ten thousand. (qtd. in Hughes 9\)

This was the important information the penny papers dealt in: the signals sent by the emerging mass audience to the publishers. The sixpenny journals had precluded the possibility of such a feedback mechanism by requiring a yearly subscription, a one-time decision with very little information value. (In fact, the decision to subscribe meant so little to subscribers that they often neglected to pay. Before streets sales bad debts were a chronic problem for the newspaper.)

Readers as writers

Bennett got the first strong signal from his audience through his coverage of the Helen Jewett murder in 1836\. A beautiful prostitute was found dead in a fashionable house of sin and a young clerk was accused of the crime. Bennett, realizing that the clerk could be made into a sympathetic figure, built up the story as a tale of scandal in high places, describing champagne parties at the house attended by businessmen and charging that the young man accused of the crime had been framed. By the time the clerk was acquited the Herald's circulation had tripled during the run of the story, mostly because of Bennett's eyewitness accounts and dramatic reconstructions of the murder and trial (Mott, American Journalism 233). Throughout the scandal Bennett had functioned as an extension of the audience's senses, describing in vivid detail the inside of the house, the bedroom where the murder occured and the look of the corpse as a policeman lifted the sheets to show him (Hughes 12). Before the interview had become standard practice in journalism, Bennett reproduced in question and answer form his conversation with the woman who discovered the body. He did the same for trial testimony. What he provided his readers was a vicarious thrill, a visit inside a hidden world that had been broken open in spectacular fashion.

In his coverage of the Jewett murder, Bennett was not so much uncovering facts as completing an image that had been dimly drawn in the minds of his readers before the incident. People had known about the house of prostitution; they had perhaps passed by it, whispering of what went on there. Vice was an atmopshere given off by the city, a dark side of the urban drama that no one could fail to notice, whether they felt tempted or not. By describing the scene of an actual crime Bennett gave form to a known but invisible underworld: he filled in what had been outlined in the imagination of his readers. Naturally the form he gave was exaggerated, for it was designed to complete an image rather than furnish the facts. Thus, the prostitute was not simply beautiful, she was beauty itself. As Bennett described her corpse:

The body looked as white, as full, as polished, as the purest Parian marble. The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici, according to the casts generally given of her.

As a form of communication this sort of report is more complex than it might appear. Bennett writes as if he is describing what he was shown, testifying as a witness, but his rendering owes as much to the audience's expectations as it does to the scene itself. It describes the way his readers might picture a beautiful woman, and in that sense is a message returned to the audience by the journalist as much as it is a report from the scene of action. Throughout the Helen Jewett scandal readers were informing Bennett about what they wanted to read, and Bennett was communicating back to the readers what the sales figures were telling him. By reacting himself with awe and outrage, Bennett was exhibiting the emotions his readers were inclined to have, and the tale began to be shaped by these demands--the logic of the story--rather than a strict desire to uncover the facts. In a sense the readers were acting as authors and Bennett as medium, an extension of their eyes, ears and curiosity.

That readers were also writers was something Jefferson had realized about newspapers long before the human interest story became a staple of the press. In advising a man who had written him about starting a newspaper, Jefferson said he thought the press of his own time so irresponsible that "defamation is becoming a necessary of life," a stimulant even reasonable people seem to need. Those who should know better read these outrageous items, forgetting the fact "that it is not he who prints, but he who pays for printing a slander, who is its real author."³ Jefferson no doubt meant that moral responsibility for the sad condition of the press must be shared by readers, but his remark also points up the role of the reader in shaping the content of the newspaper. The newspaper audience is not simply spoken to-- it speaks, both to the newspaper and through the newspaper to itself. As Tocqueville put it, "Newspapers make associations and associations make newspapers" (2: 112).

Instant community

The press is a means by which a group realizes itself as a group. And this happens because the press communicates not only from margin to center, from distant front to breakfast table, but also from heart to heart, in its expression of common sentiment, and from heart to head in the detail it gives to feelings vaguely perceived. Why do we eagerly turn to newspaper accounts of events we attended and already know about? Because it is exciting to see our experience transformed into a public report. We see things in a different light and feel connected to some small movement of history, regardless of whether we learn anything from the account. As the North American Review observed in 1866:

The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general life of mankind, and makes him part and parcel of the whole; so that we can almost say, that those who neither read newspapers nor converse with people who do read them are not members of the human family;—that is, not actually, not now; though, like the negroes of Guinea, they may become such in time. They are beyond the pale; they have no hold of the electric chain, and therefore do not receive the shock.

Bennett made sure his readers received the shock. But that was not all there was to the Herald. True, Bennett built a profitable circulation by abandoning the "important" for the "interesting." Yet he then turned around and used the profits to finance the paper's extensive information-gathering system, a network of correspondents superior to anything the press had previously seen and capable of providing fresh reports from increasingly distant places. This made the Herald an important paper for all classes, but what orginally made it a popular and profitable paper was its proprietor's success in conveying the "gossip, scandal, fun and nonsense" of the town back to its inhabitants. Thus, the Herald led a schizoid existence: outrageous and inflammatory in its attempt to interest a mass audience and, at the same time, remarkably enterprising in its news coverage.⁴ Because of the contradictory nature of his paper's appeal, Bennett could never shake his reputation as a charlatan and profiteer, despite his success in furnishing important information and biting analysis along wih the scandal and amusement (North American Review 381).

In his attempt to steer a middle course between the simple sensationalism of papers like the Sun and the dull and spiritless quality of the commercial press, Bennett gave birth to a vision of the newspaper as a great unifying force. In May of 1835, shortly after the Herald's debut, Bennett remarked that:

The small daily papers around us were solely directed to mere police reports, melancholy accidents, or curious extracts. They indicated no mind, no intelligence, no knowledge of society at large. The larger [papers] were many of them without talent and without interest. There was plenty of room, therefore, for a cheap paper managed on our plan, calculated to circulate among all ranks and conditions; to interest the merchant and man of learning, as well as the mechanic and the man of labor.

The fact that one newspaper could circulate among all classes, as the Herald did, led to an image of all classes as one class, attuned to the importance of world affairs and informed of their progress swiftly and efficiently through the news pages. It was as if the newspaper itself--in particular, the fact that it communicated so widely--could break down class barriers, even out cultural differences and send the light of understanding shining through to everyone for the mere price of a penny. Benjamin Day shared this dream, despite the fact that his Sun deliberately neglected politics, the traditional art of uniting men. "Already we can perceive a change in the mass of the people," he wrote in 1837\. "They think, talk, and act in concert. They understand their own interest, and feel they have numbers and strength to pursue it with success" (qtd. in Bleyer 164). The vision of mass communication bringing instant community did not stop at the city or nation but took in the entire world. It was simply assumed that the ability to reach everyone would eliminate conflict and unite humanity. The great Christian dream of a world-wide brotherhood was now within reach. The North American Review reasoned that, since it is isolation and ignorance that pits nation against nation and citizen against foreigner, the newspaper could not help but erase these conflicts, for it was obvious that the newspaper was ending isolation and ignorance. The newspaper "constitutes a universal town meting for politics," the Review concluded (Savage 140).

Exactly the conflict we saw Jefferson wrestling with in the first chapter is here resolved in the notion of a "universal town meeting." The town meeting is the ideal image of a democracy at work. It can carry this ideal because the town is a limited environment, where problems are small in scale and competence in governing can be safely assumed. A republic is a government that has outgrown the boundaries of a small town; it is democracy extended over distance and thus conducted through symbols-- flags which represent the nation, people who represent other people, news reports which represent events occuring at a distance, campaigns which represent the principle of "government by the people" when the people cannot directly govern. Jefferson believed that the press was vital to the health of the republic because it enabled people to participate in a government that had been removed from their immediate grasp. But he also believed that this removal was inherently dangerous, for it was always threatening to widen into tyranny. Thus Jefferson sought to preserve the political functions of the small local community. He wanted to give the town meeting as much business as possible in order to minimize the dangers of distance, the very factor that gave the press its sacred place in the republic. The idea of a "universal town meeting" erases this conflict between small town democracy and physical distance. It holds that people can manage their own affairs and find a way to unite even when scattered all over the globe. They can accomplish this because the newspaper restores the conditions of the small town by wiping out the factor of distance.

The telegraph and the electronic mythos

In effect, this vision of the newspaper wipes out the idea of a republic as well, for it eliminates the need to go through intermediaries like nations, laws and legislators. People are wired directly to one another. "The day of universal reading has dawned," said the Review, "universal thinking will follow" (141). What is really destroyed in the bypassing of the republic is the dependence on all symbols, all media, all means by which people are brought into contact with one another and with collective concerns, (and yet remain separate.) Thus the idea that universal reading leads to universal thinking: the medium dissolves. Ironically it was the arrival of a new medium, the telegraph, that put this fantastic idea in so many heads. Bennett wrote in 1845 that with this magic invention,⁵

The public mind will be stimulated to greater activity by the rapid circulation of news. The swift communication of tidings of great events, will awake in the masses of the community still keener interest in public affairs. The whole nation is impressed with the same idea at the same moment. One feeling and one impulse are thus created and maintained from the centre of the land to its uttermost extremities.

In an 1851 editorial on the telegraph and the mission of the press, Samuel Bowles extended the vision beyond the nation to the globe. In partnership with the newspaper, Bowles wrote, the telegraph promised "to melt and mould the jarring and contending nations of the world into that one great brotherhood which, through long centuries, has been the ideal of the Christian and the philanthropist."⁶ Why did the telegraph give rise to these utopian visions? The question is worth a study in itself, but here we can make some speculative remarks. Communication always appears to promise an increase in human control. Word of what is happening in distant places make it possible to direct the course of distant events, bringing more and more territory under the conscious direction of men. Communication, then, seems to expand the scope of the mind. It makes everything amenable to judgment and the revision of judgment based on new information. (In effect, it enlarges the domain of the present, for custom and tradition--those ways in which things have always been done--lose their authority in human affairs when constant action and reaction are possible through a steady supply of information. When control over distance is enlarged, those who have the latest information hold the authority.) A tremendous sense of power accompanies the reach of modern communications, it is literally the feeling of power over the world, of control following inevitably from contact with events. Frederic Hudson, Bennett's managing editor, used military metaphors to express this feeling in his history of American journalism. In describing the journalist in the age of the telegraph he wrote:

With dispatches from every quarter and nation of the earth continually pouring into the editor's office, the face of the globe becomes to him a vast field of battle—the desperate battle of life, and he is placed like a Napoleon, surrounded by his staff, to decide at once what is to be done, and to act.

The telegraph was the ideal medium for nourishing this sense of power, for it seemed to represent contact in the abstract, communication as simple fact, unadorned by language or symbol. This quality of abstractness also allowed other mythical meanings to collect around the medium. Electricity resembled thought itself and the electric telegraph the direct transmission of thought. In an essay on "The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution," James Carey and John J. Quirk make the point that, because electricity sends messages invisibly, "there is a persistent attempt to link it with an extrasensory and wordless world that can be entered in an unmediated way." As a metaphor for the modern world, electricity gives rise to the dream of "cosmic awareness, a bypassing of communication, a loss of self and (a) direct unmediated participation in the totality of life and knowledge" (420). Electric communication thus allowed two contradictory impulses to merge, Carey and Quirk argue. On the one hand it offered power over nature by annihilating space and giving men like Hudson the feeling of control over distant events. On the other hand it seemed to promise a kind of communion with nature and with other men, a restoration of the harmony that must have existed before the machine, or as the authors put it, a "povidential bond between man and his environment" (418). With the telegraph, the urges to dominate nature and become one with it were collapsed into a single utopian vision, one version of which was the "universal town meeting," an ideal political unit which both extended the control of space to its final limit and, at the same time, restored the close, communal life that existed before the community's extension in space began.

Universal citizenship through the press

It is important to keep in mind that the combination of the telegraph and the mass circulation newspaper is what gave birth to this faith, for the dream is a dream of instant transmission and total distribution. In his analysis of the "grand moral claims made on behalf of the telegraph," Daniel J. Czitrom observes that those who predicted a new world harmony through the miracle of communication were mingling two meanings the term had gained, the archaic sense of the word, in which to communicate means to make common, to commune, and the modern sense, having to do with conveying information. The "ambiguity between the two poles of meaning" went unresolved, he concludes (10-11). This ambiguity tended to obscure the contradictory effects of communication over distance-- the fact that, as the scale of social organization increase, the authority of the community dissolves. Selves are set free from the bonds of the past, neighbors become strangers and strangers neighbors. Tradition and custom count for less, technology and information for more. Carey and Quirk point to Harold Innis as the thinker who best understood this relation (389). Innis did not assume that an enlarged ability to communicate would enlarge the community. Rather, one tended to destroy the other, for the extension of social organization across space undermined the oral tradition, the carrier of culture, by making face to face contacts less important and eliminating the concern for what endured over time.⁷

We have already seen how the mass circulation newspaper was a part of this process. It appeared first in the city, offering a new form of sociability in an environment where face to face contacts, though frequent, were distant and speechless. Thus the newspaper actually arose from the absence of community, the human interest story emerging, for example, from the mutual ignorance that characterized social relations in the city. It is only when people do not care about each other and feel no responsibility for each other's fate that they are willing to be entertained by human interest items. The vision of the newspaper as a community-creator comes partly from the breadth of its distribution. The newspaper can reach everyone in the community. With the telegraph, one community could be put into touch with every other community. Add the telegraph to the newspaper and everyone could be in touch with everyone else through the press, for as Czitrom points out, it was the newspaper that brought the magic of the telegraph to the millions by publishing telegraphed news. Most people never actually used the device to send messages; it entered their lives through the press (14).

All the varieties of the faith we have been examining assume two things. One is that presenting information to people is equivalent to informing them. Since information from everywhere can now be presented to everyone, everyone can now be informed about everything. According to Anthony Smith, one of the aims of the modern newspaper "has been to create the impression--perhaps the illusion--that all information is the true business of all its readers." The newspaper offers people "an implied universal citizenship by virtue of their acquaintanceship with the facts" in the paper, Smith argues (Goodbye Gutenberg 311). The possibility of such "universal citizenship," (or what Walter Lippmann called the "omnicompetent citizen") follows logically from the telegraph's ability to transmit news from anywhere. The second assumption is communication as communion, the idea that shared information leads to shared understanding and common action-- by itself. The traditional ways of uniting men, through political action and persuasive rhetoric, through the elaboration of a shared creed (as in religion), were deemed to be obsolete. It was the magic fact of communication that would unite men, and the newspaper, the fullest extension of that fact, would take the lead and become the great civilizing force of the modern world.

Contradictions of a freed press

The faith that information can unite men and lead them to the truth was not, of course, born with the mass circulation newspaper. It had been a part of the arguments for freedom of expression since those arguments began to be made. But the faith in the delivery of information alone, in the mere fact of communication, was a novel one. In an essay entitled "Two Revolutions in the American Press," Walter Lippmann went back to Milton's classic framing of the argument for free speech. He noted that Milton believed in free speech because he assumed, like those who followed him, that truth would win out over error. But he assumed this because, as a Puritan, he also believed that "God revealed the truth directly to the faithful." Thus, "the freedom from external control" which Milton advocated in his arguments against government censorship assumed a kind of "inner control," a spiritual discipline that came from the common practice of religion (436). It was on that basis that Milton argued for free speech, (consistently excluding the rights of Catholics, Leonard W. Levy notes \[95-100\].) But an interesting thing happened in the long fight for freedom of the press, Lippmann observes. As the "external control decayed" and government lost its hold on the press, the "internal control dissolved" as well, and a secular culture began to triumph along with a free press. When, with the penny papers, the press finally emerged as profitable and genuinely free from government, the shared creed which had once bound people together was also gone. In its place was the market and the beginning of what we would now call mass culture. Lippmann writes:

Thus the popular commercial press of the second half of the nineteenth century and down to our times has had as its central motive the immediate satisfaction of the largest number of people. Its proprietors and editors had, of course, their own convictions, but the working principle [was] to catch the daily interest of their potential readers. Thus this press, escaped from the tutelage of government, fell under the tutelage of the masses. It was not a free press in the sense that it was moved by the convictions of its writers, but a kind of freedmen's press, which, lacking the positive qualities of a liberal existence, found support and profit in serving the whims and wishes and curiosity of the people.

Lippmann's argument is that, by the time the press gained the power to truly say what it pleased, all it wanted to do was please the masses. It therefore exchanged one form of control for another: the dependence on party and a ruling class dissolved, but in its place was a slavish devotion to the market, that is, to whatever would excite or amuse its audience. Sill, this was an important step, Lippmann argued; it established the press as a power any government had to respect. But the revolution was incomplete, for the object of this new press was

not to report events in their due relationships or to interpret them in ways that subsequent events will verify. It selects from the events of the day those aspects which most immediately engage attention, and in place of the effort to see life steadily and whole it sees life dramatically, episodically, and from what is called, in the jargon of the craft, the angle of human interest.

This is what the utopian visions of the press had overlooked. True, it was now possible to deliver instant word of events from anywhere on earth. And word of those events could be in the hand of the common man by daybreak-- also true. But the two facts do not make a whole. In particular, they do not make for a body of citizens interested in their common fate, informed about the world they live in and prepared to act for the common good. In short, they do not create an informed public. For while it is true that the newspaper for the first time began to address the mass of citizens, it did not address them as citizens, but as a mass. (Exactly what a mass is will be taken up in the next chapter.) To again borrow from H.D. Duncan, people did not want "information about, but identification with" their surroundings. The penny press built its appeal on the feeling of participation it lent to its readers, on its ability to extend the senses, strip away the veils of strangers, give shape and color, name and detail to the urban drama, and to reflect in its own urgency and breadth the scope and power of an unfolding modernity. It discovered how to do this by exploiting a characteristic feature of mass communication: the daily exchange of messages with a large audience through the acts of buying and selling. The information the penny papers were most interested in did not concern the unfolding of events in the world of politics and public affairs. The cheap papers were founded, in fact, on a hostility toward that world. Rather, the important information was being sent by the audience to the publishers about what sort of newspaper might sell. It was this information, codified in the form and contents of the newspaper, that was profitable. And it was this information that was constantly being circulated, in different symbolic forms, through the community of readers the mass circulation newspaper had created. The audience was communicating in a new way with itself--not with the world--though it used this new form of communication to experience its world in a fuller, more dramatic, more sensational, more enjoyable way.

Ridiculing the public realm

The penny papers were funny: comic relief. And one of the things they offered relief from was the serious business of public affairs. Early on in the Herald's rise, Bennett, seeking to draw attention to his paper, wrote parodies of the news. For example, he published mock special messages from Andrew Jackson intended to make the common people laugh and to enrage the established journals (Pray 194). (On both counts he succeeded; circulation grew and the established journals later took revenge in the "Moral Wars" of the 1840s, Bennett exploiting every one of these attacks for its publicity value.) Bennett was so bent on ridiculing every party and principle, every form of belief, that press critic Will Irwin later wrote that in "his attitude toward the public interest, he appeared unmoral rather than immoral. He kept faith with no party, respected no privacy" (Propaganda and the News 46). Consider, then, the contradictions in Bennett's Herald. After it became profitable, it pursued important information with a vengeance, virtually inventing modern reporting and making itself indispensable to anyone concerned with the vital issues of politics, business, statecraft and war. At the same time it heaped ridicule on the public realm, refusing to take seriously any public man's claim to principle and, more importantly, refusing to limit its news coverage to his public actions. If the serious and informed citizen can be defined in part by what he is not interested in, by what he refuses to hold against a man or consider relevant to a judgment about him; if the public realm, in short, excludes the private, thereby gaining its meaning, then Bennett was nothing less than a public menace, a man bent on erasing the line between public and private and exposing everything, not only to the glare of publicity, but also to his own dark sarcasm, sharpened to an edge by a true talent for the written word. Reviewing Bennett's career in 1899, E.L. Godkin wrote,

He introduced, too, an absolutely new feature, which has had, perhaps, the greatest success of all. I mean the plan of treating everything and everybody as somewhat of a joke, and the knowledge of everything about him, including his family affairs, as something to which the public is entitled.

To give some idea of what Godkin was talking about, Bennett suggested in 1836 that Americans ought to consider an emperor instead of a President. An autocracy could hardly be any worse than a republic headed by the buffoons running for office, he reasoned (North American Review 399). Of course, it is impossible to know how seriously he meant it, but that is the point: it was the seriousness of public affairs which was being questioned. The reason for this little digression is not to underline the excesses of Bennett's character, (although they are interesting in themselves) but to view them as expressions of the hostility to politics and public affairs--in fact, to everything public--which the popular newspaper embodied. Far from a "universal town meeting," the mass circulation newspaper often constituted a popular comedy in which the business of the public realm was mocked and adulterated with scandalous material from the private. Why did this happen? The argument we have been constructing is that it did not happen because of the greed of publishers or the childishness of the masses, It happened because the conditions which gave rise to the mass circulation newspaper also undermined the possibility of its audience emerging as an "informed public."

Summary

We can now begin to tie the various threads of our argument together. The newspaper finally gained its freedom by obtaining a profitable circulation. It obtained a profitable circulation through the methods of mass appeal, chiefly by discovering the power of the human interest story. The profits gained in this fashion not only freed the newspaper from government, but made possible the news gathering system which stretched across the continent and eventually around the world. It thus became possible to bring word of events happening almost anywhere to people's homes the next day. The telegraph wedded to the newspaper seemed to promise a universally informed public, for the one brought information instantly from almost anywhere and the other put it in the hands of almost everyone. But behind this vision was the questionable assumption that providing information is all there is to informing people. We have argued that such an assumption is false. The information functions of news are made possible not by the fact of transmitting messages from one place to another, but by certain characteristics the audience shares. These include a structural grasp of the environment, which makes it possible to place events in relation to one another; and along with this structure, the need to act and continually revise one's actions in light of new information.

There was nothing in the arrival of the telegraph or the rise of the mass circulation newspaper which ensured the spread of these conditions to the great mass of people. In fact, the opposite possibility is more likely: the conditions which give rise to the modern newspaper are also those which prevent its audience from emerging as an informed public. A certain loss of coherence, a splitting apart of the common world into the separate worlds of each inhabitant, helps give the modern newspaper its functions. And this loss of coherence is not made up for by the arrival of news from more distant and exotic places. The newspaper, in other words, is not a cure for the social conditions which call it into being. It does put the world back together again in the shape of the small town.

Of course one did not need an elaborate argument like this in order to doubt the utopian visions of press and public which arose from the success of the penny papers, The idea of a "universal town meeting" could have been refuted simply by glancing at the pages of the daily newspaper, which, after all, did not seem to be addressed to informed citizens concerned about public affairs. There grew up therefore another vision, also in debt to the mass circulation newspaper-- the vision of the masses united not by the information they shared or the new sense of community they felt, but by the distractions they were provided, the emotions they were encouraged to vent in consuming the newspaper's diet of scandal and amusement. There grew up, in other words, the image of a mob, assembled not in physical space--although that, too, was a threat--but through the connecting power of mass communication. And the dangers this mob presented to republican government seemed more pronounced as the twentieth century approached. This darker vision of press and public is the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER FOUR

FROM CROWD TO PUBLIC

The image of a "universal town meeting," a public in which everyone participates directly in democracy through the agency of the newspaper, associates a modern press with a scale of politcal involvement typical of a small town. But, as we have seen, the conditions responsible for the growth of the press are also those which undermine a village environment and make it a poor model for the new relationship between press and public. If the community made possible by the mass circulation newspaper did not resemble a traditional village environment, as we have argued, then what were its characteristics? Or, to put the question another way, if the universal town meeting is not an appropriate metaphor for the sort of public a modern press helps to assemble, then how are we to conceive of this public? These are the questions the present chapter seeks to address, starting with a group of mostly European writers around the turn of the century who had a very different metaphor for the modern newspaper's audience, that of an unruly street mob.

For as long as there have been calls for the people to rule there have been warnings that the people are feeble-minded, irrational and therefore incapable of ruling. And, in addition, there have been different ideas about just who the people are.¹ To even the purest democrat it is obvious that the people cannot be all persons. Slaves, serfs, workers, women, Blacks, criminals, children, and, in our own time, those who neither vote nor answer opinion polls-- all at one time or another have been defined out of existence as far as the people's voice is concerned. Fears about the rise of the "mob," the "multitude" or the "masses" therefore have two dimensions. One is the perennial belief that the people by nature are unfit to rule. The other is the rising perception that those who count as the people are expanding in number to include persons unfit to rule.

At the close of the nineteenth century in Europe, a spate of writings on "crowds" mingled these two impulses in the name of science to produce an attack on the democratic faith in man which today seems openly and sometimes hysterically hostile. There was much that was conventional in crowd psychology's analysis of the irrational element in group behavior; Machiavelli, in particular, had said many of the same things more eloquently. To that extent the whole school can be dismissed as a crude defense of a faltering aristocracy (Barrows 192). But in the analysis of the crowd there was also the dim recognition of a great historical change in the making, not so much the rise of a new society--although it was sometimes phrased that way--but a change in the character of the social bond itself. New ways of combining individuals into groups were making their appearence, many of them through the agency of the modern newspaper. It is from that angle that the present chapter examines the writings on crowds.

Metaphors for the crowd

Crowd psychology started from a simple fact that is obvious to anyone who has tried to do business by committee: that a group of people, no matter how reasonable as individuals, show a remarkably different character when attempting to act as a group. Susanna Barrows notes that Scipio Sighele, an Italian criminologist who produced some of the first writing on crowds, began by discarding Herbert Spencer's idea of society as the sum of its parts.

To refute Spencer's premise Sighele quoted one of Max Nordau's most intruiging paradoxes: the intellectual medicority of an assembly of geniuses. Like Nordau, Sighele believed that the mere act of association produced a new "being" whose characteristics were distinct from the units of which it was composed. Any study of collectivities, then, would necessarily involve something other than social arithmetic.

This "new being," a "something other" than the sum of the crowd's parts, proved to be quite elusive. One way to look at the theorists of the crowd is to examine the metaphors they used to give more recognizable form to the mysterious essence of crowd behavior.

Most of the metaphors are entirely predictable: the crowd is said to be like a wild beast, a savage, a barbarian, a lunatic, a criminal, a spoiled child. Some are a little more inventive: the French thinkers compared the crowd to a drunk--incoherent, unpredictable and deluded--and to a woman-- frivolous, credulous and impulsive (Barrows 72, 47). In addition to comparing the unknown being of the crowd to a known being like a raging beast or a silly female, the crowd psychologists sought to describe how this crowd-character was communicated from person to person. It was not enough to say that the crowd was like a madman; some theory of how madness crept over the crowd had to be developed. It was here that crowd psychology became a kind of communication theory.

Virtually all the students on crowds agreed that a number of people present in one place together did not form a crowd. As one English writer put it, "A multitude of people walking in the street, each about his own business, may form a dense mass of humanity, but they are not a crowd until something occurs to arrest their common attention and inspire in them a common emotion" (Conway 8). How the conditions of collective attention and common feeling came about was the central question crowd psychology sought to answer. Again, the metapors employed to characterize the process of crowd formation are instructive. The most important was probably hypnosis: the crowd was said to be carried along as if in a trance.

This idea had several advantages. First, hypnosis was an established scientific fact. Second, it described how one kind of person became another-- by being placed under a spell which allowed a different self to emerge. That other self could be seen as unconscious, a being not normally allowed to show itself in behavior. This explained the looser restraints on impulse characteristic of the crowd, the fact that people would do things in a mob they would never do as individuals. Another advantage of positing a collective act of hypnosis was that it implied a hypnotist, someone able to put the crowd in a trance. This was naturally the charismatic leader, a figure with whom every writer on crowds had to reckon. All in all, hypnosis was a powerful methaphor for crowd behavior and it appealed to many, including Sigmund Freud.² Gabriel Tarde, a French sociologist and the most formidable of the crowd thinkers, called hypnosis "the point of experimental juncture between psychology and sociology" (qtd. in Nye 70).

Along with hypnosis came a range of other metaphors for the mysterious unity of the crowd. These included electricity ("Does man send out wireless messages without knowing it, and is there some unrecognized coherer in the make-up of other individuals that can receive them?" \[Conway 37\]) and infectious disease (crowd fever was compared to mental illness, which was thought to be contagious to doctors who treated the insane.)

The most common metaphors revolved around the vague notion of "suggestion," the idea that one person suggests to another the type of behavior characteristic of crowds. Other terms used in more or less the same fashion were "imitation" and "mental contagion" (Nye 68-70). These ideas all stressed the importance of proximity and the sort of impulses that could be communicated among people in close physical contact with each other. Thus, Sighele explained the irrational character of the crowd by noting that emotions could be communicated by physical signs--gestures, facial expressions, shouts and cries--while the intellect was an inner quality that did not lend itself to transmission across the space of the crowd (Barrows 154). (Speech, of course, could communicate the material of the intellect, but the members of a crowd did not speak with one another. They were either spoken to or spoke en masse (Conway 22, 24). Should conversation among them develop it would immediately dissolve the crowd into small, face to face groups in which individual character could be restored. This is a point that will occur again and again in discussions of the crowd and later the "mass." Speech dissolves the conditions that make individuals amenable to mass treatment. As soon as people turn and face each other, the power formed by their collective attention on a common object dissipates in the exchange of roles typical of conversation.)

The crowd: collective attention without contact

Concepts like "imitation" and "contagion" had one serious flaw, in addition to their vagueness. They made the most sense when the meaning of "crowd" was restricted to a physical gathering of people who by some sort of contact could infect one another with the crowd mentality. The same was true of hypnosis, which suggested contact between the charismatic leader and the crowd. By far the most important insight the writers on crowds had, however, was that physical contact was no longer a necessary condition for crowd behavior. Gustave Lebon, the most famous of the crowd theorists, wrote that the crowd was now to be thought of as a psychological condition. Thus, "an entire nation, though they may be no visible agglomeration, may become a crowd under the action of certain influences" (27). According to Robert Park, whose 1904 dissertation compared the crowd to the public, this was a point on which all writers of the crowd psychology school agreed: "the defining characteristic of the crowd is not spatial juxtaposition but psychic reciprocity" (The Crowd and the Public 22). There were two levels, then, at which thinking about crowds seized on the factor of communication. First, a mass of people did not become a crowd until something common came between them and drew their attention. Second, this common or collective attention could be achieved without physical contact. It could, in other words, through the agency of a medium.

As Sir Martin Conway put it:

A crowd, in the sense I am employing the word, can be formed in a hundred other ways than by mere physical presence together at one time and place. Printing, the telegraph, and the various modern inventions and developments we are all familiar with, have made crowd-formation possible without physical contact...

Part of what crowd psychology was attempting to examine was the kind of tie which existed among people who were unknown to one another, but who somehow felt and thought in similar ways. The most important piece of evidence that such a tie existed, of course, was the mass circulation newspaper. The newspaper seemed to both embody and encourage a new type of social grouping, a kind of community that lacked any of the traditional community ties. The readers of the newspaper did not know each other; their families shared no history; they did not gather together and had no way of making their number known to the senses. They did not participate in a common activity other than the newspaper itself. And yet they made for a social whole, a collective force in the arena of politics and a palpable presence in a nation's cultural life. "Newspapers indeed are read by individuals," Conway observed, "but they are not addressed to individuals, nor does a reader read them in the same attitude as when he reads a private letter." The purpose of journalism, he concludes, is "crowd formation and crowd-direction" (16).

The type of social bond exemplified by the newspaper audience was quite baffling, for it did not consist of individuals acting as individuals nor did it have the structure, setting or function of an organized community. Everett Dean Martin, one of the few American writers on crowds, argued that, while the crowd is a social pheonomena it is also peculiarly asocial. "Crowd behavior is pseudo-social if social organization is to be regarded as a means to the achievement of realizable goods," Martin wrote (22). Neither fully social nor the result of individual actions, the crowd as assembled by communication was a body whose form resembled no other. Thus, the transparent attempts to "locate" its essence in known bodies--beasts, drunks, madmen, criminals--and to give the collective character of the crowd the qualities of an individual through phrases like "the crowd mind." LeBon wrote:

Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of all of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organised crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of mental unity of crowds.

The movement in the above passage is itself interesting, for it indicates how crowd psychology retreated from the implications of its own insights.

LeBon begins by positing a qualitative difference between the whole and the sum of its parts-- not simply an intensification or greater sum, but "new characteristics" which are held to be vastly different from those of the individuals composing the crowd. In contemporary terms we might call this a "system break." This qualitatively new feature is then immediately given the form of the old. The crowd is said to possess a "mind" and a "single being," and a "law of metal unity" is said to govern its actions. By this device the system break is quickly repaired and reader and writer are reassured, for the language of individual psychology can continue to describe what had just been called a radical departure from the features of individuals (Nye 64). This is the most important sense in which crowd psychology can be called "conservative"-- its refusal to imagine a collective body which showed neither the characteristics of a traditional community nor those of an individual mind.

Freud's psychology of the group

A more heroic attempt then LeBon's to extend the psychology of the individual to the behavior of the collective was undertaken by Freud in 1922\. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego he relied heavily on LeBon's descriptions of crowd behavior, but refused to posit a "group mind" or other special instinct.

Why put forward such fictions, Freud asked, when what is known about the individual can be used to explain the behavior of crowds? All the observable signs the impulsiveness and irritablity of the crowd, its immaturity and intolerance, its dream of omnipotence and tendency to exaggerate, the lack of critical perspective--all are observable in individuals, as well. And while these traits may be typical of children and savages, rather than civilized adults, within every adult is the incompletely repressed child, a remnant of pre-civilized man. Crowd behavior is not some mysterious spirit but simply the eruption of the instincts that are normally quieted by individuals in everyday life (9-11). What needs to be explained, Freud thought, is how this eruption in individuals helps hold a group together, rather than splitting it apart.

To explain the group character of crowd psychology Freud focused on the relation between the leader and the led. While he agreed with LeBon and others that the crowd's urge to violence and its freeing of impulse were a return to a primitive instinct, the primitive's instincts led in several directions at once. In addition to the desire to throw off restraints there was also, he noted, a deep desire to obey, to merge the self into the group and achieve an erotic union with the world again. Freud called this instinct eros. It was eros that held the group together, either the loving relation each individual established with the leader or that relationship sublimated into ties of mutual feeling among the members of the group, or what is commonly called comraderie.

What appears to be a group spirit or instinct is actually the individual relation each member establishes with the leader or his substitute--an idea, a cause--when that relation happens to coincide with the one established by other members of the group. "Crowd psychology" is thus the more or less satistical convergence of these individual ties between the leaders and the led, a bond resulting from eros, the drive for erotic union (Freud 22-24; Rieff 253-54).

This brief summary leaves out many of Freud's insights into group behavior. But for present purposes the point has been made: instead of relying on the individual as a metaphor for the collective mind of the crowd, Freud denied the existence of any fundamentally new condition and explained crowd behavior by literal reference to individual psychology. Faced with the behavior of the crowd, he did not collapse back into comforting notions of the collective as a "single being," but instead tried to push the logic of his individual psychology into other realms entirely-- history and politics. In doing so he anticipated the rise of totalitarian movements, the psychology of which powerfully resembled his analysis. But he also came close to denying the reality of history and politics. In Freud's treatment, the surge of crowd behavior through Europe from mid-nineteenth century on could be seen, not as a result of a specific historical condition, but as the revelation of the human condition-- as it was and always will be. As Philip Rieff notes, for Freud the crowd element was "the common denominator of all politics" rather than a condition created by the growth of urban industrial society.

"The conservative implications of Freudian psychology are clear," Rieff writes, "Nothing qualitatively different ever happens in history" (238-9). Thus he concludes that

Freud never articulated a true social psychology. Against the main drift of contemporary social science, his concern remains the individual and his instincts. Politics is first of all something that goes on in the mind, analogically subjectible to the same analysis as individual order and disorder.

Moving in opposite directions, both Freud and LeBon retreated from the task of describing the new social body that was awkwardly being called "the crowd." LeBon invented a "collective mind" that was said to wipe out the conscious identity of individuals. People supposedly acted as if possessed by a new being. This notion denied the possibility that members of the crowd, precisely by acting as individuals, might produce a result which none of them could forsee or produce individually, that a collective force might arise, not by wiping out the conscious being of each member, but by uniting individual actions in a new way. Ironically, there was a theoretical model of just such a collective available to any of the writers on crowds-- the classical view of political economy, in which individuals, pursuing their own interests, produce a force, "the market" which has its own existence and exhibits a higher rationality than any one member could manage.

This, of course, was the problem. The market was indeed a more complex, more modern metaphor, but it assumed rational behavior at the level of the individual and a rational result at the level of the group. What crowd psychology was attempting to explain was the irrational element in the crowd's behavior. To say, then, that the crowd was "like" a market would be to imply that the market might in some way be "like" a crowd-- a step the conservative theorists were probably unwilling to take.

Freud, on the other hand, refused to acknowledge the historical possibility of a fundamentally different social body emerging from modernity. By focusing on the leader and the led, he was able to take individual psychology as far as it could go into the mysteries of group behavior.³ But he failed to consider some other possibilities, particularly those created by new communication networks. While all the other writers on crowds emphasized the importance of the newspaper in extending the crowd mentality, Freud never mentions mass communication in his analysis. The closest he comes is acknowledging that an "idea" or "principal" can substitute for the figure of the leader in the libidinal ties that hold the group together. Presumably a group held together in this fashion could be formed through a medium like print, which might extend crowd psychology over increasingly longer distances.

But even this point, which Freud does not make, would be a relatively cautious treatment of the possibilities inherent in modern media. For example, what if there was no leader, no "leading idea" or substitute, no glorious cause or palable comraderie? Would the group element dissolve? Or, could people be yet "held together" in a different way, despite the absence of what Freud called "libidinal ties" to a leader or principle? Was there, in other words, a more subtle form of association possible, which brought people together and produced a collective psychology of some sort, and yet held them apart?

Freud considered what happened when the tie between leader and led was cut. The result, he thought, was "panic." The example he used was a vivid one: men marching into battle. An army is able to face dangers greater than any single soldier could face because of the reassuring power of the libidinal ties among the members of the group, focused on the leader but palpable among the led. If the leader should fall the bond would dissolve and each soldier would be left facing the danger alone (28). Thus, the characteristic cry, "every man for himself," which is a response not to the actual level of danger but to the dissolution of a collective courage greater than the sum of its parts. For Freud, then, the absence of the leader or substitute means the end of the group the result is chaos and panic.

But Freud's conclusion denies the possibility of members interacting in an organized way despite their isolation, which is just the possibility raised by modern industrial society, in particular the mass media. "Every man for himself" is not necessarily the end of the crowd or of crowd psychology, as long as it is possible to communicate among otherwise dispersed and disorganized individuals. This is exactly the direction of the newspaper's development. Earlier forms of the newspaper had been organs of already organized groups-- political parties, causes, merchants with a common interest in trade. But the audience of the modern daily newspaper was a group that had never before existed as a group, a community of strangers brought into contact with one another through the medium of the newspaper and held in contact by the medium's power to communicate collective results to individuals in their private worlds. The audience for James Gordon Bennett's spectacular coverage of the Helen Jewett murder trial exhibited a certain strength--shown by the jump in circulation--and could be counted on to show certain characteristics, the evidence for which was Bennett's "feel" for what readers wanted out of the story. (He became, then, a kind of intuitive "group psychologist.")

The group assembled by Bennett's Herald never had to gather physically or declare its principals to be treated as a group.

Nor did it have a charismatic leader. All it had to do was show certain tendencies, produced not by a conscious decision to unite or by a palable connection to a leader--and certainly not by some mysterious "collective mind"--but rather, by the ability of the newspaper as a medium to register many private decisions in a public way and to furnish back to this privately situated "public" the evidence for its own strength as a collective. As we shall see, "public opinion" as a thing in the world separate from individuals is just this sort of result: a collective force created not by people joining in a common cause or interacting in a community structure, but by the ability of a medium--in our time the opinion poll--to create a totality out of the tendencies of otherwise unconnected individuals. This totality has a certain bias: it will tend to exhibit the properties of the medium which created it. In the case of the opinion poll, it will take shape as "answers" whose form mirrors the manner in which the questions were asked. This is one of the most exact and important meanings of Marshall McLuhan's famous remark, "the medium is the message." Many of the groups at which the modern media are aimed exist as groups because a medium has grouped them in a certain way.

Tarde, the public and the printing press

The crowd theorist who was most interested in the way the newspaper medium grouped its audience was the Frenchman, Gabriel Tarde. Tarde saw in the thinking about crowds the outlines of a new conception of the "public." By filling in those outlines he transcended the narrow class bias of most crowd psychology and made important contributions to a modern understanding of press and public.

Tarde wanted to reserve the term "crowd" for a group of people physically assembled in one location. Like others, he realized that this was a form of association whose significance was passing. The new currents of opinion which were capturing the imaginations of men and forcing a response from governments did not arise from physical gatherings, although they could sometimes lead to street demonstrations and the like. Rather, they were created by media of communication, especially the newspaper.

The strange thing about it is that these men who are swept along in this way, who persuade each other, or rather who transmit to one another suggestions from above-- these men do not come into contact, do not meet or hear each other; they are all sitting in their own homes scattered over a vast territory, reading the same newspaper.

It was the distinctly unsocial character of the new social bond that interested Tarde. To this new form of association he gave the term "public." Thus, what LeBon might have called an "electoral crowd" or a "national crowd" was to Tarde a "public."

The origins of the public as a social body could not be found in the "nature" of man or in any of the constitutions which supposedly secured democratic rule. They were much more prosaic. The public, said Tarde, was a creation of the printing press. The Greeks and Romans had no term for an audience that extended beyond the limits of a room or square. They could not imagine an invisible collective assembled through a medium. The first appearence of the new form of association came with lay reading of the Bible. "To the united mass of its readers this gave the sensation of forming a new social body, detached from the Church," Tarde wrote (279). There were other intermediate steps in the formation of this "new social body." Communities of scholars, for example, began to constitute themselves as a group by exchanging letters and reading the same books. Here was a group dispersed in space but linked through the medium of print. Yet they did not form a true public, Tarde reasoned, "until that time--difficult to specify--when men given to the same study were too numerous to know each other personally and felt themselves bound only by impersonal communications of sufficient frequency and regularity" (280). A certain anonymity is characteristic of the public, Tarde thought. It is the anonymity not only of the members of the group toward one another, but of events themselves. Events do not appear to have authors; they arrive from elsewhere the way the newspaper arrives in the morning.

For Tarde, a political public began in France along more traditional lines through meetings in cafes and salons and, ultimately, street crowds, all of which helped to produce the French Revolution. This public emerged in full when people began to participate in events not by acting together, but by reading of others who were acting and by feeling a common tie with them. This was the "true advent of journalism," Tarde thought, the formation of a body of people dispersed in space who inhabited a common world made common not by actual participation and face to face gathering, but by the feeling of coexistence lent by the newspaper.

In her study of the printing press Elizabeth Eisenstein makes a similar point by distinguishing between a hearing and a reading public. Eisenstein points out that, to the degree that a traditional hearing public required frequent public gatherings, the printing press was an atomizing and individualizing force.

But even while communal solidarity was diminished, vicarious particpation in more distant events was also enhanced; and even while local ties were loosened, links to larger collective units were being forged. Printed materials encouraged silent adherence to causes whose advocates could not be found in any one parish and who addressed an invisible public from afar. New forms of group identity began to compete with an older, more localized nexus of loyalties. (1: 132\)

Eisenstein here identifies a broad subtheme of the present study, a principle of change according to which the relation between the press and a modern public can be interpreted.

The loosening of traditional ties on one level and the linking up of larger structures on another is the historical factor that, in the twentieth century, forces a radical rethinking of just what a public is, first by Tarde, later among Robert Park, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, and, in our own time, by writers like Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas. Here, it will not be our project to rehearse what is one of the most familiar concepts in social thought: the movement from "community" to "society," Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, tradition to modernity. Rather, we will focus on two elements in that shift. First, the role of mass communication in linking on a higher level of abstraction those set free by the dissolution of ties on a lower, more local level; and, second, the questions this dissolving and reconnecting process raises about the nature of the public and the relationship between the public and the press.

Community vs. modernity: a useful distinction?

Before proceeding in these directions, it is perhaps wise to pause and point out an important objection to the whole approach. The differences between traditional community life and modern industrial society are subject to distortion, in particular to the sentimentalizing of "community" by intellectuals who today feel the absence of its imagined features in their own, very modern lives (Bell 80).

Leon Bramson, for example, argues that the idyllic village environment where everyone knew everyone else and felt a secure place in the world finds "more expression in the imagination of sociologists than in historical fact" (71). For the present study, there are two relevant responses to the danger of overdrawing the contrasts between tradition and modernity. The first is suggested by Eisenstein, who, it should be mentioned, is a historian rather than a sociologist. In noting the frequently-noted objection to the broad distinction between a close-knit community and an atomized modern society, she argues that some of the best ground for employing such a distinction is "the relationship between communication systems and community structures" (1: 131-32). In other words, if there is one place where the distinction between "community" and "society" makes good historical sense, it is in the shift from speech to print. "To hear an address delivered, people have to come together," she writes, "to read a printed report encourages individuals to draw apart." Thus prints aids in the dissolution of "community" and gives rise to a new social form: "The wide distribution of identical bits of information provided an impersonal link between people who were unknown to each other" (1: 132). What Eisenstein's work suggests is that some of the dangers of overdrawing contrasts between tradition and modernity can be avoided by patient attention to communication shifts, where those contrasts are most immediate.

That is part of what the present chapter proposes to do.

A second response to the danger of sentimentalizing "community" is to simply point out--and keep pointing out--that the dissolution of a relatively close community and the rise of a more atomized social structure, viewed from one angle, is an alienating, perhaps even inhuman development, but, from another angle, can be seen as an important gain in freedom, a release from the "prying eyes" of village life and the strict limits on social mobility and status that an inherited order entails. This point has been made many times. Marx, for example, did not idealize the pre-capitalist community but more or less admired capitalism for releasing people from the harsh limitations of village life. That a new sense of freedom is gained by the breaking of community ties is obvious to anyone who has ever moved to the city. But such freedoms have a way of bringing new limitations, of, in the Marxist discourse, becoming new forms of domination. This is especially true of the gains in access to information which a modern society brings. It would be a mistake to assume, for example, that people are more informed because the modern media make available an unprecedented amount of information. In drawing distinctions between tradition and modernity, one should be careful not to trivialize the tremendous freedoms created by the onset of industrial society, the power to experience a wider world that is placed in the hands of the individual.

But equally important in the recognition that each withered tie and shattered limitation provides the material for a new and more abstract structure whose effects may be quite limiting, often through a paradoxical or illusory "freedom to choose" which is itself the new method of restricting choice. This is a point that has special relevance to the study of mass communication, where "the public" (or the audience, the voter, the consumer, etc.) is frequently granted the right to select anything but the way in which the selections are presented. It is through the analysis of contradictions such as these that we come to understand in the fullest sense the "freeing" character of modernity. All of which is simply another way of saying that thought must proceed dialectically.⁴

The press as a function of social scale

Having made these qualifications, we can return to the general shift Eisenstein identifies. This is the breaking up of local, traditional ties dependent on face to face communication and the rise of a new social bond, looser and extending over a greater distance. The questions we are asking in this chapter are, first, "what is the character of this new social bond?"--a question to which crowd psychology is one response--and, second, "what kind of relation between press and public does the new social bond imply?"

It was Tarde's main contribution to identify different stages in the process of dissolution and reconnection, and to view the mass circulation newspaper as its culmination.

As a way of introducing Tarde's perspective on press and public let us propose the following: that the newspaper has made stops at several points along the way in the general passage from a speech-based, face to face community to an impersonal and abstract union of readers. The publics which participated in the French and the American Revolutions can be seen as one such stopping place. While the newspaper was essential to both causes, a great deal of organization and action still depended on traditional, face to face ties, in particular the charged political atmosphere of the public meeting, cafe, or coffee house. That atmosphere had a complex character. On the one hand people exchanged gossip and made speeches in the traditional way. On the other hand, the things that they were gossiping and speaking about often arrived through newspapers, pamphlets and books. Similarly, the glorious "cause" to which every participant contributed found concrete expression in the local community. But as a principal worth fighting for it extended far beyond its locale-- a result, we have argued, of print, in particular the newspaper's success in communicating revolutionary sentiment from place to place.

The coffee-houses of the merchant classes, which were both public gathering places and places to read newspapers, had always had this dual character about them.

They were speech environments created, at least in part, by print.

The newspaper both spoke to and grew out of such places. The eighteenth century newspaper publisher was a member of a relatively enclosed community of traders and political men whose members often met on the streets. (In fact, such meetings were so likely that editors often came face to face with those they had slandered in print. The result was frequently a duel or scuffle. The decline of the physical attack by and upon journalists is part of the shift to a larger and most impersonal structure linking journalists and their audience.) The audience for the sixpenny papers of the nineteenth century was a further step along the transition from one social structure to another. Its few thousand members would not all be known to one another personally--that is, they did not form a speech community--but they would be linked by a class feeling, a common interest in matters of trade and politics, and a common understanding of how these worlds functioned. They constituted a "type" of man and their newspaper reflected that constitution. Moreover, the paper was "about" their daily activity. It brought news from another place, but not from another world, that is, from no world they would not consider their own.

Today, the Wall Street Journal represents the maximum extension of a face-to-face community tie across distances that would dissolve all other forms of community.

The language of business is so commonly shared, a structural understanding of money matters so much the same everywhere, and the business man as a "type" is so well known and so frequently encountered among those who constitute the type, that the Journal can almost be said to be the organ of a community, despite the huge distances it crosses and the millions of readers it anonymously links. Thus the Journal is undoubtedly the most informative newspaper in the world, not because it contains the most information--that point should be clear from the previous chapter--but rather because its readers share those conditions that make information usable as information. Because its audience is so "information ready," every technical advance in the delivery of information makes the Journal a more powerful and profitable newspaper.

Completing the victory of print over speech

Further along in the transition from a community structure to a broader and looser social bond is the mass circulation newspaper. Part of what was so revolutionary about the penny press was that it organized a group that shared almost no features of a face to face community. In a sense, then, it completed the victory of print over speech. The social body that resulted from this triumph was the group that Trade wanted to call the "public."

In his conception, the public is the sort of body that emerges from the full extension of certain latent tendencies in industrial society. These tendencies included the impersonality of the social structures linking one person to another, the dissolution of traditional hierarchies, and, above all, the speed and reach of modern communications. The newspaper embodied all these changes and was therefore capable of "finishing" the job the printing press had begun, Tarde reasoned.

The printing press initiated the detachment of the individual from the community by democratizing the anti-social act of reading. As we have seen, with print a new network of readers began to take the place of the old community of speakers and listeners. But the effects of this change were held in check when the number of readers remained small, as in the community of scholars organized through books, or when the printing press simply extended in space an existing community. This was the case with the Protestant Reformation, which individualized and extended the community created by the Catholic Church. The Church and the public were "two aggregates ruled by different and irreconcilable principles," Tarde argued (279). The Church, even after lay reading of the Bible, was a vertical structure linking authorities to individuals. The public was a horizontal structure linking individuals to each other without the intermediating presence of authorities.

The figure of the author was one of those authorities whose mediating function was dissolved as a modern public began to appear, Tarde thought. He thus placed great importance on the fact that the journalist was invisible and unknown, an author without a name or identity (278). The anonymity of the journalist made his voice seem like everyone's voice, a power that did not accrue to the individual author:

The man of the book is to be feared, it has been said; but what is he beside the man of one newspaper! This man is each one of us at heart, or nearly so, and therein lies the danger of modern times.

At the same time that the author's voice was being wiped away, making the journalist simply the amplifier of the average man's own voice, (or, even more powerfully, the voice of events themselves), the interval between event and report was also disappearing, making all events seem like everyone's events. Here again the newspaper was the primary agent of change, for it organized and expressed the annihilation of distance made possible by the telegraph and railroad-- that is, it gave social form to the abstract principle of instant speed (Tarde 281; T. Clark 54). The newspaper was therefore able to transcend another limitation of the book: the interval between events and their treatment in print. Earlier forms of the newspaper had begun to wear away at the time lag involved in publication, but it was the daily newspaper joined with the telegraph that finally completed this shift.

Tarde asked rhetorically, "How could newspapers, arriving only two or three times a week and then a week after their publication in Paris, give readers in the south of France that feeling of immediacy and awareness of simultaneous unanimity without which the reading of a newspaper does not differ essentially from the reading of a book?" (280) Because of this feeling of simultaneous participation in events arriving from anywhere, the public as organized through newspapers was capable of "indefinite extension," Tarde said (281). It crossed all boundaries to include everyone in its loose structure, uniting and giving shape to opinion which before had found only local expression. Thus the rise of the public was also the rise of the nation, the newspaper again extending in full a feature of the book. Books written in the vernacular were important steps in the creation of a national identity, Tarde observed. But the newspaper went further: it gave its readers the feeling of participating in a national life. It offered the experience of living in a nation--a new social unit--by bringing home to everyone the movement of national issues and the unfolding of national events. It thus gave substance to the vague sense of national identity which publication in the vernacular had inspired.

From stable to unstable publics

The public, then, was the social body that emerged as the newspaper began to exhibit those properties specific to the form--anonymous authorship, daily publication, broad distribution, rapid transmission of unfolding events--while extinguishing traits left over from the form of the book. Tarde developed a curious ambivalence toward the social body that emerged from the newspaper form. On the one hand he thought the public was inherently more reasonable than the crowd, since it was not held together by open displays of emotion. It was possible, he conceded, that the public would simply extend across new distances the irrational traits of a crowd, but this "fall from public to crowd, though extremely dangerous, is fairly rare," he wrote (282). It is interesting that Tarde phrased this possibility as a "fall," or a regression back to an earlier stage of development. For it was entirely conceivable that the new social body, precisely by developing toward its modern stucture as described by Tarde, could exhibit on a higher level of abstraction some of the same features that alarmed the theorists of the crowd. This would not be a fall or regression, but an even more alarming advance-- toward a more abstract social structure that nonetheless exhibited some of the worst traits of street mobs. Just such a possibility was what the writers on crowds had feared all along, though they did not have Tarde's insights into how this might happen.

In place of an analysis of how the modern crowd might function across distance--which implied some theory of mass communication--the crowd psychologists tended to employ loaded terms to simply denounce the masses. And when they were not issuing pejoratives of one kind or another they were developing vague concepts like "suggestion" and "imitation" which, as we have seen, showed limited explanatory power. Tarde, with his insights into the message of the newspaper medium, had a relatively detailed explanation of how the new crowd functioned, and its very strength as description led him toward a more pessimistic view than his declared faith in the rationality of the public suggests.

For example, despite his hopeful conclusion about the rationality of the public, Tarde felt compelled to distinguish between a "consolidated, stable public" made up of people who are secure in their opinions, and a "floating, unstable public" whose members shift their views from one crisis to the next. It was the unstable public that was on the rise, he observed. Loyalty to a particular newspaper and its views was declining; what replaced it was the mass circulation newspaper skilled at capturing the attention of the "more mobile publics" created by industrial society (284). As stable publics decline, a looseness and fluidity begins to characterize political affairs.

Parties come together and fall apart, sometimes swelling "to unheard of proportions, in which case they acquire enormous, but only temporary, force" (285). This was a dangerous development, Tarde argued, for it encouraged the irresponsibility of the press. The Journalist who spoke to a relatively "firm" public was restrained by the settled convictions and overall competence of his audience. His job was to amplify, clarify and generally enrich a debate his readers would be capable of conducting themselves, if they only had the means to reach each other. But the journalist whose newspaper had assembled a "capricious" public felt no such respect toward his audience and had no sense of restraint. Two new roles were thus created, that of the panderer, "the mediocre publicists" who were "subservient to the whims of their public," and the manipulator, the "important publicists" so skilled at giving firm shape to vague sentiment that the public became subject to their will (284). In other words, the function of the journalist is itself a function of the way the audience is organized. This is an issue we will take up in more depth in the Chapter Five.

Summary

We began the present chapter by asking, if the "universal town meeting" is not an adequate description of the sort of public a modern press addresses, then how should that public be described? The writers on crowd psychology attempted to grapple with this issue, recognizing immediately that "the crowd" was not a traditional community but some new social body whose features had yet to be identifed.

Furthermore, they saw that this new social unit could be created entirely through mass communication. But in attempting to describe the "nature" of the crowd, they relied too heavily on individual metaphors, comparing the crowd to a single person--a drunk, a madman--and positing a mysterious "crowd mind" which somehow took possession of the individual minds of the people making up the crowd. (Thus the importance of hynponisis in their theories.) The challenge posed by the mass circulation newspaper, we argued, was to imagine a social body which showed neither the traits of a traditional community nor those of a single individual.

Freud's ideas on crowd psychology faced this challenge a little more squarely. He recognized that group behavior could be produced by individuals acting as individuals; he did not fall back on a collective unconscious which assumed command of people's minds. Instead, he described a dynamic interchange among members of the crowd channeled through a charismatic leader or cherished idea, which produced collective results--that is, the identifiable traits of crowd psychology--through the more or less statistical convergence of the individual relations each member established with the leader of leading idea.

The importance of Freud's ideas to an understanding of press and public is in this notion of convergence. The crowd, the mass, the public-- all these modern collectives can be understood as groups whose "groupishness" is produced by individual actions converging at a higher level of abstraction without necessarily meeting as in a traditional community structure. For it is possible, in a modern environment, to act together without coming together. This is what the charismatic leader allows, Freud reasoned. But it is also what mass communication allows, in a historically new way. The weakness of Freud's approach is thus its ahistorical character. He was interested in "human nature," not the historical changes which might create new ways of bringing people together while yet leaving them isolated and alone. The rise of the mass circulation newspaper is one of those changes.

Gabriel Tarde, on other hand, did have a historical view of the matter. He connected specific characteristics of the new social body, which he called the public, to changes in the form of the medium responsible for bringing that body together. The printing press, in his view, began the process through which a modern public was created, mostly because print allowed people to share a common world without gathering together. But it was the specific properties of the newspaper form--broad distribution, daily publication, the rapid transmission of events, the anonymity of its authors--that made the modern public different from all previous political collectives.

Tarde conceived of this public not as a traditional community, nor as an individual with a mind of its own, but as an outcome of the particular way the newspaper communicated. Here, then, is a partial answer to the question which began this chapter. If the "universal town meeting" is not an adequate description of the sort of public created by the modern newspaper, then how should that public be conceptualized? Instead of equating the public with a "universal town meeting" which meets to discuss issues through the magical agency of the press, we need to focus on the way in which the newspaper gathers the public together without allowing it to actually meet. To explore this point further is the task of the next chapter.

CHAPTER FIVE

COMMUNICATION WITHOUT COMMUNITY

In this chapter we examine in more depth an outstanding characteristic of the modern public: that it is brought together, given form as a group, without actually meeting as a group in the manner of a traditional town meeting. In particular we are interested in exploring further the role of the modern newspaper in creating this somewhat paradoxical form of interaction, which, as we shall see, is an identifying feature of a mass society.

Let us begin by recalling our distinction between audiences prepared to receive news as information and those formed on the basis of human interest. Tarde was interested in this sort of difference because, in his conception, forms of journalism are functions of the type of social bond existing among members of the audience. That bond is shaped historically by the dominant means of communication, which Trade saw shifting in his own time. "The professional press," as Trade called it, "the one dedicated to the interests of the judicial, industrial, or agricultural worlds, is the least read, the least interesting, the least active"-- in other words, on the decline.

As long as the audience is reading "only notices and practical information relevant to their private affairs"--that is, as long as news functions strictly as information for those acting on their own interests--"even the habitual readers of a newspaper do not form a public," Tarde argued (288). The reason the users of information do not form a public is that, for Tarde, both the public and the crowd represented a very modern form of association, a new way of combining people into wholes. In this new form of association, individuals are brought together not through a "harmonizing of differences" in which everyone has a place and the places fit together to form a whole, but rather through the fusion of "innate or acquired similarities into a simple and powerful unison," in a "communion of ideas and passions" achieved typically through the newspaper's appeal to a wide readership (emphasis in orignal; 286).

This point can be clarified. In the case of what Tarde called the "professional press," the people the newspaper brings together are united by a common need for information, produced by their separate stations within a profession. The profession predates the rise of the newspaper which serves it: it is a community before it is communicated to. Information is useful to people when they each have a function, when they need current facts to go about their business. But the crowd and the public had no business, at least none that gave each member a place within an elaborate structure of roles.

The common-ness produced by the mass circulation newspaper is therefore of a different order. Here, what brings readers together is not a shared realm of activity or a community structure in which each person has a role to play. Rather, what brings them together is the newspaper itself, in particular the journalist's ability to secure items of common (or "human") interest and thus to sell papers.

The empty "art" of mass communication

This is one way to define entertainment in a modern environment: entertainment is the search for those symbolic forms that will bring members of an audience together on no other, more solid basis than the common consumption of the forms themselves. In a sense, then, entertainment has no purpose other than to pass the time for the audience, or, from the point of view of the advertiser, to assemble an audience that merely wants to pass the time. That is why its characteristic quality is lightness. What passes for entertainment in our culture often seems superficial or empty not because performers and audiences are superficial, empty people, but because the world between them--or the world that is assumed to stand between them--has been emptied of its power to give the performance a meaning. Johnny Carson, one of the most popular entertainers in American history, has no agenda, no message, no purpose in performing, really, other than "to get a few laughs" and make the time pass smoothly.

Carson does not conceive of his huge nightly audience as members of any community, cause, party or group, and he does not address them as people engaged in any activity other than watching television. Carson stands for nothing--except perhaps the blandness of American television--because he has nothing on which to stand: his audience is not assembled for a purpose but merely for a while. This featurelessness is reflected in Carson's physical appearence, speech manner and comic style, none of which are have any identifiable origin, and in the format of the show itself, which embodies no goal, no task to be completed or story to tell. The very vagueness of the show's title is a good clue to its meaning. It is not "The Johnny Carson Show," for not even that much content is impermissible. It is "The Tonight Show," which might as well be "Tonight's Show" since its most telling feature is its being broadcast tonight.

Again, the explanation for this absence of features is not the lack of talent in the performer or the laziness and stupidity of the audience. Nor is it wholly in the qualities of television as a medium. The factor to be focused on is the way the audience is brought together and given form as a group. The penny papers began a process which television extended in full: the assembly of an audience for no other purpose than attending to items which are "interesting" or "entertaining."

In contrast to the party press, which addressed the members of a political union, or the mercantile papers aimed at merchants, the penny papers relied on no organization or structure of activity, no significant community which predated the newspaper's organization of its audience. The audience was discovered, its unity achieved, in the act of putting out a profitable paper. It is possible to view the "art" of mass communication as nothing more than this: the continuous attempt to organize audiences that are as yet dispersed and inactive because the form which would unite them has still to be introduced. When the search is successful--and a "hit" film, book, play or song is produced--a common tendency or desire which had remained latent in the mass of isolated people has been brought to the surface and deployed for commercial gain. Lacking any more substantial basis than that, these temporary communities dissolve when the form that held their interest ceases to be interesting.

This process represents a new stage in what David Reismann once called "the sociology of audiences" (92). Audiences had classically been assembled for a stated purpose-- to hear a speech or see a play, spaces for which were set aside. The printing press introduced a new element: the audience for a book had no space set aside for it and no pre-existing form. Instead, the book created its own audience.

audience as it circulated and sold. (Reading rooms and public libraries are interesting cases of the book creating a new form of public space. But these spaces are "public" only in a limited sense, since the activity they sponsor, the reading act itself, is profoundly anti-social and since speech, the social act par excellence, is specifically prohibited.) Early forms of the newspaper took their audiences from already organized realms of activity such as business, politics, religion and so on. At this stage there corresponded to the newspaper a public space in which these pre-existing audiences assembled and dramatized their presence as a group: the public square or legislative chamber in the case of politics, the coffee house or trading room in the case of business, the Church as a physical structure in the case of religion. The new crowd, or what Tarde calls the public, was an audience to which there corresponded no public space where the group assembled and dramatized its presence as a group. The street mob was the largest group for which there was such a public space, but its significance was passing. The new mob never had to gather on the streets; it needed no space set aside for its appearence. The type of audience created by the printing press did not orginate in a realm of activity predating the act of communication. Rather, it was the act of communication which produced, or made known, the audience. Thus, a best selling book created an audience which had never existed before, and for which there was no corresponding public space.

But unlike even the most popular book, the mass circulation newspaper managed to maintain this audience indefinitely by reassembling it every morning. It did this by discovering the formula for a popular paper, a series of features which could be counted on daily to draw the attention of a dispersed and otherwise disorganized mass of readers.

Collected attention as space and time

As this new chapter in the sociology of audiences unfolded, the mass circulation newspaper emerged as a modern substitute for the public realm, a way of gathering people together regularly and ritually, but without setting aside a space for their gathering. To the extent that its formula succeeded and a steady circulation was assured, the newspaper created a kind of quasi-public space: the space of collected attention, represented in the abstract by the empty page of tommorow's paper. This space had economic value; it could be sold to advertisers (Hardt 107). It also had strategic value in that it could be used to push a cause or promote an ideology. The space of permanently organized attention, produced for the first time in the abstract by the popular press, began as a surplus space created by the profitablity of the newspaper. It is the space the paper can afford to create after the attention-getting features of the paper have been included and circulation is assured.

Usually the first use to which this space is put is advertising, for there can be no advertising until there is a paper that sells. The ideal advertisement is obviously the kind that also sells the paper, contributing to--rather than being carried by--the power of other attention-getting features such as the human interest story. (Most fashion magazines today benefit from this kind of advertising, as does the New York Times Sunday Magazine. People read them for the ads.) Like advertising, the news can either contribute to or exhaust the value of the other attention-getting features. That is, it can either be a space creator, helping to sell the paper, or a space consumer, something which can appear because the paper sells. It is difficult to know at any given time exactly which items in a paper create or exhaust space, but certainly since the rise of the mass circulation newspaper, the editorial, for example, has always been a space consumer, while the murder story has always been a space creator.

With television, what we have just termed "the space of collected attention" is better construed as time. It is time that can be bought and sold, for the weekly television schedule represents the attention of millions of people collected in the abstract and divided into hours and minutes, each of which has a different value depending on how many millions are involved.

It is fair to say that commercial television time is a form of time which had never previously existed, a meaning of time that was created by mass communication. In a similar sense, the front page of the newspaper, a surface at which thousands, then hundreds of thousands of otherwise disconnected people would be certain to gaze, was an absolutely new kind of space, not only because of the number of readers it represented but also because of the way it represented them. The readers of the paper were publicly addressed but privately situated; their individual decisions to buy and read the paper created a collective result, the newspaper itself, but did not arise out of a collective cause, project or party. These readers, members of a new social body, were related through the newspaper but not necessarily to one another. The only message they were certain to share was the medium which united them. They formed, in other words, a mass.

The meaning of "the mass"

But what is a mass? Up to now, we have been using the word as if its meaning were clear. In fact, as several writers have pointed out, the "mass" is one of the most frequently used and frequently confused terms in sociological thought. (Bramson 27-30). It appeals to both the left and the right for different reasons.

It also seems to connote, in one sense, the lack of organization, a certain formlessness, and, in another sense, an excess of organization and control, as in the "manipulation of the masses" (Bell 76). One explanation for the troubled history of the term is suggested by Fred Matthews in his study of the Chicago school of sociology. Around the turn of the century, he notes, aristocratic conservatives blamed "democracy," socialists blamed "capitalist exploitation," and liberal sociologists blamed "urbanization" or "mobility" for the same conditions of industrial society-- the conditions we have generally associated with the decline of "community" and the rise of a more atomized social structure (124). The "mass" was the ground on which all these analyses--and their different political overtones--met. The mass was clearly related to the democratization of the polity, it was undoubtedly made possible by the growth of industrial capitalism, it was certainly a product of the urban environment and it was encouraged by the new mobility individuals felt. In short, it was the result of the decisive changes everyone saw at work in modern industrialism. What kind of result this was, its true cause and significance, was a question of interpretation obviously dependent on ideology. The very vagueness of the term allowed several different ideologies to collect around the same concept, in apparent agreement that the "mass" was on the rise but in disagreement, obviously, over what the rise of the masses meant.

So where that does leave the present study? Rather than attempting to settle the question of what the mass "really" is, and rather than arbitarily choosing one writer's definition over another's, let us look at the "mass" as simply a name given to the kind of social body that results from the decline of a speech-based, face-to-face community and the rise of a looser, larger social structure made possible, in part, by the space-binding power of modern communications. The German theorist Jurgen Harbermas identifies a string of terms sociology has used to grasp essentially the same problem. He writes:

Status and contract, Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft, mechanical and organic solidarity, informal and formal groups, primary and secondary groups, culture and civilization, traditional and bureaucratic authority, sacral and secular associations, military and industrial society, status group and class-- all of these pairs of concepts represent as many attempts to grasp the structural change of the institutional framework of a traditional society on the way to becoming a modern one. (90-91)

We have already met up with several attempts to grasp this "structural change" involving tradition and modernity. The idea of a "universal town meeting," which we examined in Chapter Three, was a rather crude attempt to reconcile a village environment with the speed and reach of electric communications. In the present chapter, both the "crowd" and Gabriel Trade's conception of the "public" are efforts to grasp what happens to a "traditional society on its way to becoming a modern one," as Habermas puts it.

Let us view the "mass" as another such attempt, and try to connect what has been said about it to the rise of the modern newspaper.

Public transmission; private reception

In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture, Raymond Williams notes that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "multitude" was the most common term for referring in general to the great bulk of the people. Its place was taken in the eighteenth century by "mob" but, as we have seen, in the nineteenth century the term "mob," (or, in Tarde's analysis, the "crowd") gradually lost its general reference and became confined to a large and volatile group that was physically assembled that is, a street mob. As this delimitation of "mob" occurred, Williams writes, the word that replaced "mob" and came to refer to the bulk of the people in general was "mass," followed by "the masses." Two strands of meaning are joined in the modern sense of the term "mass," he says. One is the lack of distinctions, a sense of sameness and amorphousness; the other is the connotation of bigness, denseness and bulk (159). The odd thing, Williams notes, is that in such terms as "mass communication" a word connoting density and bulk is used to describe an audience that is "numerically very large" but spatially isolated, forming anything but a dense mass (162). In this sense perhaps the only modern means of communication that is literally addressed to a mass is a public address system as used by Hitler.

In most usages the term "mass" preserves the sense of largeness and public-ness connoted by the street crowd, but comes more and more to refer to a paradoxical situation in which individuals are treated as members of a collective that never quite collects, a crowd that has somehow amassed itself (or been amassed) while its members remain in their private stations. This is the most slippery meaning of mass communication: public transmission, private reception; socially produced, individually consumed.

An effective illustration of the odd condition of a mass audience was provided by the movie Network, in which Peter Finch plays a crazed TV newsman who urges his audience to go to the window and shout, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore\!" As the film shows people from all over a city neighborhood opening their windows and shouting the same thing, a sense of the audience's bulk, its bigness, and the weird para-social connection its members share, comes over the viewer. Note that it is speech that makes palpable the existence of the mass audience; for Finch's followers to begin realizing their strength as a group they have to turn away from the television set and open the windows of their private homes. The space between the buildings where their shouts meet recalls a lost public realm, a space which mass communication has made obsolete. Finch's message, then, is a self-destructive one.

In urging people to reconstitute a public realm through speech he destroys the conditions which made it possible for him to preach such a message in the first place: the TV audience dissolves. By using the power of the medium against itself he becomes a true television radical, a threat to the logic of the form. In the dramatic structure of the movie, he must therefore be destroyed. And he is, by assasination.

But television only extends and institutionalizes the mass audience, which began to take shape with the appearence of the modern newspaper. In a mass audience conditions of separation become the new basis for bringing people together. We saw this at the most elementary level in the analysis of the crowd, where strangers in the street, each immersed in a private world, begin to form a crowd as their attention is fixed on a common object. Even where they are attentive to a common object and physically gathered, as in a street mob, the members of a crowd are isolated from one another by the absence of face to face relations conducted through conversation. As soon as those relations are restored by speech the mob element dissipates. (A totalitarian society may be said to emerge when even conversation among intimates begins to function like the address to a crowd. When speech loses its power to dissolve the mass and becomes in its own way a mass medium, leaving individuals isolated even as they face each other and converse, the only decently "public" realm left is the private mind.

This, of course, is the terrifying predicament of Winston Smith in 1984: in order to stay sane he must produce a public realm from within himself because speech has lost its human functions. For, as Smith says to himself, freedom is the right to say "two plus two equals four"-- not the right to think it, to know it, or even to write it down, but the right to say it, presumably to someone else. Thus the wisdom in Hannah Arendt's remark, "Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being" \[4\].)

Attention as a commodity

As audiences begin to lose their physical location and are assembled more and more through media of communication, the separete-ness of those constituting the audience becomes even more pronounced, a condition dramatized by the movie Network. Again, television is merely the latest and most powerful means for grouping together otherwise isolated individuals-- that is, for forming a mass. The printing press began the process and the newspaper intensified it to the point where, with daily publication and a broad circulation, the newspaper had created for industrial society a permanent collective of otherwise unconnected individuals, access to whom was represented in the abstract by a page of the sure-selling daily paper.

The mass audience could then become the object of commercial technique the search for the symbolic forms which would link the most people, peddle the most papers, and, eventually, sell the most products. Those forms, whatever they turn out to be--murder stories, comics, crossword puzzles, gyrating women--are less the expression of a "natural" or universal interest, than an outcome of the particular social (or para-social) means through which the audience is assembled. To put the same point another way: the familiar diet of amusement and distraction, horror and trivia served up by the mass media is an expression not of the human condition but of a historical condition created by the advance of industrial society. Williams makes this point in a particularly interesting way. Local newspapers in England, he observes, do not rely on the methods of mass appeal that are the mainstay of the national tabloids. And yet they are read by the same people who supposedly form the "mass" audience for the national papers. The local press tends to be "about" the things that happen in the local community, and it is able to maintain a modesty and a sense of proportion in its language through this close connection to lived experience. The tabloid press, on the other hand, is "about" the extraordinary. The most fantastic things and distant people fill its pages: an ordinary person makes it into the paper only by winning the lottery or being murdered in a particularly interesting way. Williams writes:

Produced for a known community on the basis of common interest and common knowledge, the local newspaper is not governed by a "mass" interpretation. Its communication, in fact, rests on a community in sharp contrast with most national newspapers, which are produced for a market, interpreted by "mass" criteria. The methods of the popular newspapers do not rest on the fact that simple people read it, for then the local newspaper would hardly be read or understood at all. They rest on the fact that it and its readers are organized in certain kinds of economic and social relations. It we realize this we will concentrate our attention, not on man's natural goodness or badness, but on the nature of the controlling social relations. (Culture and Society 312\)

It is because its members share no common world of activity that the audience of the mass circulation newspaper is held together mainly by "cheap" sentiments and appeals to the senses, Williams is arguing. (Of course, why those appeals take the particular semiotic forms they take is another question. The reason gentleman prefer blondes and not redheads still has to be explained. All that is being said here is that the explanation is not in "human nature" but in culture, or what Williams calls the "sociology of culture."¹) As we have seen, the more the newspaper circulates through an organized realm of activity where individuals each have a function, the more prepared they are to receive information and put it to work, and the more the news will reflect and speak to actual experience. That is what the local newspaper is able to do, according to Williams. But the local community is not the only social group whose members are organized in such a way as to permit journalism a close connection to shared experience.

There are others: trade unions, professions, religious groups, political causes. Similarly, within the orbit of the modern newspaper there are audiences for specific features which are organized along different lines than the general, or "mass" audience. Sports fans constitute a kind of national community whose shared activity, the game, "grounds" sports news in the same way that money as a common coin grounds business news for businessmen. The journalism that flourishes within these more defined environments has a character very different from that addressed to a mass of readers. No one who is put in charge of the newsletter for a thriving organization has to become an expert in the techniques of mass appeal, mostly because the job of attention-getting is done by the organization itself in the vital connection it establishes between its members and their work. A need to know, a "demand" for news, arises naturally out of the dynamics of such an environment; it does not have to be produced by the cleverness or guile of journalists.

Attention becomes a commodity that must be produced and sold when activity is not interesting or important enough to sell itself. In our society, the activity that most needs to be bolstered in this fashion is that of buying. Advertising is the name given to the way in which we produce attention to buying, for buying as a social act cannot command attention on its own.

It is by no means obvious why buying should require such a boost; after all, people do need things. In fact, the need to give buying a boost through mass advertising arises in the twentieth century when industrial society begins producing goods in excess of those that would ordinarily sell themselves.² Attention as a commodity, as a thing that can be bought and sold (whether as space or as time) is thus an index of how difficult it is to rouse the interest of people who feel no need to attend to what is advertised. It is related in this sense to the evaporation of the traditional means by which attention was once compelled-- to the degradation of the work environment, to the decline of religous ritual, to the abandoning of the close-knit and hierarchical community for the city, where, as we heard Rousseau's hero say in Chapter Two, "of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my heart." The loosening of such a hold is what creates the binding power of mass communication: a mass society must produce as a commodity the attention to things that a community, any community, tends to compel on its own.³

The blurred boundary between public and private

So it is the decline of a compelling community structure that gives mass communication its entry point, whether the goal is to sell products, newspapers or movie stars. The search for the "lowest common denominator," which is by now so characteristic of the mass media, can only emerge as a cultural practice when a range of other "common denominators" are either wiped away or bypassed.

This withering away of a range of other, smaller social forms is the historical means by which a mass society is produced, James Carey observes. For Carey, a mass society, "understood in its most technical and least ideological sense," is

a form of social organisation in which intermediate associations of community, occupation and class do not inhibit direct linkage of the individual and primary groups to the state and other nationwide organisations through mass communications. ("The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator" 24\)

These "intermediate associations" were able to compel attention in a way that a mass society does not. Hannah Arendt makes a similar point in identifying the elements of a mass society. She emphasizes the importance of the "common world" established by speech and public ritual through which people mutually verify what is real and agree on what is important (46-47). The significance of this common world is that it "relates and separates" at the same time, bringing people together and verifying what is common or public to all, while leaving purely subjective experience in the darkness of private life. "What makes mass society so difficult to bear," she writes, "is not the number of people involved, at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and separate them" (48).

The members of a profession, a local community, a political cause or a trade union are more likely than a mass audience to establish among themselves a common world and enact its principles in public life. These groups are able to make a clear separation between the public and the private, the common life of the group and the individual lives of each of its members. Such a boundary is a result of the activity members share and the universe of discourse which upholds some utterances while restricting others. The readers of the Wall Street Journal have in common the world of business and finance and the language of money, which they all regard as "public." This world both joins them together and keeps them apart, in the sense that businessman meeting on a train do not have to relate to one another as individuals; they have the world of business to discuss, and each has a place within that world. There is no need to know each other intimately; indeed, intimacy gets in the way of conducting business. And yet the language and the activity they share enables them to interact. This is what Arendt means by a common world which "relates and separates" its members at the same time, doing public life the inestimable favor of restricting the scope of the private.

But the mass audience, as we have said, is an odd hybrid of public and private: its members are publicly addressed as private individuals.

That, after all, is the effect of a news item about a domestic tragedy: something which is purely a private affair is publicly communicated, not to a public but to private individuals scattered in their homes, each invited to have his own emotions about the incident. What this means is that the functions of "relating" and "separating" are blurred in a mass society, and neither achieves its full effect. People are never really brought together nor are they left fully alone. Consumer advertising, for example, is clearly part of the socialization process, in the sense that it is about the most precious values of the society. So in a way it is a public ritual. But as a ritual it is not enacted in a social setting, and there is no dramatization of its values as group values. The preferred voice in the ads is personal; a deoderant ad speaks not with the authority of the culture but in the personal voice of the anxious consumer or trusted friend. In a similar way, political leaders versed in the techniques of impression management use television to speak to each member of the audience individuallly and impress upon their listeners the leader's personal charm. "The modern charismatic leader destroys any distance between his own sentiments and impulses and those of his audience," writes Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man. Attention is then directed to the leader's personal character rather than his public acts (265).

The result, says Sennett, is that the leader's listeners "lose a sense of themselves too. They focus on who he is rather than what he can do for them" (221). This is one way to understand the difference between a hero and a celebrity: a winning or odd personality replaces the great deed as the bestower of fame. A traditional hero does what he does for the glory of the group, team or cause. His modern counterpart, the celebrity, does what he does for the glamour brought to his individual life and, by reflection, the lives of his fans. Heroes perform for a public world, celebrities establish in public a private relation with their fans, many of whom dream of replacing the celebrity and becoming the public object of private worship. Celebrity as a social relationship between famous people and their fans is thus part of the logic of mass communication, which communicates publicly to people in their private worlds. It is through this blurring of the public and private realms that a mass society is brought together and socialized.⁴

The market as a linking medium

The technique of fashioning items for public transmission to private worlds is the major contribution of journalism to a mass society, for as Williams remarks, "In fact, there are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses" (Culture and Society 300).

The commercial formula, a recipe for selling large numbers of papers, is one example of a "way of seeing people as masses." To recall the reasoning behind this conclusion: the same man, a member of a local community addressed as such by a local newspaper, is addressed as part of a "mass" by a national newspaper employing a commercial formula, Williams argues. Clearly, then, it is not the reader's "essence" as a mass man that explains the forms in which the national medium communicates to him. For in another context he is not a mass man at all.⁵ "Massness" is in the relation established between the communicator and those to whom he communicates, a relationship founded on the absence of all relations other than the communication act itself. American sociologist Herbert Blumer realized this fact fifty years ago in his writings on the mass. For Blumer, mass behavior takes place in a realm "outside the field of local culture." It focuses on "objects and experiences that transcend" what happens to people in their waking, working lives (116). The mass is a "homogeneous aggregate" of otherwise heterogeneous and dispersed people-- in other words, an abstraction in which differences are ignored and broad similarities stressed. This abstract union has no organization or structure, no activity which gives its members a place in a larger scheme.

And since it has no regular organization the individuals of which it is composed have no status, are not allocated to any recognized niches, and have no designated roles to carry out. The anonymity of the individual and the freedom of his behavior from an embracing structure means that the control of his behavior must be made by direct appeal and not by social authority or subtle pressure as in a social system... The mass has no culture, no traditions, no established rules or forms of conduct, no body of etiquette adjusting the relations of individuals, and no system of expectations or demands.

All these absences govern the kind of journalism that is addressed to a mass audience. Perhaps the most interesting example of a kind of communication founded on the abscence of relationships among members of the audience is the USA Today, a "national newspaper" addressed to a mythical union of Americans. With the USA Today the absence of any truly shared culture is the most important condition readers share. The paper speaks in chummy tones to a "community" whose members have almost nothing in common, except the material of a floating national culture created by the mass media. Politics is clearly not a shared activity or concern, and so it is relegated to a perfunctory role. Some other way of suggesting a national identity must be found, government having proved itself ineffective, (or perhaps merely boring.) Thus the almost hysterical attempt to suggest a national community through the constant use of the word "we" in headlines and articles, and the inflation of the sports and weather pages into dominant parts of the paper, (sports and weather being two realms where conditions resemble more closely those of a traditional community.) In addition to sports, weather and the glitzy world of mass media, the USA Today is concerned with ease of consumption. A tremendous effort goes into making the paper readable, almost in the way that a chair is designed to be comfortable.

The designer of a chair takes for granted that the human body is more or less a shared condition among those who might use the chair. The Gannett Company is interested in the body also: in how an eye scans a page, in what the brain regards as a pleasing line, in color and shape and form as physical facts which can be adjusted to the tendencies of readers. This extreme concern with the body, exemplified by the brilliant look of the paper, is the lowest level of commonality any group of people can enjoy. If nothing else, everyone has a retina which functions in pretty much the same way.

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong about good design or even the aim of making reading pleasurable. The question we are raising is: what holds the newspaper audience together? If the answer is "graphics" that is one sort of journalism; if the answer is "politics" that is another. In any form of journalism, it is the way the audience is organized, the level at which its commonality is reached, which accounts for the content of the press, not the "nature" of the audience as people or the character of the journalist as a professional.

Lacking any basis for communicating to the members of a common world, the mass circulation newspaper seeks to communicate to private individuals in their separate worlds. But since a private message to each person is impossible to fashion, individual readers are construed, not as individuals, but as an abstract bundle of tendencies expressed through the acts of buying and selling.

The market, in other words, replaces the common world as the basis for communication. Williams notes that both the commercial newspaper, which was addressed to merchants, and the London Times, which addressed itself to the governing classes "had, as their basis, the image of a particular kind of reader, in an identifiable class to which the owners and journalists themselves belonged." By contrast, the popular press "has, as its image, a particular formula, which, beginning perhaps in the 1840s, has been rapidly developed since the institution of new advertising in the 1890s" (The Long Revolution 178). Such a formula turns the audience into a object. It begins to replace the more concrete conception the journalist had of his reader, a figure with whom the journalist had once shared a common world and a universe of discourse. The power of the successful formula is that it turns an abstract mass of readers into a concrete set of practices, transforming the absence of relations among people into a set of relationships among symbols which can then become the object of attention. The formula is deduced from the statistical fluctuations of the market, the pattern of preferences that emerges from the acts of buying and selling. At first the pattern is discovered through trial and error, but in the twentieth century it becomes known through the quasi-scientific enterprise of market research.

This relatively abstract and indirect form of contact with the audience then begins to characterize all levels of the relationship between the newspaper and its readers (Hardt 106).

Public opinion as an oppressive force

We can now bring the present discussion to a point: the mass is what results from communication without community. In slightly different fasion, that is what Williams, Carey and Arendt and Blumer are all saying. And that is what Tarde had perceived in his analysis of the "public." In arriving at this point we have construed "community" rather broadly. It has meant not only an actual local community, that is, a village environment, but also those wider networks which exhibit some of the same features. Thus the merchants who read the sixpenny papers of the 1830s formed a kind of community even if they did not all gather face to face. Why? Because they shared the activity of commerce and a language which develops around it. Sports fans are a kind of community for similar reasons. In this sense, "community" is perhaps better understood as a "universe of discourse" centered around a common activity. Yet there is another important meaning to the term in our treatment. "Community" also connotes some sort of structure which gives each member a part to play, a role or function that permits some activities while restricting others.

A mass audience has no such structure (Blumer 118). It consists of individuals who, as individuals, happen to attend to the same things.⁶

Perhaps the first great theorist to undertake the anlaysis of communication without community (and thus to anticipate a mass society) was Tocqueville, who described its emergence in terms of "equality," that is, the collapse of traditional and hierarchical distinctions between the rulers and the ruled, the aristocracy and the common people. Like so many other thinkers grappling with the onset of modernity, Tocqueville emphasized how the loosening of restraints on one level becomes, on a higher level, a new form of oppression.

When the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself individually with all those about him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them; but when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows and to place himself in contrast with so huge a body, he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness. The same equality that renders him independent of each of his fellow citizens, taken severally, exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater number.

For Tocqueville, the absence of an aristocratic hierarchy gives rise to a new force, public opinion, in which the power of numbers replaces the authority of received truths (2: 10-11). Tarde had recognized the same point. In a traditional community, he noted, a common idea was established through speech, either by private conversation or public oratory.

A notion of what most people believed "did not appear like a stone fallen from heaven," (as it does today when, for example, an opinion poll is published.) Rather, "for each person the \[common\] idea was linked to the tone of voice, the face, of the person from whom it had come, a person who lent it a living visage." In traditional "primary groups" like the family, clan or village, voices are given the weight they deserve based on the authority of the speaker, Tarde observed. But "in the secondary and much larger group, adhered to blindly by individuals who cannot see one another, voices can only be counted and not weighed." The press is one of the means for counting, rather than weighing voices; it upholds the opinion, not of the great man, but of the greater number of men. It thus assists in the triumph of quantity over quality (301-2).

The force replacing the authority of received wisdom is public opinion as assembled through the press, which, in Tocqueville's view, "presses with enormous weight upon the minds of each individual." The power of public opinion arises from the levelled social relations prevailing in a democracy, not from any presumed deference to the "people" as encoded in a constitution (2: 10-11). It is a power which seems to exist above individuals and beyond their reach, a new directing force in human affairs too huge and amorphous to be given direction.

While it is associated with "the people," no individual person feels public opinion to be his own voice. Tocqueville writes:

In the ages of equality all men are independent of each other, isolated and weak. The movements of the multitude are not permanently guided by the will of any individuals; at such times humanity seems always to advance of itself.

What Tocqueville is expressing here is the remoteness and abstractness of the new social body, which we have called the "mass," Tarde called the "public" and which Tocqueville associated with democracy. This new social body produces a force, "public opinion" which is able to tyrannize individuals because a range of other social forms which once mediated between the individual and the group have been wiped away, levelled by the "age of equality." This is part of what we mean by communication without community: the absence of an intermediate structure which would translate between the feelings of the individual and the beliefs of the group. As Blumer observes, in the mass there are "merely individual lines of action." These "may converge in a startingly unanimous direction and thus make the behavior of the mass exceedingly effective." But what looks likes the opinion of the mass is "not a result of consensus or of mutual understanding" (119). The convergence which creates public opinion is never experienced by the people whose actions converge. It takes place in another realm entirely, where, as Tocqueville put it, "humanity seems always to advance of itself."

The public as absence or void

The unreality of this other realm was for Soren Kierkegaard the identifying feature of the modern public. In an 1846 essay entitled the Present Age, Kierkegaard followed Tocqueville in fixing on the "levelling process," for him a "silent, mathematical and abstract" force that erases "the concrete particulars of organization," thereby destroying "those intermediate qualifications which temper the humour of man's positions and strengthen its pathos" (56-57). No one directs the levelling process, but it goes on. Individuals contribute without cooperating; they manage to create a collective without collectively creating anything. "A demon is called up over whom no individual has any power," Kierkegaard wrote (54). That demon he called the "public," for him not only a negative term but negation itself, a word signifying the absence of any means to bring people together and give them a task. Thus the public is not really a social body at all but "a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage" (60). The public is "a body which can never be reviewed" because it has no boundary or definition; it "becomes everything and is supposed to include everything" (61). It is "only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities" that the public arises, "consisting of individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization-- and yet are held together as a whole" (60).

How, then, is the public created? By the press, which allows people to participate in the society with neither the pleasure of face to face contact nor the responsibility that goes with it. Through the agency of the press everyone becomes an onlooker rather than an actor, and anyone who tries to act becomes material for the curiosity of the onlookers. And yet the onlookers, members of a phantom public, are through their very passivity acting in a way that defies description and eludes all notions of responsibility. They are helping the levelling process along by reducing every action to material for their own amusement (65-66). Just as collective enthusiasm produces a positive force, the "crowd," the collective inaction and refusal of responsibility characteristic of the public produce a negative force, a giant absence or void into which the individual as a man of action disappears (54). Between the group and its members there has therefore arisen a fault, a vacuum, a no man's land of non-relationships given a spurious materiality by the press.⁷ Its name: the public. "The individual reader of the press is not a public," Kierkegaard writes. Even though many individuals may read the same newspaper, the reciprocity of face to face contact is lacking.

Because of the way it is organized, the newspaper public cannot emerge as group which is able to take action, assign members a place, or give meaning to roles and responsibility to the actors in them (61). One does not make a stand by taking an interest in news stories, Kierkegaard would say; and if many take a similar interest they have not made a similar stand: they are merely creating abstractions like "public opinion" and the "public mood," from which they derive no real comfort and toward which they feel no responsibility.

The only good thing about the public, Kirkegaard concluded, was that it provided a gigantic ground against which the individual could define himself. Genuine individuality could only be accomplished through religion, he believed, and religion as the creator of the individual could only be achieved in reaction against the emptiness and insubstantiality of the public world (Bratlinger 106). This was the modern function of the group: not to support or nourish the individual, but by repelling him to educate him in authentic personal feeling. Unless, of course, "he succumbs in the process" and exists simply as a member of the public, that collective which fails to collect (Kierkegaard 62).

A person "belongs" to the public only at moments when he is nothing else, since when he really is what he is he does not form part of the public. Made up of such individuals, of individuals at moments when they are nothing, a public is a kind of gigantic something, an abstract and deserted void which is everything and nothing.

Of course, the "something" which members of the public are supposed to be, the role imagined for them in the democratic discourse, is the role of the citizen. Citizenship is the status which membership in the public bestows on individuals. This status can obviously be construed on a number of levels. At the technical level, anyone is a citizen whom the law designates as one. But citizenship is more than a legal designation, signifying certain rights. Kierkegaard's view of the public as an "abstract and deserted void," a "something which is nothing" denies any meaning to the role of the citizen after a certain point in the growth of the public. For Kierkegaard, a true citizen is a member of a collective small enough and close enough to permit a connection between collective acts and individual responsibility. When such a connection can no longer be felt citizenship reverts to a negative function: it is your being when you are being nothing else. To become something substantial one must turn away from the empty role of the citizen and the vacant public realm toward the realm of religion.

In its extremes, Kierkegaard's view of the public realm illuminates how far the idea had fallen from its origins with the Greeks. As Arendt observes, the Greek polis, the original public realm, was designed "to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness" (175; Noelle-Neumann 76).

For Kierkegaard, the relation is exactly the opposite: it is only by opposing and resisting the public that one achieves a true individuality. The individual distinguishes himself not in public but in private-- indeed, in a kind of desperate privacy enforced on him by the inability of the public world to "relate and seperate" the members of a society. What has happened in the long passage from Athens to nineteenth century Europe is that the public realm has disappeared: the place where citizens met to gather and converse, relate and separate, distinguish themselves and recognize others, has been lost to human affairs and, in its stead, stands the "public" as an abstract body organized through mass communication, a floating force above the plane of daily experience and human contact which has neither the power to bring its members together nor the respect to leave them alone. As the public looses its place, its physical location, it looses as well the concrete connection to human beings established especially through speech. "Public opinion" changes character from something identified with particular people to an abstraction which represents everybody and nobody, the voice of the masses in which no one quite hears his own voice.

Summary

We can now begin to summarize the argument we have been constructing across the last two chapters. The writers on crowds at the turn of the century were wrestling with the onset of what we have called, for better or worse, a "mass society." The conditions which characterize this new arrangement are several, but we have focused on one as an element in all the others. This is the seperateness of the people who are brought together as a mass. We saw, for example, that what distinguished a street mob from the new "crowd" was the lack of physical contact among the crowd's members, the fact that spatially isolated people seemed to act as if they were in contact with one another. In a sense, of course, they were in contact-- through media of communication, especially through the mass circulation newspaper. But in another sense they were not. A new mechanism had been placed between individual behavior and group results, a more indirect and abstract way of combining people into wholes. We contrasted this new structure with an older one, with what we have called (again with some trepidation) "community." Rather than take on the entire sociological problem of "community" vs "society," we have focused on a particular element in a community structure-- the importance of face to face relations conducted through speech and centered around a common world in which people act together. Sennett has emphasized these factors in describing how a "sense of community" develops.

The simplest way in which a community identity is formed is when a group is threatened in its very survival, such as a war or other catastrophe. While taking collective action to meet this threat, people feel close to one another and search for images that bind them together. Collective action nourishing a collective self-image: this alliance stretches from the ideal of Greek thought to the speech of 18th Century coffeehouses and theatres, the shared speech yielded people the sense of constituting together a "public." In general, we can say that the "sense of community," of a society with a strong public life, is born from this union of shared action and shared sense of collective self.

The transition, then, from a community structure to a mass society has been interpreted as a shift from speech environments where members share a common world to a larger and more abstract setting where individuals are linked by media of communication and do not share a common world other than the one made common by communication. Thus we have deduced from our treatment a formula for a mass society: communication without community.

The newspaper, we argued, has stopped at several points along the shift in scale from one structure to another. Some of these stopping places remain vital even today as the different forms journalism may take depending on the way the audience is organized. A community newspaper that addresses itself to the members of a village environment will show a very different character from a mass circulation daily, as will the newsletter of a thriving volunteer group or the organ of an active political movement or, indeed, the Wall Street Journal. In all these forms of journalism there are elements of a community structure which shape the content of the newspaper.

Some of the elements we have focused on are: a public space corresponding to the group the newspaper addresses a common world of activity structured in such a way as to give each member a place or function in the group; a universe of discourse which gives similar meanings to shared experience; and, finally, a clear dividing line between the public and private realms, the business of the group and that of the individual, outer and inner worlds, self and other. In the present chapter, "community" has been treated as an ideal type of social organization combining all these features. It should be noted that the purpose of using such a type is not to prove that it once existed in a particular time and place and now does not, but rather to have some method of illuminating a long-term change from one social structure to another. In other words, "community" is not a precise description of history but a method of illuminating its overall movement.⁸

At the opposite end of the general movement from one social structure to another is a second ideal type-- a mass society, a form which exhibits the absence of those features identified with community. The problem of describing a mass society is to convert these negative terms into positive ones, to describe how it is held together despite the absence of traditional community structures like a public space, a common world of activity and so on.

This, we have argued, is the function of communication media in a mass society: to allow social treatment of a distinctly "unsocial" group, that is, the mass audience. We have examined several ways the newspaper performs this function. The first and most basic is communication across distance, which allows physically seperated readers to be sent the same messages. What the mass circulation newspaper then added to this was the discovery of those particular symbolic forms capable of drawing the attention of an otherwise disorganized mass of readers. Thus the "formula" of the commercially successful newspaper. The success of such a formula allows the newspaper to create a space of collected attention which can be bought and sold like any other commodity. This space substitutes for a public gathering place, allowing collective treatment of a group that never collects. (With television, this space becomes time, making it possible to buy, sell and otherwise take advantage of the collected attention of millions of people.)

Another way the newspaper gathers people together and yet leaves them seperate is by addressing private life through a public medium. This is the effect of many of the symbolic forms the mass circulation newspaper develops as it searches for ways to sell more papers. An advice column, for example, is publicly communicated but privately experienced, and it clearly substitutes for a smaller, more local structure like the extended family, which would have provided advice in an earlier time.

Consumer advertising as a social form pays the same attention to private life in its use of the public media. Like the advice column, it also attempts to insert itself between the individual and groups such as the family (Ewen 131-138) Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism 140). An equally important example of the same overall shift is the gradual replacement of the political party by the direct appeal to voters through the mass media, typically centered around a charismatic leader. The erosion of all such intermediate structures in a mass society dissolves the border between the private and the public realms, leaving the abstracted individual face to face with abstract totalities like "society" and the state, which then appeal to him through public media with their privatizing messages. The "public" in a mass society is made up of individuals publicly addressed but privately situated, a situation symbolized most clearly by the television watcher who "participates" in politics by privately viewing public events staged to appeal to millions of people scattered about in their homes.

Conclusion: the journalist as a cultural figure

To conclude this chapter we want to introduce the question: what happens to the relationship between the journalist and his audience as a mass public emerges? We have already observed that the eighteenth century journalist shared a common world with his reader.

He met his public on the streets, as it were. But with a mass public there is no common world to share, and no way to "meet" an audience which is never gathered together as a group. How does this change the atttitude journalists take toward the public? Terry Eagleton has written about what happens to the critic as a cultural figure when the scale of public life is transformed. His remarks about the relation between criticism and its public parallel points we have sought to make about the press.

In the eighteenth century, Eagleton notes, writers like Addison and Steele shared a universe of discourse with their readers. The critic as a literary journalist was seen as a companion or enabler, a mediator among equals. He chides and corrects rather than denouncing and excluding. Since everyone is assumed capable of judging, the critic's judgments take on authority only because they represent (that is, re-present) the general opinion. The critic helps conduct the discussion the public is always having: he is appointed rather than annointed. He can therefore be tolerated because, theoretically at least, anyone could do what he does. Eagleton writes, "Regulator and dispensor of a general humanism, guardian and instructor of public taste, the critic must fulfill these tasks from within a more fundamental responsibility as reporter and informer, a mere mechanism or occasion by which the public may enter into deeper imaginary unity with itself" (22).

This role of the critic as a "co-discoursing equal" will begin to change as the scale of eighteenth century public life undergoes a transformation. The most important development here is the shift in the method of financing artistic production, a history whose parallels to the press are almost exact. Roughly three stages can be discerned: patronage, where the work is produced for a single patron whose desires dictate the form and content of the work; subscription, which is a kind of collective patronage involving a circle of persons who agree to sponsor the work; and finally, the market, where the work becomes a commodity to be sold like any other and to fail like any other if it does not sell. As each stage unfolds, the writer's patron becomes a more and more distant figure, until with a mass audience he cannot be identiifed at all. The newspaper has passed through the same three stages as the work of art. It began in the sixteenth century as a private newsletter produced for wealthy patrons, passed into the subscription stage in the seventeenth and eightenth centuries, and emerged as a commodity with the penny press of the 1830s. The shift from a system of patronage to one of commodity production forces a change in the attitude taken by writers toward readers, by producers toward consumers. Eagleton remarks:

The mutation from literary patronage to the laws of the market marks a shift from conditions in which a writer might plausibly view his work as the product of collaborative intercourse with spiritual equals, to a situation in which the "public" now looms as an anonymous, yet implacable force, the object rather than co-subject of the writer's art.

Two different attitudes toward this "implacable force" develop. Raymond Williams identifies one in his own anlaysis of the shift from patronage to subscription to the market. Writers had always complained about the public, he notes, but these complaints became more acute in the nineteenth century as commercial publishing made obvious the crude tastes of the masses. Writers began to defy the judgment of the public deliberately and to wear this defiance as a badge of respectablity-- an attitude we heard Kierkegaard express in the extreme. Rather than pandering to an ignorant mass of readers, writers now sought to address themselves to an "emboded spirit," as Woordsworth had once put it, to the People as "as Idea, an Ideal Reader, a standard that might be set above the clamour of the writer's actual relations with society," Williams observes. This "embodied spirit," he notes, was "a very welcome alternative" to the depressing realities of the market (Culture and Society 34). At the same time, other writers, especially journalists and literary critics, began to realize that they were no longer expressing or regulating the opinions and judgments of a competent public, but instead forming the public's opinions and dictating its taste.

The public as a market may be a harsh master but it is neither shrewd nor critical; it can be flattered and titillated, stroked and cajoled into accepting the work of a skilled symbol maker as its own tastes and opinions. This role of symbol maker for a mass public obviously conflicts with the classical conception of the critic or journalist as the enabler of a discussion the public is always having. As Eagleton observes, "The critic is ideally the mirror but in fact the lamp: his role is becoming the ultimately untenable one of 'expressing' a public opinion he covertly or flagrantly manipulates" (39). As a manipulator of opinion the critic or writer is clearly a political agent in league with larger powers, or as Eagleton puts it a "lackey."

So there are two directions open to the critic as a cultural figure when market relationships replace a shared community life as the basis of interaction between writers and their public. One is to surrender to the reality of the marketplace and produce according to its demands; the other is to flee that reality for a higher one, an imaginary world of readers and writers which is the shattered eighteenth century public reconstructed as an ideal realm. Eagleton calls the inhabitor of this imagined world the "sage," poet to a absent audience:

With the decline of literary patronage and the classical public sphere, the abandonment of literature to the market and the anonymous urbanization of society, the poet or sage is deprived of a known audience, a community of familar co-subjects; and this severance from any permanent particular readership, which the sway of commodity production has forced upon him, can then be converted to the illusion of a transcendental autonomy which speaks not idiomatically but universally, not in class accents but in human tones, which turns scornfully from an actual "mass" public and addresses itself instead to the People, to the future, to some potential mass political movement, to the Poetic Genius buried in every breast, to a community of transcendental subjects spectrallly inscribed within the given social order.

The counterpart in journalism to the "transcendental autonomy" of the literary sage is the principle of objectivity, which becomes the ruling ideology in American journalism in the twentieth century. Objectivity seems to propel the press, not only above the clash of different opinions, but beyond the whole question of what a public is and what "public opinion" means in a modern environment. Objectivity allows the press to inhabit an imagined realm where readers can calmly "get both sides and decide for themselves," as if they were back in the eighteenth century and personally participating in an on-going debate. Eagleton hints at this interpretation of objectivity when he writes,

Once "the public" has become the "masses", subject to the manipulation of a commercialized culture, and "public opinion" has degenerated into "public relations", the classical public sphere must disintegrate, leaving in its wake a deracinated cultural intelligentsia whose plea for "disinterestedness" is a dismissal of the public rather than an act of solidarity with them.

That the press has dismissed the public in just this fashion is the theme to be explored in the next chapter, where we examine the professionalization of journalism.

PART TWO

THE PUBLIC AND THE PROFESSIONALIZED PRESS

CHAPTER SIX

THE IMPOSSIBLE PRESS

In this chapter we examine the drive to establish journalism as a profession in the early part of the twentieth century. The reason we are interested in the professionalization of journalism is that, in becoming a profession, the modern press had to declare its attitude toward the public. It had to say what its public responsibilities were and how it proposed to meet them. As we shall see, these declarations were made in an atmosphere of doubt and mistrust about the loyalty of the newspaper to any goal other than its own profits. What we want to know is, what kind of public did a modern press assume it was addressing, and what were the reasons for that assumption? As a way of framing that discussion, let us undertake a brief review of some of the concepts we have developed so far.

Prior to the growth of the press, public discussion always involved a physical location and face to face contact among citizens engaged in speech. For the Greeks this was all there was to "the public"-- a place where people talked and listened. It is only with the growth of the press that we begin to conceive of a public that exists in some other way than through a physical gathering and that conducts its business through some other agency than face to face conversation. Thus we are obliged to ask whether this new public, wholly dependent on the press for its constitution, can exist in the same way as its classical predecessors. The only way to examine this question is to raise the issue of the public sphere or realm, the environment in which the public is presumed to gather and conduct its discourse.

In the eighteenth century, when most of our ideas about press and public were set down as principles, there existed a peculiar balance of conditions. On the one hand the press had been set free from direct censorship and was now able to circulate ideas among citizens, as well as bring word of what had happened in distant places. So the eighteenth century public realm had been enlarged and extended by the press, exactly as the framers of the Constitution had reasoned when they set down freedom of the press as a guaranteed right. On the other hand this press was a kind of subordinate to speech, a new medium kept in its place by the vitality of the old. The typical item in a newspaper of the day was a political or moral essay (or a reprinted speech) on, for example, "the rights of man." These pieces were not only meant to be discussed and debated, they arose from discussion and debate and returned there as soon as they were published. Today we are impressed by how many readers an author like Tom Paine had (Postman 34). But perhaps this puts things the wrong way. All those readers were really the writers, in the sense that it was their discourse which Paine had simply put into a more dramatic and communicable form. Jefferson hesitated to claim authorship of the Declaration of Independence, believing it to be nothing more than a summary of what every citizen knew and had talked about, or as John Dewey described it, "an expression of the American mind so firm and plain as to command assent" (qtd. in Dewey, Living Thoughts 15\) Eighteenth century America enjoyed an extraordinarily vibrant public life, in which public discoures and the printed word supported and nourished one another.¹

With print and speech, reading and conversing held in harmonious balance, with the scale of government small and oriented to the local community, and with the public realm anchored to a physical location like the coffee house or town hall, a vision of the press as the servant or enabler of public discourse was quite justified. Indeed, the connection was so obvious that governors routinely censored newspapers, fearing the effect they would have on public discussion and the political behavior of those participating in it. The fear was well founded. Neither the French nor American revolutions would have been possible without the spread of ideas and the relaying of news through the press. Because of this apparently natural "fit" between the press and a vibrant public discourse, certain contradictory elements in the relationship tend to be obscured. These contradictions between a modern press and a vital, active public have been a recurrent theme in the present study. In general, we have argued that the conditions which enable the press to grow and mature are also those which undermine informed discussion among citizens of matters involving the common good.

Some features of the new public realm

The modern newspaper is a child of the city, according to Jefferson the very environment whose dimensions were certain to destroy the vigorous public life of the town. The scale of the city inhibits an on-going discussion among informed citizens involving matters of the common good.² As ways of gathering a public together, the town meeting and the modern newspaper arise from opposite social structures and lead to different public realms-- indeed, to different democracies. The main difference between the town meeting and the newspaper publics, between a community structure and a mass society, is that attention to the same issues or events, membership in a common world, preceeds the functions of the press up to the arrival of penny papers. The party press, for example, helped enlarge and give form to the political party, but it was always the servant of a cause larger than itself. The party paper "expressed" a unity of sentiment, a common-ness that existed prior to the functions of the newspaper in gathering together an audience. As the party press declined and the newspaper grew more independent, the press ceased to be a representative of existing political structures and became more and more the means by which the polity was gathered together.³

Today we see this in extreme form in the case of the national political conventions, where the party "meets" only to provide a scene for the television cameras, which are the true means for bringing people together politically. The origin of this reversal of roles, where the medium becomes the political structure and politics an activity within it, is in the ability of the mass circulation newspaper to make its pages an area of organized attention, a new kind of public space reflecting the logic of mass communication, where citizens met up with events but not with each other. In this space people are brought together not to form themselves into groups, declare their common principles and discuss what action to take, but simply to find amusement and interest in the compendium of features the newspaper offers. With this development the press begins to constitute a new public realm, a public called into existence every morning according to the principles of the newspaper form. The result is that the press grows more and more independent from earlier political structures, especially the political party, for the area of permanently organized attention has economic and political value which the press can exploit.

The new independence of the press was reflected not only in the absence of any direct party affiliation and the economic self-sufficiency of the mass circulation newspaper, but also in the ability of the press to determine how audiences were to be linked to leaders. After 1900, for example, the press stopped simply reprinting political speeches and began to write news stories about them, placing the speech in a larger context and inviting reaction from opponents or supporters of the speaker (Schudson, "The Politics of Narrative Form" 102-3). The speech, then, ceased to be the medium between the speech maker and the wider audience available through the press, and the press ceased to be dependent on the text of the speech as given. The functions of the speech were largely taken over by the news story, a form created by the press. It was through the newspaper that most people "heard" the speech. During the period when it simply reprinted speeches, the press functioned as an adjunct or extender of an earlier public event. But when it shifted to writing news accounts of speeches and inviting reaction, the press began to structure the event according to its own demands-- the demand for drama and conflict, for example, or the demand for brevity and consumability. Events, especially in the political sphere, then began to anticipate these requirements and arrive pre-packaged as news,⁴ This is what we mean when we say the press began to constitute the public realm: journalism replaces with forms of its own invention earlier means of linking leaders, followers and events. These forms are patterned after the demands of the newspaper, and later, television, Events then follow suit. The interview replaces the public address; the press conference replaces the town meeting; a television spectacle replaces the party convention; election campaigns pattern themselves after the demands of the evening news. Today terrorists take lives in order to manufacture events, the meaning of which is to gain media coverage.

Attention granted vs. attention gained

As assembled through the news the public realm is a very different universe of discourse from the town meeting or other traditional political structures, and the role of the press in constituting this new public realm is different from its role when it is merely the publicist or extender of traditional forms like the political speech. The main difference concerns what might be called the economics of attention. The content of the modern public realm often consists of the struggle to get and hold attention, while in a more traditional environment attention is a pact between speakers and audience, something that is given so that public discourse can have a content of its own. To understand this difference we need merely compare the Lincoln-Douglass debates of 1860 with a typical election campaign today. Neil Postman has pointed to the extraordinary level of concentration the Lincoln-Douglass contests required on the part of the audience. The debates sometimes lasted as long as six hours, and yet they were popular events, drawing crowds in the thousands who listened, without benefit of amplification, to a form of speech that was more complex and linguistically dense than any an audience could tolerate today (44-51). In contrast, a typical campaign event in the 1980s has a single purpose in mind: to gain a few minutes of coverage on the evening news. What is said is hardly of any importance the goal is to show the candidate in an attractive setting acting like a confident leader.

Now, all this would seem to be an effect of television, but the origins of the shift are actually much further back in journalism history. Today we are so accustomed to constant demands on our attention that it is hard to imagine what things were like before mass communication. Before the penny press, newspapers competed only in the sense that there were several to choose from in big cities. Readers subscribed; there were no street sales, no environment in which it was necessary to capture the attention of passing people. That is why the first page of the paper often contained long, dull advertising and small, dense type; editors assumed that readers gave the newspaper their attention. But as soon as one penny paper started competing aggresively with another the situation changed. Now it was necessary to assume that readers could be won away by a competitor: attention had to be gained. The first page became the front page, a battleground for attention. Helen MacGill Hughes observed that

The front page would probably never have evolved from the first page were it not for the fact that purchase by annual subscription was largely replaced by single sales made by newsboys on the street to passers-by. But Benjamin Day sold the New York Sun on the street from the time of its founding; and from the outset the fact that the first page is on the outside, while the others are hidden from view, gave it peculiar importance. Then, as technique improved, the front page began to contrast with the first page in the same way as the scientific window-dressing of the department store contrasts with the non-descript display of the old drygoods emporium. The reader accepts the special characteristics of the front page as the nature of things, but they are all reducible to the editor's efforts to compel people to buy his paper and not another. (31)

The comparison between the front page and the department store window is apt.⁵ Before mass merchandising, attention was not something a seller of goods had to produce. It was granted by a customer who was assumed to be interested (or not interested) in buying. But with the rise of department stores, mass advertising and the arts of display, attention became something to be won--one might almost say taken--from a busy and easily distracted consumer. If we consider the environment in which goods are presented for sale as a public realm, we can easily see the shift that has occurred. Getting the customer's attention becomes in large part the content of the public realm created by the store. The space the store devotes to the attractive display of goods is a measure of how far this new public realm has advanced. In the case of the newspaper a similar measure is the size of the headline. As Hughes notes, large headlines are not a "natural" or inevitable feature of journalism. They arise from a certain environment, in which the competition for attention governs the behavior of communicators. Wherever these conditions prevail, the content of the public realm will be increasingly devoted to producing something that had once been a given, leaving less space, time and energy for all other activities. In a certain sense, then, content is eclipsed from public discourse: everything said is devoted to the struggle to be heard. More importantly, being heard becomes a matter of technique, in which proven strategies are recycled over and over, again emptying the content of public discourse.

To summarize the point we are making, in a traditional public realm--the Greek polis, the town meeting, the dry goods store before mass merchandising--attention is granted, while in the new public realm created by the mass media attention has to be gained. The result is a certain eclipse of the content of public life. People had once created the public realm among themselves by agreeing to grant attention to a common cause or question, in the same way that people "create" the theatre by collectively agreeing to suspend disbelief. The show can then go on, the theatre can have a content, because the conditions creating the theatre have been secured. (What would the theatre would be like if actors, directors and playwrites thought that the audience might shift its attention at any moment to a competing spectacle? The answer is all too apparent: the theatre would be like network television. One could argue that this is exactly the direction the Broadway musical is taking.) By setting up a permanent and escalating competititon for attention, mass communication institutionalizes the insecurity of the public realm: it may or may not exist, depending on whether people are listening. And there is always a competing event, a different headline, another store window to intensify the struggle.

Distractions from the problem of the public realm

The newspaper was the first agency to sponsor this struggle, and became, therefore, the originator of a vast change in the character of public life. And yet somehow it held on to its association with the classical public realm, a world in which discussion could go on as if the competition for attention had never pre-empted it. As we saw in the third chapter, it was assumed that a bigger, stronger, more profitable press would mean a more active and informed public. But what in fact happens is that a bigger, stronger, more profitable press--based as it is on advertising revenue tied to circulation figures--creates a new climate for public affairs, in which attention has to be secured against a host of competitors, many of them coming from within the newspaper itself. Color comics begin to be popularized in the 1890s, just one of the many ways the newspaper seeks to attract attention to itself. The more it is concerned with producing attention to itself, the less of a role the newspaper can have in supporting the public realm, for the nature of the competition requires the newspaper to drag in anything that will shock, flatter or amuse. These contradictions between a modern press and a settled and secure public realm tend to be obscured by a pair of attitudes which need to be briefly examined. The first involves the important role the press has had in establishing the right of free speech, which tends to cloud the relation between the press and the fact of public discussion; the second involves the nature of information.

One of the ways the press has managed to identify itself with an ongoing communal discussion is through its long fight against censorship, in which it has functioned as the very embodiment of democratic principles, a faithful public servant always on the citizen against a threatening government. To this day the American press watches carefully over any threat of interference, partly to protect its "turf" but also because defending against such threats puts the press in its most favorable, least ambiguous light: as the upholder of the principle of free discussion. Important as they are, controversies over freedom of the press give a narrow focus to the problem of public discussion. They suggest that what prevents the public from being fully informed and active in a democracy is the lack of information or the tainting of news through censorship, news management, restrictions on reporters and the like. Problems involving too much information, too much to be known, too little context, or the eclipse of content from public discourse--all of which the press may have exacerbated--are rarely visible through the smoke of First Amendment battles. When the emphasis is on the information necessary for public discussion to proceed, the existence and quality of that discussion tend to be taken for granted. The battle to "make public" suppressed facts thus tends to suppress the fact that the public itself has been transformed, with the press as one of the most important agents of the transformation.

The second factor obscuring the contradictions between a modern press and a traditional public involves a misunderstanding of the concept of information. There is a natural tendency to equate improvements in the gathering and distribution of news with a more informed public.⁶ But as we argued in Chapter Two, the real question is whether the growth of the press, in general, brings with it a growth of the conditions which enable people to use information as information. In addressing this question, it is not enough to focus on changes in the content of the press. The reason a content survey is not sufficient has to do with the nature of information. We are accustomed to thinking of information as a thing which can be packaged, distributed and consumed. From this perspective, it would be reasonable to look at the sort of information the press provides as a guide to whether it "informs the public." But as we have said several times, information is not really "in" the items which come over the wire and make their way into the newspaper. It is "in" the relations between people and a changing environment. The more changes matters, the more each fresh report makes a difference, the more information there can be in the news. That is why war is such a boon to journalism: war conditions create a context where even small changes in the status of events are meaningful to many people. Here we are not repeating the commonplace observation that information requires a context to be interpreted. We are saying much more. Information is context, in the sense that whether something "informs" or not depends on how meaningful a change in status is to a person receiving an item. Histories of the news are therefore incomplete when they focus on what the press has presented as news. A fuller history would be a history of the "event" as a definer of current reality, a story of how recency came to be a way of understanding the world. This social history of the news, (a history of news "from the bottom," as it were) is as yet unwritten. Were it to be undertaken, it would have to focus on the social conditions which give recent events the authority to define the status of things; or, to put it more plainly, it would have to ask: what makes news matter?⁷

Critical inquiry into the press is today centered on a totally different question. Rather than wondering "what makes news matter?" press critics usually ask, "what is the matter with news?" The result is that the problems of accuracy and fairness dominate all other possible questions. As focal points for criticism, accuracy and fairness are hardly trivial matters, and it is quite reasonable for an open society to insist on such standards. (Whatever the problems with "objective journalism"--and there are many, both practical and theoretical--even a brief examination of what passes for news in totalitarian countries can be a convincing argument for objectivity as a principle.) What needs questioning is not the validity of accuracy and fairness as goals for the press, but the presumption that error and bias are all that prevents the press from "informing the public" and fulfilling its functions in a democratic society. It may be that a competent, complete and scrupulously fair press would still fail to "inform the public" because of something in the nature of modern journalism and its relationship to its audience. That is the possibility we have been exploring in the present study.

The "golden age" of press criticism

With all of the above as a preamble, we can now begin to address the central issue of this chapter: the professionalization of the press and the attitude toward the public it implied. At the turn of the century in America the contradictions between a bigger and stronger press and a vibrant public realm were nearer to the surface than they seem today. As a public institution privately financed, the newspaper seemed to be at cross-purposes with itself. It continued to insist on its special place in a democratic society, and yet in its pursuit of profit it behaved no differently than any other business. Like any other business, it therefore became the target of the Progressive era's muckrakers and reformers. Press criticism filled the journals of the day; almost all of it began by recognizing that "journalism has now become a business."⁸ Journalism had in fact become a business much sooner, at the point where the penny papers grew profitable; but the era of "Yellow Journalism" in the 1890s had put a sharper edge on the conflict between private profits and public duties, and gave a wider focus to questions of press performance.⁹ Critics asked whether it was possible for mass circulation newspapers to "inform the public," whether there might not be something in the way the modern newspaper was organized which prevented it from performing the functions democracy had assigned to it. The sort of the questions raised then concerned the structure of the press as an institution, and whether this structure was compatible with journalism's public functions.

What might be called a "golden age" of press criticism, stretching roughly the 1890s to the 1930s, coincided with the maturation of the newspaper as a commercial medium and with the rise of a self-conscious journalism profession. It also coincided with the Progressive era's preoccupation with the threat to public welfare posed by private businesses run solely for profit. Of course, as a business the press was a special case. Where most businesses could be regulated by an activist government concerned about "the public interest," the press enjoyed the special protection of the First Amendment. If it was to be improved, it would have to improve itself. And in a way it did, by becoming in the twentieth century a recognized profession with a set of standards designed to make the press a responsible public servant. Professional standards, then, were the solution put forward to the conflict between journalism as a business and journalism as an essential function in a democracy, a conflict which seemed especially sharp around the turn of the century. In the remainder of this chapter we examine the attitude towards the public which professionalism implied. We will want to see how journalism as a profession faced the contradictions outlined earlier between a modern press and a secure and vibrant public realm.

The Progressive Era has been interpreted as an attempt to reconcile a familiar, village environment with a new, urban, industrial society whose dimensions overwhelmed inherited assumptions about economic order and political behavior. In simplest terms, it was a struggle with the bigness of things, a crisis of interpretation involving the scale of events in a technologically advanced era.¹⁰ Obviously a full interpretation of that period is beyond the scope of the present study. Our interest is in how the central conflicts of the era--private profits vs. public interest, village environment vs. a modern, technological society--came to bear on the press, which had grown into a huge and profitable industry by the turn of the century. Our first task, then, is to decribe the growth of the press from a successful experiment in commercial journalism in the 1830s to a big business in the twentieth century.

Newspaper growth 1870-1930

We have so far suggested that the modern newspaper is a direct outgrowth of the revolution in journalism brought by the penny press. This is most accurate at the conceptual level. The idea of human interest as a standard for journalism, of news as a saleable commodity, of appealing to a wide audience and selling that audience to advertisers, of political independence backed by commercial success, of investing capital in a newsgathering network-- all these indeed began with the penny papers, especially Bennett's Herald. In that sense there can be no clearer dividing line than the 1830s. But to equate the penny press with the modern newspaper, as we have done so far, is misleading in so far as it suggests that there were no important changes after the 1830s. This is decidedly not the case. If it can fairly be said that the idea of the modern newspaper was born with the penny papers, then much of the working out of that idea--and of the contradictions inherent in it--occurred later, particularly in the period from the 1870s to the First World War.

The growth of the press is a complicated story, the results of which can rarely be explained in the language of cause and effect. More than most businesses, the newspaper is involved in almost every aspect of social growth and technological change. Most businesses make and sell a product, but the product the newspaper makes is of a different order of complexity. The newspaper sells the world to its readers at a loss, then turns around and sells its readers to the world at a profit. The complicating factor is the advertising function, which is itself a function of a developing consumer economy and also a powerful factor in its development. Yet the ads are dependent on the news function. The two in tandem are capable of registering social change on any number of levels. Let us take one example of the newspaper as a complex social indicator. Stories about women activists appear in the news as women become more visible public actors in the Progressive era (A.M. Lee 396). The newspaper also begins to search for new features, such as advice columns, which will appeal to women, since women do most of the buying of the department store items advertised in the paper (A.M. Lee 587; Mott, American Journalism 507). This advertising naturally begins to address itself more to women in their new role as expert consumer (A.M. Lee 326). At the same time, evening and Sunday papers account for much of the growth of newspaper circulation from the 1870s on, in part because women readers prefer to take their paper then (Mott 599). Finally, woman increasingly make their way on to the newspaper staff for all of the above reasons (A.M. Lee 396; Mott 489-90). So, on at least five levels, in the content of its news coverage, in its formula for hooking readers, in the appeals of its advertisers, in its circulation patterns and in the composition of its staff, the newspaper "registers" the shifting status of women around the turn of the century and becomes itself an element in that shift.

The many levels of interaction between the newspaper and social change tend to frustrate any search for the cause of newspaper growth. This is undoubtedly a reason for the emphasis on the "great man" approach in press history. It is much easier to attribute the fantastic growth of the press to the genius of the great publishers than it is to imagine the genius it would take to actually explain such a development. So a complete explanation for the growth of the press is at present lacking. But let us at least document that growth in more detail. There were 574 dailies in the United States in 1870, 971 in 1880, 1,610 in 1890, 2,226 in 1899 and 2,600 daily papers in 1909 (A.M. Lee 64-65). In 1860, the Herald led all papers in circulation with 77,000 (Mott 403). By 1900 the biggest papers were selling over a million copies a day (A.M. Lee 119). Following the Civil War newspapers grew at only a slightly higher rate than the population. But after 1BB0 the rate of growth climbs steadily upward, swamping the increases which followed the introduction of the penny press. Total circulation of all newspapers was 1.5 million in 1860, 2.6 million in 1870 and 3.6 million in 1880\. It then begins to shoot upward, to 8.4 million in 1890, 15.1 million in 1900, 24.2 million in 1909 and 33.0 million by 1919\. The number of papers sold per household rose modestly from 28 in 1860, to .34 in 1870 and 36 in 1880\. Again, it then rises dramatically, to 66 in 1890, 94 in 1900, 1.23 in 1909, and 1.38 papers per family by 1919 (DeFleuer 65). Looked at another way, the number of people per daily paper sold fell from 31.0 in 1850 to 2.9 in 1930 (A.M. Lee 70). Clearly, the reading of newspapers had become a national habit touching all classes in the twentieth century.

In New York, the figures on the popularity of newspapers are even more decisive. Before the penny press one paper was sold for every 14 or 15 inhabitants. The penny papers reduced this to one paper per 6.5 persons in 1840\. The ratio was 1 to 3.9 in 1860, 1 to 2.3 in 1880 and 1.2 persons per paper sold in 1899\. In 1929 there was more than one paper sold for every inhabitant in New York (A.M. Lee 80-81).

This tremendous expansion was financed by the growth of advertising. National advertising revenues for all publications rose from $104 million in 1880 to $256 million in 1900, $540 million in 1909, $1.4 billion in 1919 and almost $3 billion in 1929 (Pope 25-6). More significant than these gross increases is the percentage of newspaper income derived from advertising. In 1879 44 percent of newspaper income came from advertising, the rest from sales to readers. By the turn of the century advertisements contributed more than half, and by 1909 they represented 64 percent of newspaper revenue. In 1929 the figure was 74 percent (A.M. Lee 749).

Larger circulations and bigger ad revenues go hand in hand, and one result is a tremendous increase in the amount of capital required to start or purchase a newspaper. Also contributing to the demands for capital was the telegraph. The Associated Press was formed in 1849 to help offset high telegraph costs through a cooperative arrangement. Soon all newspapers either had to either secure a membership in the cooperative or spend large amounts of cash competing with it for news, both of which were expensive propositions. In 1835, Bennett started the Herald with $500. In 1851, Henry Raymond and his associates had to invest $69,000 to begin the New York Times (A.M. Lee 166). When Adolph Ochs purchased the Times in 1896 it was recapitalized at $1 million (Mott 550). The Pittsburgh Press was sold in 1923 for $6 million; Alfred McClung Lee reports that the purchasers had failed to exercise an option to buy the paper for $51,000 in 1892\. In the intervening years the newspaper had become a highly profitable, capital-intensive enterprise, leading Lee to observe in 1937 that, though publishers still profess belief in such "old-fashioned catchwords" as freedom of the press, they can afford to do so "largely because the price of chips defines the character and the number of those who can now play the journalistic game."¹¹

The communication effects of cheap prices

While the costs of producing a newspaper rose, the price paid for a copy of the paper remained low and often fell. This is the reverse side of the increasing percentage of costs paid by advertising. One cent papers were common from the 1830s right up to the First World War, a remarkable fact considering how expensive it had become to publish a newspaper. Competition, of course, was the mechanism by which the price of newspapers was kept down despite increased costs. Lee points to three different waves of sensationalism, one in the 1830s, another in the 1870s and 18805, and a third after World War I when the tabloid war was at its height. In all three periods the same pattern shows itself. Prices creep up and the formula for the newspaper becomes fixed by custom until a competitor arrives to cut prices and deploy a new formula which draws readers who were either undiscovered or abandoned by the established press. The upstart paper begins to steal away advertising by the sheer size of its audience, forcing the established papers to cut prices and adopt the circulation-building features "discovered" by the competition. The period of intense competition ends with the erasing of differences between different classes of papers, all of which must adopt similar tactics to "keep up," and with the wiping out of smaller or weaker papers by the cheap prices of the survivors.¹²

Since a cut in prices will lead to higher ad revenues and big profits only when circulation is agressively maximized, much of the cheap newspaper's energy goes into getting people to buy the paper. Cheap prices thus have more than an economic dimension to them. They have an aesthetic, as well. The newspaper that "comes cheap," is not only inexpensive to purchase, it is made easier to read, more immediately likeable. It "comes cheap" in terms of effort. As publishers struggle to capture a portion of an increasingly volatile market, the reading act itself is transformed by all the attention paid to making it easier. Anything which will grab attention is preferred over anything which requires attention to grasp. The best example of this dynamic at work is the swelling in size of the newspaper headline, from a small category heading, to a terse anouncement of recent events, to a screaming block of type so big, Mott reports, that in some headlines of the 1890s only five letters could fit across the page (American Journalism 544). Rather than headlines announcing events, events begin to be arranged to produce headlines: the bigger the better. This is literally the case with the popular crusades and circulation stunts that did so much to boost sales from the 1870s on. Newspapers financed attempts to reach the North Pole, sent balloons across the Atlantic and hired detectives to track down criminals, all for the purpose of creating more fantastic headlines (A.M. Lee 282-85; Emery 381). In 1896, William Randolph Hearst is said to have sent a cable to his illustrator in Havana who had complained about the lack of anything to illustrate. The cable read, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war. Hearst." (Mott 529\) The story may be apocrophal, but the point it makes is accurate: the newspaper was in the business of producing attention to itself, and if that meant producing a war as a by-product, then this was entirely within the logic of a commercialized, competitive press.¹³ Nor were these tactics confined to overtly sensational papers like Hearst's Journal and Pulitizer's World. In 1911, for example, the respectable New York Times sent a cable around the world to itself as a way of building interest in the paper. (The message returned in 16 and a half minutes.)14

The influence of advertising on the press is incompletely described by the newspaper's economic dependence on ads. The deeper influence was in the ethic of self-promotion, which made the production of attention the paramount goal, subordinating all other communication functions to that one. The penny papers had made the newspaper a vehicle for assembling attention to advertising. From the 1870s on, the newspaper became more and more a vehicle for assembling attention to itself as a medium for the ads. As Harold Innis once observed, the use of the front page to sell the newspaper amounts to the "indirect sale of advertising" through a news formula designed to create interest in the paper (The Press: A Neglected Factor in Economic History 23). In this context, Innis notes a remark by Ivy Lee, the pioneer of public relations, on the difference between news and advertising. News, said Lee, is that which people are willing to pay to have brought to their attention; while advertising is that which the advertiser himself must pay to get to the people's attention. (Lee 13; qtd. in Innis 23\)

Lee's view of news as anything people will pay to read expresses well the emphasis on attention alone which is the real effect of advertising on the press. But it leaves out an important complication: how much are people willing to pay? Through cheap prices and easier, more "naturally" interesting reading, the goal of the commercial newspaper was to insure that people never had to pay too much for their news. In fact, this is one way to define sensationalism: as that forumla for news which requires readers to pay the least for their paper, both in terms of cents and sense-making, (that is, the effort or knowledge required to make sense of the world.) Today, we see this in extreme form with television news, which suggests that people can "get their news," not only for free, but with noticeably less mental effort than it takes to decode even a single page of the newspaper. As almost everyone knows, the substitution of "hard" news for items with proven attention-getting value, such as occurs routinely in local newscasts, is a direct result of the competititon for ratings, which is required by the advertising-based structure of broadcasting, where the ads pay 100 percent of the costs. Broadcast news takes on a noticeably different character in England, where people pay more directly for their television through a licensing fee. In a word, the news is more serious.

The attention producing machine

In general, the less people pay for their news, the more news is concerned entirely with getting their attention. The more (or the more directly) they pay, the more it is assumed that attention-fixing is a function performed by readers or viewers themselves. Thus, at the opposite extreme from the local newscast would be something like an oil industry newsletter, which is extremely expensive and puts almost no effort into making itself readable. The will to read is assumed to exist in purchasers of such a costly and specialized journal. But, as Pulitizer's biographer George Jurgens notes, the readers of a mass circulation newspaper in hot competition with its rivals "had to be pursuaded to buy six mornings in the week, and six mornings in the week the readers of a rival newspaper could be won away" (4日). Here the will to read is slight, investment is low and the effort to fix attention is assumed to be almost wholly the newspaper's responsibility. That effort thus becomes the content of the press, a development for which sensationalism is another name. Todd Gitlin reports that television executives assume the TV audience is uncommitted to what it is watching. "Industry lore," says Gitlin, assumes that "the audience is fickle and expects instant clarity. The finger is always poised near the dial, so all salient elements have to be established with breathtaking haste" (161). The stereotyped characters and hackneyed plots that litter network television are thus a result of the need to immediately fix attention and maintain it at a breezy, undemanding pace. They can further be seen as the obverse side of the zero investment the audience makes in the content of television. Again, this is the almost inevitable result of an advertising-based structure; it is also one of the most vivid characteristics of a public realm constituted by media of communication.

The wholesale transfer of the attention-fixing function from individuals--in particular, from the individual reader--to the media of communication, where it becomes the formula for commercial success, is one of the most important effects of mass communication. Not only does it shape the messages of the mass media, it creates the environment in which all messages compete for attention.¹⁵ Items that are easier to attend to get disproportionate "play" in the media, while those that cannot compete on the surface of attention remain unattended to. Here again, the USA Today is an interesting example. The Gannet Company has created a newspaper whose formula for news amounts to a single factor: readability. Everything which performs the attention-fixing function for people is considered news, while everything which requires people to fix attention by effort is to be avoided. The editors thus insure that almost all news stories run on a single page, since the effort required to turn the page detracts from readability. The fact that a reasonably complete account of events might require another column of type is not considered relevant. What is underway here is an experiment with the act of reading analagous to the concern with "flow" in television broadcasting (Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form 86-118). The object is to remove from reading the continuous exertion of effort that has been the bane of schoolchildren since the advent of the book. In the Gannett Company's experiment, this aim is accompanied by an extensive market research program designed to produce inductively those features most easily read.¹⁶

We have tried to trace this process back to the economic basis of the mass circulation newspaper, in particular to the increased dependence on advertising revenue and the need to lower prices to boost circulation. The cheaper the price of each copy, the more the content of the press is concerned with selling more copies to make up for the loss in revenue from each sale. This is the source of the discontent with the press which reached a peak around the turn of the century: the newspaper had become an attention producing machine which really had no other goal. The historical irony is that, from the 1870s on, the machine grew so fantastically proficient, absorbing technology after technology and reorganizing its internal structure so that by the First World War it had become an almost ideal embodiment of the industrial age, a highly integrated, tightly structured giant whose whirring presses, clacking wires and fast-talking reporters together performed a daily miracle of speed, power and timing.¹⁷ Lincoln Steffens described a portion of this miracle in 1897:

The superintendent of delivery has to know exactly when he must have the first papers in order to catch the first mail; the foreman of the press-room must say how little time he needs to run off the first thousand copies; the foreman of the stereotyping room times his process to a second; and so on back to the news department, which has to be ready for the night editor's "make-up" in season to "go to press" at the moment determined by the closest reckoning of each chief of staff. ("The Business of a Newspaper" 463\)

Together with the growth of the Associated Press, which put even the smallest paper in touch with all important events and the largest cities in touch with the smallest towns, the newspaper as a technology had been almost perfected by the 1890s. And yet the 1890s were also the period in which the excesses of sensationalism reached a peak with Hearst's Journal, Pulitzer's World and the many papers which imitated all or some of their tactics. "Yellow Journalism" coincided with the maturation of the press as a communication technology. The newspaper, a supreme accomplishment of the machine age, was at the same time the conductor of a trivial and debasing discourse, and, in the eyes of many, was more than ever a threat to the health of the community.¹⁸ How to interpret this fact?

Yellow journalism as a neutral technology

Edwin Emery, a contemporary historian of the press, sees yellow journalism as a problem in how the technology of the press was put to use. He writes:

The tools which were now available--linotypes and faster presses, more striking typography and layout, color printing, cartoons and photographs, skillful writing by larger staffs of reporters and editors, better communication facilities--all could be used constructively to build better newspapers. Stories which were written in a more readable style, or which in their nature appealed to the human interests of readers, could increase popular acceptance of the newspaper without detracting from its social usefulness. Bigger headlines, pictures, blobs of color might give the newspaper a new face, and might cause some readers to grimace at the result and yearn for the bygone days; but effectively used, these devices too could be useful and desirable.

Of course, these new tools could also be used irresponsibly, Emery observes. The newspaper could place "success in snaring readers ahead of the primary obligations of journalism." This is what yellow journalism was: the new, technologically-advanced journalism "without a soul." The shameless purveyers of the yellow press were those who "seized upon the techniques of writing, illustrating, and printing which were the pride of the new journalism and turned them to perverted uses." Pulitzer, in Emery's view, "had opened Pandora's box" by perfecting the devices of sensationalism. His discoveries were then taken up by other, less sorupulous publishers who "did not understand that Pulitizer had sought to achieve a balance between informing the reader and entertaining him" (415-16).

The rhetorical problem Emery is tackling is to reconcile the newspaper's power as a communication technology with its debasement as a social instrument. His solution is notable in two respects. First, he sees as "neutral" not only the physical instruments of the modern press, the wires and presses, but also the symbolic forms the press had developed to capture attention and maximize circulation: the human interest story, the splashy headline, the sensational twist on a story. These devices have no effects themselves, he says; their meaning lies in how they are used. That the headline itself may have a bias, that attention-getting as an industrial art may have an effect on the things attended to, that readability may have an ideological dimension to it, in short, that the "interesting" may serve some interests and undermine others-- these possibilities escape Emery's view of the modern newspaper as essentially a neutral instrument.

The remarkable thing, however--and this is our second comment on Emery--is that many observers at the time of the yellow press did not share his view that the modern newspaper was a neutral technology somehow perverted by unscrupulous publishers. Rather, they saw it as inevitably biased by its commercial basis. "Journalism has become a business" was for these observers an ominous and deeply significant development. For it meant that the newspaper, by its nature, would have a duty to private profits first and that its public functions would inevitably suffer. In 1903 the Nation called it a "commonplace" that publishers are "far more concerned today with the sums which can be made out of their properties than with the opportunities they may have to enunciate political principles or insist upon high ethical standards in our national life" ("Education and Journalism" 168). The long and storied equation between the press and the spread of political thought seemed to have lost its relevance. The goal of the modern newspaper was simply to make and sell a product. That the scared functions of the press had been profaned by commercial success was certainly on the mind of the critic who observed in 1893 that the "fundamental principle of metropolitan journalism today is to buy white paper at three cents a pound and sell it a ten cents a pound."¹⁹

Much of the concern about journalism as a business focused somewhat simple-mindedly on the direct influence advertisers and big corporations had in shaping the news.²⁰ While there was no lack of incidents to justify such complaints, the deeper effects of journalism as a business did not require such obvious interference by capital in the news. This point did not go unnoticed at the time. A 1902 Atlantic article on "The Newspaper Industry" noted that the popular newspaper undermines intelligent public discourse by advocating contradictory things at top volume. The typical yellow journal "shrieks so continually," on so many different subjects and "so obviously without sincerity, that it can lead in no particular direction," the writer observed. The result is a kind of ideological chaos which does not encourage "lucid reflection on political programmes in the popular mind." Emery might blame such an effect on the publisher's lack of principles, but the Atlantic saw it as an inevitable outcome of the newspaper's overwhelming need to "attract attention thus to itself."²¹ In other words, the confusion of the public mind was a logical result of the way the newspaper was organized. The only way to improve public discourse would be to change the structure of the press. Thus, the Atlantic's solution: "public opinion will have to turn to the weekly press," where the monetary investment is lower and discourse can therefore take a more considered form (Fisher 751). This sort of suggestion was not unique. Around the turn of the century there were proposals for an endowed newspaper, talk of a municipal newspaper, and an attempt by E.W. Scripps to market an "adless" daily, (the experiment failed in 1917).²² These proposals show how convinced many observers were that it was the structure of a commercialized press that stood in the way of its public duties, not the scruples of particular journalists.

From structural conflict to professional conduct

How is it possible for writers at the time to have seen the structural factors preventing the press from fulfilling its public functions, while Emery, writing in 1972, views the matter as simply a problem in the personal integrity of publishers? Why is it that many critics of the press around the turn of the century could see that what Emery calls "success in snaring readers" had become "the primary function of journalism," whereas for Emery, a historian, the former is logically opposed to the latter? What accounts for this naievete about a period which was hardly naieve about itself?²³ Let us see if we can answer some of these questions. Emery's views on the yellow press place him solidly within the tradition of what James Carey has called the "whig interpretation of journalism history," which, according to Carey,

views journalism history as the slow, steady expansion of freedom and knowledge from the political press to the commercial press, the setbacks into sensationalism and yellow journalism, the forward thrust into muckraking and social responsibility.

The whig interpretation looks at newspaper history and sees continuous improvement in press freedom and the journalist's sense of public duty. It tells a certain story about the rise of the modern press. According to this tale, the newspaper first freed itself from political dependence by becoming commercially successful; journalists then freed themselves from the excesses of commercialism by developing codes of conduct which emphasize a commitment to truth, fairness, and the public's right to know.²⁴ This is what is meant by professionalism in the press. James Curran has described essentially the same reflex in English press history. There are generally thought to be three stages in the development of the press in England, he notes. First, a period of direct control by the state in which censorship is routine, second, the drive toward independence based on the newspaper's increasing success as a business, and, in the twentieth century, a third stage in which "the press becomes less partisan and more socially responsible due to the growing commitment amongst publishers and journalists to the professional goals of objectivity, balance and accuracy" (51).

For the present study, the most important effect of the whig interpretation of history is to frame the conflict between private profits and public functions as a problem in professional conduct rather than a structural tension inherent in the organization of modern journalism. Herbert Birkhead, in an unpublished dissertation examining the "professional project" in journalism, argues that the whig approach to press history was developed by writers ideologically committed to the profession of journalism and to journalism education as training for the profession.

These writers developed a "textbook tradition" of historiography, where history is useful as a way of bringing students into the fold and giving them a sense of confidence about their chosen field.²⁵ The textbook tradition, he says, is

an interpretation of journalism history consistent with the role of professional journalism education, a function that intersects with and supports a broader professional model of the press as a social institution. (xvii)

The "professional model" of the press originated, Birkhead argues, in the turn of the century conflict between the technological might of a modern press and its nakedly commercial motives. Two interpretations of the press emerged, he says. One emphasized "the speed, range and scale of modern journalism as social benefits," while the other stressed journalism's "emerging corporate structure" along with its commercial bias. Professionalism unfolded as a way of rescuing the communication power of newspaper technology from the economic structure which made that technology possible. The professional journalist, it was asserted, would be an efficient expert putting the machinery of the press to socially useful ends, and he could do this even while housed within a business dedicated like any other to monopolizing a market and making a profit. As long as he held to his professional standards, the modern journalist could fulfill the classical functions of the press despite the transformation of journalism into a business and the peddling of news as a commodity. Birkhead writes:

Advancing a professional claim based on a compelling technological transformation of the press worked toward legitimizing the economic aspects of a fundamentally altered press. Indeed, the claim helped to assert that the nature of the communications revolution was more technological than economic.

Emery's view of yellow journalism as a set of basically sound techniques put to unscrupulous uses is an example of the "professional project" at work. Again, the goal of this project is to reframe structural conflicts as matters of professional conduct. Thus, Pulitzer, for Emery a man of careful scruples, "sought to achieve a balance between informing the reader and entertaining him." Pulitizer's professional standards help contain and balance (and ultimately make harmless) the conflict between attention-getting and information. His unprofessional imitators, however, "perverted" the technology of the press, tipping the scales toward a socially harmful result. The tools of journalism, including the art of arresting attention, remain neutral devices, no more powerful in determining the message of the press than a typewriter is in shaping the text that is typed on it. The improvement of journalism, therefore, does not involve the drastic step of restructuring the market-based economy of the newspaper. Rather, it simply requires a professional awareness on the part of the practicioner, who holds in his hands the power to make journalism a force for good or ill.

Was journalism a profession?

The difficulty for those who put forward this interpretation of the press was that journalism shared almost none of the features of the established professions such as law or medicine, where the claim to be upholding professional standards was backed by the economic independence of the practicioner. A doctor or lawyer owned his own practice and received a fee directly from a client who needed his expert services. In the era of journalist-as-enterprising-printer or journalist-as-publisher-and-editor, those who constituted the press enjoyed a similar status: they ran their own shop. But in a modern newspaper organized as a bureaucracy this was clearly not the case. As the Nation noted in 1873, in the newspaper industry there was no longer any way for "the laborer to climb into the position of the capitalist" ("The Profession of Journalism" 38). The modern journalist was housed somewhat charitably within a business he neither owned nor controlled, and his "fee" came not from those who supposedly needed his services--that is, members of the public--but from publishers supported by advertisers who sold goods to consumers. All three of these groups were in a sense "clients" of the journalist, yet he was not in a position to dictate to any of them just what services they required, another aspect of a profession which journalism lacked.²⁶ Nor did the journalist command any esoteric knowledge a laymen could not understand. Indeed, it was the business of the press to deal in a language the average person could understand, which made it difficult for the journalist to surround his craft with anything resembling a professional mystique.²⁷ The absence of any esoteric body of knowledge also made professional training difficult, and prevented the press from licensing its members or controlling the number of people who entered the profession. "There are altogether too many people who call themselves journalists' for no sound reason," complained one writer in 1910 (Hamilton 650). The trouble was, what sound reasons were there? As M. de Blowitz wrote in 1893,

...by dissection of the dead human body may be discovered the laws of medicine, and the best methods of curing the living a lawyer may learn in the schools the instruments and conditions of his profession, namely civil laws and the methods of court procedure the art of the orator has its teachable maxims and principles; the art of war its rules and precepts; indeed, throughout the entire list of human professions, there is for each a special series of laws and conditions by knowledge of which he who enters as an apprentice may go out, by slow degrees of advancement, a master. But in journalism, alone among the professions, this is not the case. In this career, there is no body of doctrine, no series of fixed rules, apparently no possible method of instruction... (38).

Of course, these difficulties did not prevent journalism schools from opening beginning in 1908.²⁸ The idea of a professional training ground for journalists was given its biggest boost by Joseph Pulitzer, who proposed in paper, capable of headlines like "Blood on a Mother's Lips" (Juergens 41). Especially in its battles with Hearst's Journal in the 1890s, it was decidedly jingoistic and anti-intellectual, reflecting, no doubt, the prejudices of its readers and just as certainly profiting by them (Juergens 210-233). Equally fierce in exploiting the common man's credulity and fighting for the common good, Pulitzer was both a boon and a menace to public welfare, as he himself may have realized. A proud man, he did not always live up to his own standards; he regretted having competed with Hearst at such a debased level (Juergens 45).

The lost power base of the press

Steffens's point was this: if Pulitzer could not find a way to employ an entirely "responsible" journalist or, indeed, to become one himself, he could at least create a school dedicated to the standards he could imagine but not meet. And that is what the College of Journalism was to be: a haven for "responsible" journalism, and, more importantly, a haven from the realities of the marketplace. "The school of journalism is to be not only not commercial, but anti-commercial," Pulitzer wrote in an article defending his idea in the North American Review. "It is to exalt principle, knowledge, culture, at the expense of business if need be. It is to set up ideals, to keep the counting room in its proper place, and to make the soul of the editor the soul of the paper" (655). The goal was to create an environment where journalism would be exclusively a public affair, where the "principles of journalism" would be studied apart from the industrial setting in which they were practiced (656). Pulitzer said that he hoped to "create a class distinction between the fit and the unfit" in the press, a distinction "based not upon money, but upon morals, education and character" (649).

The emphasis on character was of the highest importance. The word is found again and again in discussions of journalism as a profession (Harger 224; Hamilton 648-9). The school of journalism was to instill character in young men, who would then be able to resist the pressures of commercialism. There was nothing wrong with the newspaper being a business, Pulitzer thought. After all, the more profitable the paper, the more certain its independence, and the less vulnerable it would be to corruption. The problem was not business, but the spread of its values to realms where they did not belong. Commercialism, he said, "becomes a degradation and a danger when it invades the editorial rooms" (659). The way to prevent this invasion of editorial territory was to produce journalists of such fine moral character that they would not allow the line to be crossed.

The editor, the real "journalist" of the future, must be a man of such known integrity that he will be above the suspicion of writing or editing against his convictions. He must be known as one who would resign rather than sacrafice his principles to any business interest. It would be well if the editor of every newspaper were also its proprietor, but every editor can at least be the proprietor of himself. If he cannot keep the paper from degrading itself, he can refuse to be a party to the degradation. (660)

Let us be clear about the role integrity is asked to play in a professionalized press. At an earlier stage in press history, "the journalist" as a cultural figure was represented by the great editor who was also, as Pulitzer says, "a proprietor." Bennett, Dana, Greeley, Raymond, Bowles, Godkin, Hearst and Pulitzer himself were all embodiments of the press as an institution. These men gained their authority because they had bold ideas and powerful platforms from which to launch them. Of course, the ability to publish a profitable newspaper did not automatically confer wisdom on the publisher. As one Atlantic writer observed in 1902, the nineteenth century editor was often absurdly impressed with himself and his visions. A heroic figure in some respects, he was quite comic in others. But whatever his excesses--and they were legion--the editor who used his paper as a personal platform stood for "a noble ideal," said the Atlantic: that the press had a civic duty to be a leader of public opinion (Fisher 747-8). Through his functions in shaping and giving voice to popular opinion, the great editor was "associated with the statesman in the affairs of government," and had a similar, if not equivalent, standing in the community. This was the orignal incarnation of the professional journalist: the man who attempted to lead through the newspaper he owned. That he also made money from the enterprise no doubt helped his standing, but it was not the reason for it. Journalism used to be a profession, the Atlantic reasoned, when "not business prestige, not commercial success, but intellectual abilities and moral qualities, gave it its force and vitality" (746).²⁹

The same point has been made about the British press by a contemporary observer. According to Philip Elliot, the original "professional" journalists in England were editors who used their papers as power bases to build reputations and gain political clout. In the nineteenth century there was a "brief hiatus," he says, "between censorship, corruption and economic controls and the commercialization associated with publishers for a mass audience." This period produced a "myth of professionalism," in which "the great writing editors appear as a force in the land beholden neither to their masters nor their readers" (173).

The twentieth century meaning of professionalism arose from the reallignment of power within the newspaper. Rather than hiring capital, the modern editor was hired by capital, and his job was to produce a paper that would sell enough copies to gain advertising revenue. As an employee dependent on the business side of the paper the journalist had no power base; the newspaper was no longer a platform he owned and controlled. Professionalism was put foward as a way of restoring the independence and prestige lost to the journalist when the newspaper was transformed into a business. Independence and prestige were once a function of the powerful position the newspaper held in the community. As the publisher of a widely distributed paper, the great editor was a force to be reckoned with. He gained respect when he learned how to use that force for purposes other thản making money. But in the new arrangement the independence and prestige of the journalist had to be guaranteed in some other way. Lacking control over the newspaper as a social instrument, the journalist had to find a way of resisting the pressures of commercialism and gaining stature in the public eye. Thus the emphasis on personal integrity. The professional journalist would not allow the news to be tainted because to do so would violate his deep sense of public duty. With this incorruptability he could gain a reputation as a force to be reckoned with, using, if necessary, the one power he did have: the threat of resignation. As Pulitzer said, "He must be known as one who would resign rather than sacrafice his principles to any business interest.... If he cannot keep the paper from degrading itself, he can refuse to be a party to the degradation" (660).

Separating the press from the newspaper

The school of journalism was to aid in the training of character by preaching a sharp division between the editorial and business functions of the press. In developing his plan for the school, Pulitzer enlisted the advice of Charles Elliot, President of Harvard and probably the most respected figure in higher education at the time. Among Elliot's recommendations was a course in "Ethics of Journalism," which would educate students in the proper relations among publishers, editors and reporters, paying special attention to the journalist's freedom of thought and the role of the publisher in shaping the presentation of news (Kimball, "The Profession of Publicist" 804). As an example of the "professional training" that might be given to journalists, this course had an interesting object. For its very existence was an admission that the independence of the journalist was imperiled by the structure of the modern newspaper. If the profession of journalism could not offer its recruits the actual independence that comes from running one's own shop, it could at least train them in how not to be compromised by a compromising situation. To put it another way, if freedom of the press, as A.J. Liebling said, belonged to those who own one, the professional journalist, unable to own a press, could at least secure a kind of intramural freedom by drawing a line inside the newspaper offices across which the owners of the press--those with the real freedom--were not allowed to go. The professional journalist would then be the expert in maintaining the line's integrity, and thus his own. In this fashion the very conditions preventing journalism from becoming a true profession are converted into problems about which the journalist has expert knowledge-- if he is professionally trained. Dependence is transformed into independence, not by altering the journalist's basic predicament but by training him in how to prevent it from becoming worse.

Pulitzer's proposal was generally well received, (Baker 39\) but there were a significant number of critics, That the journalism school faced an impossible task was clear to several writers around the turn of the century. In a reply to Pulitzer in the North American Review Horace White observed that the university has nothing to teach journalists since the field requires no special skills that can be learned in a classroom (26). The best that could be hoped for, he said, is to produce the kind of man "we have in mind when we say Mr. So-and-So is a gentleman and a scholar." But this type, a generally educated person, is the goal of the university as a whole, not the province of any special school, White argued (27). Furthermore, even if a journalism school could succeed in producing an educated man, where is the demand for his intelligence and sound judgment? With yellow journalism near its height and showing no signs of abating, the field offers little opportunity for the kind of journalist the school seeks to train. White wrote,

No self-respecting youth will prepare himself for future connection with a yellow journal; and, in general, the number who will prepare for newspaper work will be governed by the aspect in which journalism daily presents itself to their eyes. What are the most prominent features of journalism today? They are pictures, head-lines, color scheme, job type, sports, gossip. Is it any wonder that the bright young men, those who feel "growing pains" for high achievement and growing hope for distinction therein, are repelled from a profession which presents itself in such harlequin garb? (32)

Arthur Reed Kimball covered many of the same points in a 1903 piece on "The Profession of Publicist." The "conditions of modern journalism afford only occasional opportunity for independent work, such as is afforded in other professions," Kimball wrote. "Only by happy chance of a broad-minded and high-minded" owner, or by "the rarer chance of being himself admitted to a share in the ownership" can a journalist, no matter how well trained, "enjoy that degree of independence which is the distinguishing mark of professional life." Nor is the pay particularly high in journalism, Kimball noted; and professional training shows no signs of increasing it. While a capacity to "grasp great issues and the wit to express great thoughts," might conceivably bring a certain prestige to the journalist, these are the skills least necessary for success in the field and the least esteemed by employers. And yet the same skills--so little in demand--are "those which first of all a school of journalism is founded to develop in so far as it is to realize its purpose of training young men to be publicists, and thus of raising the profession of journalism" (807-810). The real problem in making journalism a profession, Kimball said, is that, compared to the editor who was also a proprietor, the modern journalist "has, and can have, no right except to resign." Under these conditions, he concluded, "it is futile to attempt through a special school to raise journalism to the rank of a profession," for

journalism must increasingly repel the men to whom naturally it would most appeal, the men to whom it owes the largest share of its influence in the past, the men to whom it should look to give it character in the future. (B10-11)

This fairly well summarizes the point we have been making about the school of journalism: that it attempted to set up a world apart from the realities of the marketplace, a world in which the journalist would once again enjoy his independence and prestige despite the disappearence of the conditions which had once guaranteed it. Part of what we mean by a "world apart" is that the journalism school would be a haven from commercial pressures where no attention was paid to the business aspects of journalism. But that is not all. The goal was also to create a separate world within the newspaper, to divide the editorial functions from the advertising and circulation departments, and to give a sacred meaning to the line between them. On the integrity of this line would be built the reputation of the press as a responsible public servant. As long as reporters and editors could be said to brook no interference in the news by those primarily concerned with business, the press could separate itself as an institution from the newspaper as an industry-- indeed, from industry in general. The wall separating the editorial and business departments could then take on a deeper meaning. It could help divide public life in general from the pursuit of private profits, in effect protecting democracy from any threat posed by industrial capitalism. A press that functioned strictly as a public servant implied a public that demanded strictly a responsible press, and this implication remained whether or not such a public existed or could exist in an age of mass communication. In this fashion the press began to distinguish itself from the whole problem of the modern public realm, from an increasingly competitive symbolic environment in which attention was no longer granted but gained.

The creation of an impossible press

Part of the goal of professionalism, then, was to set up a "world apart" from the conditions of an industrial society, a world in which public discussion was still vibrant and meaningful and the public itself took an active role in politics through the agency of the press. This movement toward a mythical public realm originated at precisely the point where certain illusions about democracy and capitalism, the newspaper and business, could no longer hold. While the newspaper was still under the direction of the great editor, the contradictions inherent in its growth were overshadowed by the heroic efforts of the men who guided it. In the nineteenth century it was still possible to believe in the newspaper as a source of enlightenment and a leader of public opinion (Birkhead 72-73). But as the twentieth century neared the great editor seemed more and more a menace to public welfare. In the 1990s Hearst and Pulitzer found themselves pushing sensationalism to its limits, not because they were totally without scruples, but because the logic of their battle for bigger circulations forced them to employ the full resources of the newspaper toward a single goal: the production of attention. Yellow Journalism was not an original formula. What Hearst and Pulitzer did was turn the potential of the modern newspaper loose, reducing all its possible functions to one, primary function: grabbing attention. The threat this posed to democratic traditions was obvious. At the same time a larger threat was unfolding, that of the giant corporation manipulating events in its own interest, (the dominant theme of the Progressive era.) At just this moment, when the newspaper had exposed itself as a public menace and the lust for profit seemed to threaten the foundations of democracy, the press began to create its world apart from industrial society, one in which the strict adherence to professional standards would guarantee the status of the press as a public servant. An impossible press was born, one which sought to solve the whole problem of public life simply by controlling the conduct of journalists.

Around the turn of the century there were many doubted that this would be enough. A 1903 editorial in the Nation on "Education in Journalism" made the simple point that it would do no good to uplift the standards of journalists when it was clearly the tastes of readers which determined the content of newspapers. "It might almost be said that it is the newspaper-reader who needs to go to school, and not the newspaper maker," the Nation observed (168). From this point of view, it is the economic structure of the press and the role of the reader in that structure that determine whether journalism can realize its high-minded ideals, not the temper or training of journalists. This was also the conclusion come to by an anonymous journalist in a 1925 piece in Harper's. The writer took the time to muse on an important irony we have already mentioned, the trivial uses to which the noble power of the press was being put.

I turn to our mechanically and professionally sophisticated forty-four pages and find that yesterday the most important happening on earth was that a foreign resident shot a fellow alien, probably fatally, for alleged independent advances to the former's ten year-old daughter. I find that Jack Dempsey has married Miss Taylor; that Floyd Collins's body in its Kentucky cave is not yet reached; that a French jury has acquitted an actress who killed her lover to spare him his "death agony"; that a woman who has presided over the Nebraska house of representatives for one day (not a word of what she or the house did is published); and that gifts donated to a prophetess of a non-forthcoming end of the world by her followers will not be restored by the courts to the givers.

So much for page one\!... (4)

The author's solution to the problem was an interesting one. A few established papers, using the same agressive tactics developed to sell papers, must attempt to "sell" the people on the sort of news that is "worth an intelligent citizen's attention," in defiance of the apparent fact that there is no popular demand for such news. It may be, the journalist speculates, that there is more of a demand than previously thought. On the other hand, it may also be that "the American mass intellect" has sunk so low that no remedy is possible. He then concludes that "it is time we learned this definitely." Even journalists, he says, "have a moral right to know whether in the future their profession is to afford honorable employment for gentlemen of intellect and independent judgment." Newspapermen are as entitled as anyone else to their self-respect, or at least to a conclusive answer on whether such respect is possible (7).

Here is another view of the press at odds with the professional attitude. In demanding an unambiguous answer to the question, "what sort of public is out there?" the author was declaring that professional status depends on the relations established between readers and writers. If those relations are founded on mutual respect, the journalist can take pride in himself as a professional. But if respect for the public proves unfounded, then this reflects poorly not only on the popular intellect, but on the journalist who must cater to it. Journalism can rise no higher than the mind of its audience, and since this must be the case, it is time to learn conclusively what the nature of that mind is.

Now this is a provocative question, unsettling not only to the professional project in journalism but, indeed, to the foundations of democracy. As John Dewey once put it, democracy is upheld "not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished" ("Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us" 224). By proposing that the press furnish the "proper conditions" and await a verdict, the journalist in Harper's was demanding an answer to a question that has rarely concerned anyone inside or outside the press. That question is is it possible to inform a modern public? The answer the profession of journalism has implicitly put forward is, "yes, if the information presented is accurate and objective," in other words, if professional standards are met.

Professionalism as ideology

What exactly is wrong or misleading about this answer? Let us see if we can clarify the point by risking an analogy with the medical profession. Imagine for a moment that the most important factors affecting the health of the population are more or less environmental. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the atmosphere we work in, the kind of life we are encouraged to lead in a technologically advanced age-- suppose these are the things which make people sick. The medical profession would then be presented with a problem. It has the responsibility of making people well, and yet the factors making them sick are much larger than the resources of the profession. A question therefore arises: at what level should the medical profession fix its responsibilities for health care? Is its job to cure disease? Should it also attempt to change the way its patients lead their lives in order to prevent disease? Or should it try to change the society so that the conditions causing illness are corrected? It is possible to operate at any of these levels--the personal, the social, the political--and still be "responsibile," depending on how one's responsibilities are defined. The medical profession, in other words, could easily set up a "world apart" from the most important factors in health and disease, and yet operate responsibly within that world, especially if it determines its own standards and judges the conduct of its own members. It can be argued that organized medicine has done just that by historically neglecting nutrition and preventative care generally in favor of an emphasis on surgery and drugs. And yet this does not mean that surgeons have acted unprofessionally. The problem concerns the way the profession has defined itself. Professional standards, then, have a dual function. On the one hand they inspire public confidence by setting up codes of conduct and some form of punishment for violators; on the other hand they fix an outer limit on professional responsibility, defining that portion of the problem the profession will treat as real. This is one way in which professionalism becomes an ideology: the profession is given the power to define what does and does not constitute a breach of public duty. That which is defined away may in fact constitute the bulk of the problem the profession claims to be treating.

Now, without stretching the comparison too far, let us view the press as a profession with responsibility for the health of the body politic. This is certainly claiming no more for the press than the press has often claimed for itself. Pulitzer, for example, said that in endowing a college of journalism he had in mind not the elevation of the profession but "the welfare of the Republic" (678). The question is, at what level will the press assume its duty to the health of the Republic? Will it take a broad view of the problem and consider the domain of journalism to be the whole of public life, or will it somehow narrow its focus to something simpler? The professionalization of the press needs to be viewed as an answer to this question, a fixing of the outer limit of journalism's responsibilities. As codes of conduct, professional standards tend to focus attention inside the area defined as real by the profession, while their most important effect is often to leave out, deny and otherwise define away everything that lies outside the profession's view of itself. This is what the Nation had grasped in saying that readers were the ones who ought to go to school; the idea of professional training for journalists implicity denied the role of the reader in shaping the character of the press. It sought to focus attention instead on the character and qualifications of journalists, an area over which the profession of journalism could more easily exert control. This sort of willful blindness to the predicament of the press was part of the journalism school from the beginning. As we have seen, Pulitzer deliberately sought to preach the "principles of journalism" apart from the industrial setting in which the work of the press actually took place. He realized that for the journalism school to "raise the standing of the editorial profession," its goal must be to

mark the distinction between real journalists and men who do a kind of newspaper work that requires neither culture nor conviction, but merely business training.

Note that the "real journalists" are those the profession considers to be "really" doing the work of journalism, while those who are "not really" journalists do some "other kind of newspaper work" defined as other by the profession. With this sort of strategy the press began to separate itself as an institution from the newspaper as a commercial medium, the goal being to improve the prestige of the profession by leaving behind, defining as "other," that portion of the newspaper which was involved in producing and selling attention as a commodity. This was the explicit theme of M. de Blowitz's 1893 article on "Journalism as a Profession." The goal of profesional training should be to create a special type, "standing head and shoulders above the stream of contemporary journalists," de Blowtiz wrote (42). By recruiting talented people into the journalism school the

level of the profession can be raised, not only from the point of view of the work produced, but also in the intrinsic value and dignity of the producers; thus banishing forever those who are the bane of the profession, the pirates and footpads of the highway, lured thither by misery or chance, who arm themselves with a pen as a revolver, and who, sheltered behind the columns of a paper as behind trees of a forest, have made in certain countries the name of journalist synonymous with an insult or a calumny (45).

Of course, there was a problem with this strategy. Those who were "the bane of the profession" also did the work of attracting readers. Leaving them behind meant leaving the popular newspaper behind, which threatened to strand the professional journalist without an audience. After all, the horrors of senationalism were at least in part a reflection of what readers were demanding of the press. If a professionalized press sought to seperate itself from the means by which attention was gained, from the business of buying and selling readers, it was implicitly claiming that it wanted nothing to do with the mass audience. This was alright for a profession which consciously addressed itself to an elite, as newspapers had before the penny papers. But the claim the journalist made for professional status was based on the solemn duty he owed to the general public. He might be paid by the publisher, but his allegiance was to the people.

Dismissing the public in the name of the public

At the time this claim was being put forward, yellow journalism was providing ample evidence that readers of the press wanted nothing more than distraction and amusement. The "people" seemed to be composed of crude, ignorant masses who wanted to see their own prejudices reflected in the pages of the newspaper. So where was this public whose interests a professionalized press was dedicated to serving? What was the evidence for its existence? The press could find no answer to these questions, and yet some way had to be found to avoid identification with the demonstrated readership of the newspaper. For its tastes only led back to the dirty business of buying, selling and struggling for attention, a world from which professionalism was a deliberate escape. The professionalization of the press, then, was a dismissal of the actual public journalists faced. In its stead was placed a mythical public formed in the image of the journalist's professional standards, the public that would have to exist if the claims of the press to professional status were to make any sense. This is part of what the "public" became in the discourse of modern journalism, an imagined body to which a scrupulous press owed a scared duty.³⁰ To put it as simply as possible, the press needed to invent the public as an ideal reader when it separated itself from the actual readership of the newspaper.

Michael Schudson conducts a related argument about the professions and the public in Discovering the News. Early in the twentieth century, he says, public opinion began to mean something new. In the nineteenth century it had been "the voice of the middle class against an aristocracy," especially in England. In the United States it had been identified with "the people," who were presumed to share the middle class values of education and rationality. But the forces of urbanization, immigration and mass journalism combined to give a new connotation to the term, Schudson observes.

Public opinion was no longer the readership James Gordon Bennett or Horace Greeley or Samuel Bowles addressed in small, dense type and long-winded editorials; the public was now the urban masses who liked banner headlines, large drawings and photographs, snappy and spicy writing. True, the older journalism has scarcely been as dignified or reasoned as some liked to remember it, and the educated middle class itself liked banners and spice more than it cared to admit. But at the same time it felt a great need to distinguish itself from the rest of the reading public, for it no longer recognized in "public opinion" what it took to be its own voice, the voice of reason. The professional classes now took public opinion to be irrational and therefore something to study, direct, manipulate and control. The professions developed a proprietary attitude toward "reason" and a paternalistic attitude toward the public. (128-9)

Although the middle class professional--including the new breed of journalist--could look down on the public as crude and irrational, it was not possible to dismiss the public entirely. For in a democratic society the public was the only real source of authority, its perceptions the only sure guarantee of status. This is pointed out by Burton Bledstein in his study of professionalism in America. Bledstein views professionalism as the attempt of the middle class to assert its authority by laying claim to expert knowledge certified by university training. In pursuing this strategy the ascending professional class created a contradiction for itself-- the fact that in a democractic society one had to toil in the name of the public, (there being no other goal or body to serve), and yet distinguish one's self from the public in order to lay claim to a higher status and impress on the society the need for one's services. On the one hand, Bledstein notes, the aspiring professional "identified with the public's interest" and asserted his belief in basic democratic values. On the other hand, he sought to establish his independence from "those he considered to be his inferiors," demanding, for example, the right of self-criticism (123). Not just for the press, then, but for professions in general, professionalism was both a dismissal and a glorification of the public. The profession claimed to have the "public interest" uppermost in mind, and, at the same time, asserted that the public was neither qualified to do what the professional did nor entitled to judge how well he did it.

For the press this dual claim presented a particularly tricky problem, for an assertion that the public was incompetent threatened to collapse the entire democratic mythos, and with it the source of the journalist's exalted place in society. It was one thing for doctors to claim that people could not understand modern medicine and therefore had no business treating themsleves; it was quite another to say they did not understand their political system. Other professions could deliberately surround their subjects with arcane rituals and speak in a mysterious language, but for the press these strategies were clearly untenable. Journalism had to speak in a common language about subjects of public interest, and it had to insist that a public sharing this language and active in defending those interests was out there, demanding a responsible press. This put the press in a nearly unique position among the professions. Most gain power and status by intimidating the layman into accepting the judgment of the "expert." The implication is always that people do not know enough or care enough to decide things for themselves. But the press built itself up by claiming the exact opposites that people were not only competent to decide public questions but eager to do so, as long as they were furnished with the proper information. The equation is simple: the more active and able the public, the more vital and scared the functions of the press. Alone among the professions, journalism sponsors a myth of independence and competence, in which the average man's interest and ability as a political actor is built up along with the status of the press.

Of course, the journalist had an advantage over other aspiring professionals. He was relatively insulated from the public whose interests he had to serve. The public as a "client" of the journalist never appeared in the flesh, and made no direct demands on the professional. The point of contact between actual persons and working journalists was the newspaper, but the more the press could separate itself from the business of the newspaper--especially from the means through which the newspaper gained the attention of its readers--the less relevant this connection to actual people would be. As we have argued, this was the goal of professional training in journalism to distinguish the press as an institution from the newspaper as a business. To the degree that this project succeeded, the public could simply be made up, imagined in whatever shape the press desired, there being no mechanism by which an actual public could declare itself dissatisfied (or simply bored) with the service it was getting from the press. Since a professionalized press was, in effect, subsidized by those who did "some other kind of newspaper work," as Pulitzer put it, the press would not have the verdict of the marketplace hanging over its head. In fact, the more it ignored the marketplace, the more "professional" it would appear. Meanwhile, the press could borrow the mantle of the public's authority, and use it to justify everything it did, especially by use of the phrase "the public's right to know," and by invoking the sacred place of a free press in a democratic society. Thus we have a recent journalism textbook declaring that

Every journalist of consequence considers himself to be a public servant and believes that he and his organization are ultimately accountable to the public. On this base he rests his values. In a very real sense, therefore, he makes representative government possible, for he is the essential link between the governors and the governed.

Needless to say, there is no mention in the book of the actual means by which the "journalist of consequence" is held "ultimately accountable to the public," or even who this public is. There is no historical or critical discussion of the "essential link between the governors and the governed," the implication being that it is pretty much the same as it was in 1789\. Critical analysis is absent here because being a public servant in a professionalized press requires no demonstrable connection to an actual public; it is a self-declared status, or, as described rather candidly by Arthur Reed Kimball, "a feeling that comes over a person when he behaves in concert with his own conscience" (258). Kimball acknowledges that journalism's claim to professional status is not based on the independence of the journalist or on any esoteric knowledge he has mastered, but rather on a "sense of responsibility to the community, the loyalty to the public as a client above all other loyalties" (256).³¹

Answering to the community of journalists

Once again, a "sense of responsibilty" journalists feel toward the public does not require any mechanism by which the journalist is held accountable to actual persons or groups of people. The only community to which the journalist must answer is the community of fellow journalists. This was another goal of Pulitzer in founding a professional school: to encourage journalists to identify with each other. At present, he noted, a journalist does not speak of another journalist as a colleague.

But if the future editors of the city were in large proportion graduates of the same college and had a recognized professional meeting-place in which they could come together informally and discuss matters of common interest, would they not eventually develop a professional pride that would enable them to work in concert for the public good and that would put any black sheep of the profession in an uncomfortable position? (650)

As members of the press turned away from the demonstrated readership of the newspaper and those who catered to it, they turned toward each other. Local press clubs had been around since the 1870s, but they had a somewhat sullied reputation since many members were not journalists at all but politicians and businessmen hoping to influence the press (A.M. Lee 667-8). The National Press Club began in 1908, Sigma Delta Chi, the national fraternity of journalists, in 1909, the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1922\. Among the ASNE's first moves was to adopt its "Canons of Journalism" in 1923, a list of seven commandments dealing with accuracy, fairness and responsibility to the public. The seventh commandment, entitled "Decency," concluded with this interesting admission: "Lacking authority to enforce its canons, the journalism here represented can but express the hope that deliberate pandering to vicious instincts will encounter effective public disapproval or yield to the influence of a preponderant professional condemnation" (qtd. in MacDougall 62). In other words, the "Canons of Journalism" were purely symbolic, a list of shoulds and should-nots meant to impress the public and put fear in the hearts of wayward journalists. In law and medicine, "professional condemnation" could include revoking the right to practice. But in journalism, all that existed to keep the professional in line was "contempt of his fellows," as one apologist for the press put it (Hamilton 648-9). On the reverse side, all that existed to put pride in the heart of the journalist was the respect of his fellows, there being no other mechanism by which a responsible and professional journalist could judge himself a success.

The fellowship among journalists encouraged by journalism schools, press clubs, professional associations and codes of ethics involved a further reorientation of attitudes toward the public. Esteem in the eyes of the community was replaced by esteem among one's colleagues, with the community becoming an abstract body, the public, whose perceptions about the press were to be influenced by the rituals of professionalization. Harry Christian has analyzed this shift in the British press. In the nineteenth century, he notes, most journalists were employed by small, local newspapers and concerned about their standing in the local community. The idea of journalism as a profession gave journalists "an alternative allegiance, namely to their colleagues," in which prestige was a fraternal judgment removed from the opinion of laymen (281). The public perception of journalists was still important, but a professional orientation created a new set of relationships among colleagues who together concerned themselves with improving the image of the press in the eyes of the layman. Thus the importance of professional associations and codes of ethics. The public to which the modern journalist looked for recognition was not a known community of fellow residents whose opinion was valued in a personal way, but rather the general public--one might almost say "society"--which bestowed higher status on some professions than others. This more general and abstract public was reached not by personal contact but through symbols of authority and prestige. Thus, in 1890 a Royal Charter was granted to the Institute of Journalists, a professional association begun by members of the British press in 1880\. The group to which the journalist owed his allegiance had by the twentieth century split into two groups: the immediate association with fellow journalists, and the distant ties to an abstract public conducted mainly through symbols like the Royal Charter or the Canons of Journalism.

The newsroom as an insulated environment

Today the professional journalist has little or no contact with actual readers or viewers, and prides himself on that fact. Sociologist Herbert Gans reports that journalists are not typically interested in their audiences, and when they are their judgments are often unsound, based on personal feeling or industry lore rather than empirical research. In Deciding What's News, a study of newsweeklies and network news operations, Gans writes:

I began this study with the assumption that journalists, as commercial employees, take the audience directly into account when selecting and producing stories; I therefore paid close attention to how the journalists conceived of and related to their audience. I was surprised to find, however, that they had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected feedback from it. Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid little attention to it; instead, they filmed and wrote for their superiors and for themselves, assuming... that what interested them would interest the audience.

One of the reasons Gans gives for this lack of interest in actual readers and viewers is that journalists "are reluctant to accept any procedure which casts doubt on their news judgment and their professional autonomy" (232). Professionals pride themselves on writing and editing for an "interested" and educated audience, for that is the audience that grants them the most freedom to perform their sacred functions in a democracy. At the same time, journalists look down on what they assume most people want from the news. Gans observes that beneath

the rejection of audience wants and preferences lurks a further fear, also embodied in journalistic audience lore, that many viewers and readers are not particularly interested in the news they now receive, preferring gossip about celebrities to important activities of important actors. "They only want to know how the astronauts shit while they are in space," a producer working on a space-mission story once pointed out.

There are, then, two images of the audience the professional journalist has in his head, both tending toward the mythic. One, which we can call the "public," is an imagined audience of educated and interested citizens, (much like journalists themselves) who want the kind of news the press is most pleased to produce: important information about public affairs and serious political analysis, the sort of news that makes the press a vital link in a vibrant democracy. Journalists typically over-estimate the size of this group when asked about the actual composition of their audience, Gans reports (238-39). At the other extreme is the audience journalists are afraid they actually have: a huge mass of faceless viewers and readers whose desires, if catered to, would reduce the role of the journalist to that of a cheap entertainer. This can be safely be considered a mythic construct as well, since, as Gans points out, journalists are quite uninterested in what is actually known about these "cheap" desires and habits (232). Professional newsworkers try not to think about the mass audience, says Gans, for they fear its size and power (234).

Conclusion

The result of all this is a peculiar isolation from actual people. The supposed "clients" of a professional press are treated either as an idealized public, interested in "serious" news and educated enough to understand its importance, or, in the alternative, an equally idealized mass of gossip-lovers, easily distracted, who not only fail to appreciate the efforts of a responsible press but threaten its very existence. The goal of professionalism is to insulate the press from this threat as much as possible, so that the image of a competent and educated public can rule the journalist's imagination and support his self-esteem. Again, what originally creates a professionalized press is the line protecting the editorial workers from the business people, a mythic divider which serves to distinguish the "public" from the masses, public life in general from the harsh conditions of the marketplace, democracy from capitalism, information from entertainment, the gathering of news from the economics of attention, and which, at the deepest level, divides the responsible, serious "adult" self from the pleasure-seeking child self.

In the next chapter we examine two thinkers who refused to make these separations in their thinking about press and public. Walter Lippmann and John Dewey did not try to isolate the public from conditions they thought threatening to its existence. They took into account the transformation of the public realm from an environment in which attention was granted to one where attention had to be gained. This led them to ask how it was possible for the public to have any meaning in an age of mass communications. Among the factors working against the public was the press itself, in particular the way the modern journalist had conceived of his task. Whether or not there was a public became, for Lippmann and Dewey, an open question, and, given the depth of their insights, a truly interesting question. It is the question we take up next.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE MYTH OF THE OMNICOMPETENT CITIZEN

The conclusion we drew in the previous chapter was that a professionalized press adopted a certain attitude toward the public. On the one hand the press sought to insul ate itself from readers and the means by which the newspaper gained their attention. So professi onalization was a disnisal of the people who actually constituted the "public. " On the other hand, if a vision of the press as a responsible public servant was to make any sense, there had to be a public that demanded and deserved a responsible press-- a public that wanted information rather than entertainment, that was active in politics and concerned about issues, that justified by its own interests and competence the claim of the press to prof essional status. After all, what glory was there in declaring one's allegi ance to a mass of gullible consumers craving a little distraction each morning? And so professionalization, while dismissing the public on one level, glorified it on another. There grew up a myth of an informed, active and competent public, even as the press took steps to protect itself from its actual public and that public's degraded (and degrading) tastes. Both attitudes were flights from the whole problem of public life in an industrial age, from the question of whether it was possible to inform a modern public, or whether, indeed, a public even existed.

In the next two chapters we examine the work of two writers who took up these questions willingly, subjecting the idea of an informed public to a kind of twentieth century reality test. In doing so they were led to theorize about the nature of modern journalism as well, since both believed the press was the main hope for reversing the decline of public life. Walter Lippmann and John Dewey refused to allow the professional journalist the comfort of assuming his public was out there, waiting for the vital information he had pledged to provide. Instead they insisted that the press come face to face with the conditions undermining a competent and informed public, some of which the press had itself created. Because they expected so much of the press--more, in fact, than journalists expected of themselves--Lippmann and Dewey saw how little the press was doing to improve the conduct of public life. They saw that the press was part of the problem of preserving democracy in a modern environment.

We will begin with Lippmann. His career is without parallel in the American press, his life an extraordinary record of the conflicts which wracked the twentieth century. Ronald Steel observes in the opening of his biography of Lippmann that a "man whose childhood had been spent learning Latin and Greek by gaslight and riding a goat cart in Central Park lived through the revolutions of psychoanalysis, bolshevism and fascism, nuclear fission, and frenzied nationalism" (xvii). Lippmann began his writing career by applying the recently published theories of Sigmund Freud to political behavior; he ended with bitter denunciations of the Vietnam War. In between he manged to lead the life of an intellectual and a journalist, engaged in events but concerned about ideas, in particular about ideas that would help solve or at least clarify the great political questions the modern democracies faced. Though he had plenty of reasons to do so, Lippmann never lost what Steel identifies as

a conviction that politics mattered, that men could live a life of reason, and that those with special gifts or understanding had a responsibility to do what they could to illuminate the path.

These qualities are worth mentioning not to genuflect toward Lippmann but to point out how his special perspective on the press and public evolved. Other men of ideas have had ideas about the press, and other journalists have been concerned--or imagined themselves concerned--about the great questions of war and peace, religion and science, politics and human nature. John Dewey, Robert Park and Max Weber come to mind in the first category; H.L. Mencken and James Reston in the second. But as a journalist, Lippmann actually wrote books still worth reading on these subjects; and as an intellectual he actually edited a daily newspaper, one of the finest of his time.¹ His daily column was read by millions of ordinary people who depended on Lippmann to tell them what to think. The influence this gave him meant extraordinary access to leaders and events. Walter Lippmann was "the name that opened every door," as a colleague once put it, a man who could not tour Europe without visiting at least two or three heads of state. One does not lead a life like this and develop an ordinary political philosophy. When Lippmann stepped back to ponder a problem, he stepped back from a world which had welcomed him all the way inside. In 1919, for example, he wrote editorials about the Fourteen Points he had earlier helped Woodrow Wilson to draft (Steel 158-9).

Revamping the notion of liberty and the press

It will not be our concern to review Lippmann's life or work as a whole. We are interested specifically in his thoughts on press, public and the problem of preserving democracy in a modern age. That portion of his work begins in 1920 with the publication of Liberty and the News, a monograph on the heightened responsibilities of a modern press. The background to Liberty and the News\--indeed, to most, if not all of Lippmann's writings--was the idea of the Great Society, that is, a society whose economic life was based on industrial production for a world market, whose political boundaries were no longer contained within the nation-state and whose daily life was therefore determined by distant and often incomprehensible events. The problem was how to reconcile this new environment with the older ideals of democracy. Lippmann began with the traditional link between democracy and liberty.

What led Lippmann to forumlate the problem in this way were the events of World War I, especially the Paris Peace Conference, where the work of propagandists had whipped up the passions of the home populations and prevented statesmen from devising a sane and just peace.² The Great War showed that a new factor, "the manufacture of consent," had entered the triangular relationship between government, press and public. It was now an open question whether "government by consent" could survive, for democracy was more dependent than ever on the integrity of the news columns while the news columns were more subject than ever to sophistry and manipulation. In this sense, wrote Lippmann, "the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism" (5).

The key insight in Liberty and the News was that the public had been given more power by modern communications and the scale of the Great Society, which no longer allowed leaders to wage war and make peace in isolation from popular sentiment. But this power was difficult to exercise rationally, since the events with which public opinion was concerned were distant and complex. No more than an impression, more or less accurate but always incomplete, could be had of a war unfolding across the ocean. Even for the people closest to the action the war was something of a mystery. Most people think newspaper correspondents have observed the things they write about, Lippmann noted.

Far from it. Nobody, 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. (43-4)

Unable to know things first hand, the public had to depend on the press. But the press was itself dependent on official versions of a war that could not be glimpsed in full. The news inevitably suffered, then, not only from the bias of interested parties, but also from the sheer size of the undertaking, the breaking apart of a graspable, manageable reality that could be surveyed from a point above the action. There was no such point--the world had exploded in scale--and so journalists fell back on offical statements, authorized versions of an event no one could see whole. The breaking apart of an environment which could be reliably reported also gave propaganda its entry point, for if the true shape of events was impossible to render, people would provide a shape of their own out of ignorance and prejudice. Propaganda picked up where the facts failed, giving the irrational element in the popular mind an institutional basis. This was part of the problem of journalism in a modern environment: the facts were hard to get, but even getting the facts was no guarantee they would be believed. Propaganda could short-circuit the process, putting what people wish to be true ahead of the truth as known. This was especially likely in a democratic society, where there were few restrictions on what could be put before the public. In an interesting comparison, Lippmann observed that the verdicts of juries--a kind of case-by-case public opinion--are notoriously unreliable, even though a jury benefits from the rules of evidence and standards for discourse which prevail in the speech environment created by a courtroom. In the court of public opinion there are no such standards, no penalties for lying, no presiding judge to rule statements irrelevant or out of order. Moreover, the jury is not "the qualified voters alone," but

everybody who creates public sentiment-- chattering gossips, unscrupulous liars, congenital liars, feeble-minded people, prostitute minds, corrupting agents.

"It is clear," wrote Lippmann, "that in a society where public opinion has become decisive, nothing that counts in the formation of it can really be a matter of indifference" (36). Here was the most important contribution Liberty and the News had to offer: the notion that all public statements were factors in the formation of opinion, not just those of the journalist. The question of "informing the public" thus widened considerably to take in the entire communication environment, of which the press was only a part. Rumor, gossip, stereotype, prejudice, propaganda-- all these contributed to public opinion as well.

Lippmann's retreat into professionalism

This wider view of the matter was incompatible with the professional attitude we surveyed in the previous chapter. Professionalization is a way of localizing the problem of the public in the behavior of journalists, which can then be managed according to professional standards. The assumption is that a code of conduct among journalists can ensure that the press informs the public. In a famous series of Colliers articles published in 1911, Will Irwin gave voice to this common tenet of a professionalized press. A modern society is dependent on the press for its information, Irwin observed.

Axiomatically, then, the quality of news, its freedom from undue bias and taint, is supremely important. Could one slant or taint all news at its source, he would vitiate all public intelligence. Could one raise the standard of all news at its source, he would correspondingly elevate public intelligence. ("What is News?" 16\)

What Lippmann had offered in Liberty and the News was a series of complications to Irwin's formula for improving the public mind. There were sources other than news which bear on "public intelligence," Lippmman observed. These included rumor, prejudice and the propaganda which played upon them. Moreover, there were severe limitations on the ability of news to give an accurate picture of events. Journalists often relied on second or third hand information and had no way of observing events themselves. Even more troublesome was the rigorous attitude a citizen must have to translate accurate news into more reliable opinions. One had to be open to new evidence a sort of scientific spirit, "a unity of method," had to prevail among common citizens for news to improve the quality of public opinion (67, 72). There was no guarantee that such a spirit existed in the mass of citizens. Yet without it, accurate information could not achieve its aim: "the resumpton of contact betweem beliefs and realities," as Lippmann put it. These things were all more problematic, more difficult to achieve, than the raising of standards within the profession of journalism.

And yet professionlism was the very solution Lippmann advanced at the conclusion of his analysis. Journalists should be better trained and their status upgraded, Lippmann argued. Documentation must improve in the news columns, and all articles should be signed so that reporters can be held responsible for their work. Courts of honor might be set up by journalists themselves to prosecute those who abuse the privileges of a free press. Reporting must become more disintested and scientific (74-85). These suggestions were entirely conventional in comparison to Lippmann's view of the problem. He, too, fell back on the conduct of journalists as the decisive factor in public opinion, even where his own analysis had showed that many other factors were involved. He, too, focused on the content of the news columns--accuracy and fairness being the main issues--when earlier in the book he had shown, first, that news is a very limited form of knowledge to begin with, and, second, that the conversion of news to sound opinion requires more than sound news. It involves, in fact, the whole process by which humans form a picture of their world, a territory democratic theory had always declined to enter. This would be the direction his interests would take after Liberty and the News (Blum 60). As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. observes,

Liberty and the News, for all its apprehensions about the actual workings of democracy, preserved the assumption that, given the neutral facts, the people as a whole could be relied on to act rationally. But Lippmann soon found he could not rest comfortably in this assumption. As he gazed out at America in the twenties, he wondered if better reporting would really solve the problem of public confusion and apathy. Was the "news" really enough? (201-2)

Two years later Lippmann gave a decisive answer to that question. In a famous passage near the end of Public Opinion, he wrote that the press

is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for popular decision. The trouble lies deeper than the press, and so does the remedy.

The conviction that "the trouble lies deeper" than the conduct of the press has helped to make Public Opinion a classic of modern political thought. For the press had been traditionally put forward as the solution to every weakness in democratic theory, much as the schools in America have been offered up as the solution for every social problem. By stating emphatically that the press was not enough, Lippmann removed the key element in an entire edifice of thought surrounding the duties of the citizen in a democracy. A whole world of assumptions about how people form an understanding of public questions then began to collapse, including those of the journalism profession. Commenting on the 1965 re-issuance of the book, German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann noted that "without being sensational at all," Public Opinion "is in fact an expose'."

But it is an expose' that runs so contrary to people's natural inclinations about how they wish to see things that now, long after its original publication, it still seems new and, for all practical purposes, still has not been incorporated into intellectual thought.

Let us see how Lippmann went about this reversal of what Noelle-Neumann calls our "natural inclinations."³

The press as a medium without a message

It is possible to argue that the central myth on which all other myths of the press are built is that of an unmediated link with the world provided by journalists to audiences. As Dan Schiller observes, "News reports repeatedly claim that, ideally at least, they recount events without the intrusion of value judgments or symbols" (2). In his study of TV news, Edward J. Epstein was startled to find that television journalists often believe that the news is simply a "mirror" of the world, even though they work in an environment where, through the cutting and editing film, a picture of reality is actively re-arranged to fit some notion of a "good story" (13-25). Note that a mirror is the most negligible medium possible; it reflects everything, distorts nothing. Comparing news to a mirror can easily be dismissed as an overly defensive response to criticism; but to regard what Epstein calls "the mirror metaphor" as merely a rhetorical ploy would be to ignore the persistence of similar notions in press history.

As we saw in the third chapter, the telegraph seemed to promise a means of world-wide unification, a "universal town meeting" conducted through the press. The idea of a "universal town meeting" denies that the newspaper as a medium linking people is also a medium between people, and that it remains between them, substituing common acquaintence with a symbolic world--the news--in place of actual membership in a common world. We have argued that the newspaper brings its readers together only in the most paradoxical fashion, as members of a community that never meets. But the myth of a "universal town meeting" ignores this paradox. The doctrine of objectivity, about which we will have more to say later, offers a similar sort of denial; it is clearly a myth of unmediated communication in which the world can be offered directly, that is, "objectively," to readers. Finally, there is the "slaying the messsenger" myth, in which journalists interpret criticism of the news as a displaced dissatisfaction with the world as it happens to be. Journalists are simply messengers, the news simply a reflection of "the way things are." Again, the assumption is that the world passes through the news in an unmediated way and is offered that way to audiences.

In an interesting essay on the rise of objectivity as a value in journalism, Anthony Smith locates its origins in the use of shorthand to produce verbatim accounts of speeches in the eighteenth century.

Shorthand was the first of that long series of journalistic techniques which at first seemed to promise the reader the complete recovery of some semblance of reality... By presenting the reader with the ipsissima verba \[the very words of a speech, it seemed at first that reporting was capable of providing a true mirror of reality. ("The Long Road to Objectivity and Back" 161\)

The ability to create a replica of the event as it actually occurred first gave reporting a special function, Smith says, allowing journalism to seperate itself as an art from printing and publishing. From this original division grew the possibility of a reporting profession, he argues. If he is correct, then the "mirror metaphor" is deeply rooted in the very idea of journalism. It is what separates the journalist as a figure from other types of observers, and from other functions inherent in the newspaper. Mirroring the world is the thing journalists can do that non-journalists cannot; on this original distinction a definition of the press is built. Perhaps this is what accounts for the persistence of objectivity as a principle of journalism, despite the many justifications for abandoning it. In a different context, Smith observes that the idea of objectivity, which, after all, implies a world which can be ojectively perceived, was upended by all the developments in modern thought. And yet it had been so institutionalized by journalism schools and professional routines that the wiping away of its intellectual basis did nothing to dislodge objectivity from journalism. "Freud, Einstein, Heisenberg, and all of the twentieth-century movements in the arts and sciences could shift and manipulate the term at will without greatly disturbing the newspaper world," Smith writes.⁴

What could account for the persistence of a world view that apparently has so little going for it? The suggestion here is that objectivity may only be the surface expression of a larger assumption about unmediated communication, the assumption being that journalism as communication can recover the world and deliver it directly to its audience. This idea is more than a professional myth: it creates the press as an institution, marking off the boundary between journalists and non-journalists, the press and the layity. Even those most most dissatisfied with the news tend to employ the mirror analogy in their attacks on the press. They want journalists to be "fair," to tell it like it is, to write and speak the truth. They want journalism to mirror the world. Never do they ask journalists to be better symbol makers or story tellers. There is nothing non-sensical about these expectations, but they do share the assumption that an ideal press is a medium without any message other than the one worldy events have for the life of man. That is the moral of the slaying the messenger tale: the messenger is killed--by non-journalists--because he has no message other than that of events themselves.

The third world of representation

Lippmann's Public Opinion was an open attack on the mirror analogy, an attempt to introduce a contrary idea-- namely, that the world cannot be mirrored in the news because it is a joint product of the perceiver and the perceived, both for journalists and, more importantly, for the public. Lippmann insisted on discussing a third realm, a "pseudo-environment," that must always exist between people and events: the world of representation. This third world cannot be eclipsed by fair and complete reporting; it does not dissolve with the ability of photography to reproduce images exactly; it cannot be willed away or minimized in any fashion because it is a fact of human nature, and the first fact of human communication.

For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintence. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. To traverse the world men must have maps of the world. Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else's need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.

The student of public opinion, Lippmann continued, must recognize at the outset "the triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action" (11). Public opinion arises from events and returns to affect them, but the connection is not a direct one. Thus the image of a triangle: the third point is language and the entire problem of representation through symbols. All knowledge is mediated; the only way we learn anything about events is through symbols, and symbols are always a reduction and distortion of what they symbolize. A three-sided model contrasts, of course, with the line or channel that is commonly assumed to stretch from the world to audiences through the press. Having declared this at the outset--"We shall assume that what each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him"--Lippmann then set out to square democratic theory within the triangle of human communication (16). As might be expected the fit was rather poor.

Most of Public Opinion is a series of observations on the limits of human perception in comparison to the reality it confronts, with particular emphasis on political events and the way they are perceived. "For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see," Lippmann wrote. "In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the forms stereotyped for us by our culture." These already formed images, "the current patterns, the accepted versions," are a kind of filter through which news of the world passes. They "intercept information on its way to consciousness," forcing the new (and the news) to conform to the familiar (54-57). Lippmann was careful to add that a reliance on what he called "the greater economy of the allegory" was not a weakness or a vice but a human necessity, especially when the mind turns to public affairs: "In putting together our public opinions, not only do we have to picture more space than we can see with our eyes, and more time than we can feel, but we have to describe and judge more people, more actions, more things than we can ever count, or vividly imagine" (95). Again:

So great is the multitude of things that we cannot keep them vividly in mind. Usually, then, we name them, and let the name stand for the whole impression. But a name is porous, old meanings slip out and new ones slip in...

In comparison to the demand for meanings language is static, frozen. There is therefore a structural gap between the play of events and the means available for recognizing and interpreting them. Not only language, but all forms of representation are constantly doing violence to the facts, and this violence is not a willful conspiracy or the result of sloppy speech but a built-in feature of human communication. In addition to these inevitable limits on perception--which could almost be said to be biological--there are social facts which need to be recognized, Lippmann argued. Thought goes on in a "bath of noise" and a host of distractions and amusements confronts the modern citizen (47). The amount of time the average person spends on public affairs is comparatively meager. "We are concerned in public affairs," (that is, they affect us) but "immersed in our private ones" (36). An appetite for the study and discussion of public questions is neither a requirement for voicing an opinion nor a common attribute of those who do. Lippmann had noticed and could not help remarking upon the "relief" that is commonly felt when "talk turns from 'general topics' to a man's hobby" (45). Our private lives are so much more real and immediate; it should not surprise us that they win out over politics in the competition for attention. And yet this fact, obvious to all, is rarely acknowledged in our thinking about public opinion.

Functions of the symbol in politics

To create consent through a common understanding of the facts is all but impossible, Lippmann argued; the facts are distant and complex, the will to understand them slight, the limitations of language too heavy. And yet some sort of agreement, some common ground must be reached for politics to proceed in a democracy. An area of agreement above the plane of events must therefore be secured. This is the function of the symbol in political discourse: to allow masses of people to share an opinion even when they do not share an understanding of the facts. When political reality is reduced to slogans, catch-phrases and iconic images, people respond just as powerfully to the symbol as they do to the conditions it was meant to represent. And the response is often a private one, in the sense that it is based on some emotional need or will to believe that has arisen out of the individual's personal circumstances. Phrases like Law and Order, Justice, Humanity (or, in our own time, Big Government or Welfare Cheat) allow for a unity that would not exist if discussion proceeded at a more concrete level. They literally create out of private feeling "public" opinion. But the public-ness of opinion formed in this way merely indicates the level of abstraction at which political discourse is conducted, not the breadth of agreement a particular leader or campaign has achieved. Lippmann writes,

If, for example, one man dislikes the League \[of Nations\], another hates Mr. Wilson, and a third fears labor, you may be able to unite them if you can find some symbol which is the antithesis of what they all hate. Suppose that symbol is Americanism. The first man may read it as meaning the preservation of American isolation, or as he may call it, independence; the second as a rejection of a politician who clashes with his idea of what an American president should be, the third as a call to resist revolution. The symbol itself signifies no one thing in particular, but it can be associated with almost anything. And because of that it can become the common bond of common feelings, even though those feelings were originally attached to disparate ideas. (132)

Visual symbols are a particularly potent means of creating this quasi-public consent, for they evoke private feelings in an effective way.

...where action depends on whether a number of people are of one mind, it is probably true that in the first instance no idea is lucid for practical purposes until it has visual or tactile value. But it is also true that no visual idea is significant to us until it has enveloped some stress of our own personality. Until it releases or resists, depresses or enhances, some craving of our own, it remains one of the objects which do not matter.

The art of deploying symbols in politics to find the level of abstraction at which many private feelings begin to meet, and to communicate to large audiences at that level. Employed in this fashion, symbols "do not stand for ideas, but for a sort of truce or junction between ideas. They are like a strategic railroad center where many roads converge regardless of their ultimate origin or their ultimate destination" (133). Those who control these strategic points on the terrain of symbols also control public policy, Lippmann observed. This is the problem which propaganda and the manufacture of consent pose for democracy: agreement reached in the "pseudo-environment" of representation allows for action at the level of events, but the connection between the two is deranged. Shared symbols do reflect a shared understanding. Public opinion is really private feeling publicly registered. The symbolic environment in which elections are determined and policy debated fails to reflect the "unseen environment" where problems are hidden in a tangle of facts. Only the visible is deemed to be real. As Lippmann observed, "There has always been more popular interest in the profits of millionaires, which are visible but comparatively unimportant, than in the wastes of the industrial system, which are huge but elusive."⁵ Thirty years before television he had recognized the fact that not all dimensions of a problem can be portrayed visually, and yet the visual is deemed the most real.

At the level of symbols the propagandist rules politics; at the level of events the master is the machine politician. A heightened reliance on imagery and an increasingly remote bureaucracy thus go hand in hand.⁶ They are two sides of the same coin: the functional derangement of discourse from policy. The political environment included both these levels--the symbol and the system--but not a means for reconciling them. This was a fact which could not be assimilated into democratic theory, Lippmann charged. Here began the next stage of his argument.

Democracy as second nature

In the opening of the book Lippmann had declared that "instead of taking for granted an environment that is readily known," the student of public opinion is interested in "how the larger political environment is conceived, and how it can be conceived more successfully" (17). This was the question democracy had always avoided. The early democrats, including the founders of the American republic, had assumed that the knowledge needed to govern the world was inborn: "Men took in their facts as they took in the breath" (164). For this assumption to be at all workable, the scope of the world had to be restricted to the dimensions of village life, a conclusion which Jefferson--never a vulgar democrat--had logically drawn. The ideal community in Jefferson's vision, (and in American democratic theory as a whole) is a self-contained agrarian environment, in which the problem of knowledge never arises because the world is so restricted in scale.

It was not that the Founding Fathers were ignorant of facts at odds with this vision. They saw the mobs of the cities, they knew the limitations of the average man's mind, they admitted--some publicly, most privately--the strength of the aristocrat's argument that only an elite were fit to govern.⁷ And there were critics at the time who pointed these things out. But they "were about as welcome as a small boy with a drum," Lippmann wrote. The democrats saw themselves engaged in a "bitter and uncertain struggle" for human dignity, and had found in the democratic ideal a faith "so much deeper, more intimate and more important" than any practical theory of government (162-3). Unable to reconcile this faith with their knowledge of the world, they searched for a world which would justify their faith, and found it in the self-contained village of the eighteenth century. There was "an element of solid sense" in their reasoning, Lippmann wrote.

Jefferson was right in thinking that a group of independent farmers comes nearer to fulfilling the requirements of spontaneous democracy than any other human society. But if you are to preserve the ideal, you must fence off these ideal communities from the abominations of the world. If the farmers are to manage their own affairs, they must confine their affairs to those they are accustomed to managing. Jefferson drew all these logical conclusions. He disapproved of manufacture, of foreign commerce, and a navy, of intangible forms of property, and in theory of any form of government that was not centered in the small self-governing group. (170)

A vision of a self-contained, naturally knowable and easily managed environment gave rise to a compatible idea of citizenship. Men were assumed to naturally possess the knowledge and practical skills necessary to govern themselves. Citizens were thought to be jacks of all trades who were equally adept at tending their own lives and conducting public business for the good of all. Equally adept also meant equally interested: the average citizen was assumed to be public-spirited by nature, motivated to take an interest in "everybody's business" since he knew everybody in town (173). Democracy therefore required no particular training or controlled temperment; as a way of life it was neither learned nor earned but granted to man as second nature. This may have been a serviceable set of assumptions in the eighteenth century, Lippmann allowed, but when it was extended into a modern environment it made no sense at all. Summarizing this portion of Lippmann's argument, D. Steven Blum writes,

the notion that citizenship could be mastered effortlessly by all was tenable only, Lippmann asserted, if the boundaries of the self-contained society were enforced ruthlessly, only if the affairs of the community did in truth remain simple and predominately detached from those of the larger world. And it was this pristine state of affairs that was being made obsolete by the complex interdependence of the twentieth century; democracy could no longer be expected to dwell contentedly within its own borders. (68)

The boundaries that had been placed around the community's affairs were clearly dissolved by modern conditions. But the image of citizenship those boundaries helped to create--that of the generally competent, naturally skilled, public spirited man--could not be abandoned, for there was nothing in the ideas of the democrats to take its place. Democractic theory was not, in any sense, learning theory.⁸ And so an ideal of citizenship practical only for a self-contained village was extended to take in the entire world, since in the Great Society the entire world was the domain of public affairs. The reasoning was simple: Everything was now connected to everything else. Through modern communication every place was now in touch with every place else. Therefore, everyone could now know what was happening to everyone else. The doctrine of "omnicompetence" was born, in which the average citizen was expected to have a working knowledge of all events and an informed opinion on every public question of consequence, even when events unfolded in an unseen and unfamiliar environment.

The unpopularity of a popular press

That we must all be informed about everything was an entirely unworkable ideal, Lippmann concluded; there was nobody, not even an expert, who approximated it. And yet the absorption of the small town into the Great Society had not yielded any other theory of citizenship. Omnicompetence had triumphed by default, a victory Lippmann refused to accept.

There is no prospect in any time which we can conceive, that the whole invisible environment will be so clear to men that they will spontaneously arrive at sound opinions on the whole business of government. And even if there were such a prospect, it is extremely doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered...

At this point an obvious question presented itself: what about the press? Is the press not a means for bringing "the whole business of government" within the range of the common citizen? Does it not offer at least the hope of a reasonably complete picture of the world available to anyone who can read? This was the question Lippmann took up next. But rather than beginning with the promise of the press, which had hypnotized democrats for centuries, he opened his analysis with a more general observation: "The idea that men have to go forth and study the world in order to govern it, has played a very minor part in political thought" (201). To Lippmann this was a startling and deeply revealing fact: we take knowledge of the world for granted. The only barrier to an informed citizenry that is usually acknowledged is censorship, where it is assumed that if the truth is allowed to circulate freely, it will triumph in the minds of men.⁹ That is the closest democracy comes to any kind of learning theory. The insistent belief, said Lippmann, is that the "truth is not earned, but inspired, revealed, supplied gratis" as long as information flows freely through the culture. This very limited conception of how people come to know their world extends to thinking about the press, he wrote.

Universally it is admitted that the press is the hief of contact with ur nvironment. And practically everywhere it is assumed that the press should do spontaneously for us what primitive democracy imagined each of us could do for himself, that every day and twice a day it will present us with a true picture of all the outer world in which we are interested.

This expectation, that the press will assemble for everyone a reliable image of the world, relects the simple-minded view that knowledge need not be earned by study and effort. To make this point Lippmann focused on the economy of the newspaper. We do not expect to pay for our news; instead, we ask advertising to cover the costs of producing a newspaper-- a symbol, Lippmann thought, of the meager amount of effort we are willing to expend on public affairs. The average man "expects the fountains of truth to bubble, but he enters into no contract, legal or moral, involving any risk, cost or trouble to himself. He will pay a nominal price when it suits him, will stop paying whenever it suits him, will turn to another paper when that suits him. Somebody has said quite aptly that the newspaper editor has to be re-elected every day" (203). The citizen takes little responsibility for the press in comparision to other public institutions. Schools are funded directly by taxes voted on by the taxpayers. Utilities are supported by user fees. Law and medicine also charge a fee which the client pays directly. But the costs of the press must be hidden away, dissolved into the price of goods, which includes the expense of the advertisements which make the newspaper a solvent enterprise. (204).

This unusual economy has its warping effects. Although the newspaper is expected to provide the general news upon which a democracy depends, it is not allowed to prosper by providing that news. Maintaining a steady hold on the reader is the only way of succeeding in the newspaper business; yet the individual reader judges the newspaper not on its general news coverage--which, dealing with distant events, is difficult to evaluate--but on the items of interest to his own life. It is human interest, not social responsibility which spells success in the newspaper world, and to be interesting frequently means flattering a prejudice, distracting a tired mind, indulging an appettite-- in general, turning the newspaper into a fun-house mirror of the reader's own personality. Arthur Brisbane, Hearst's most trusted editor, once made this point in a particular effective way. "Nobody wants to know what you think," said Brisbane. "People want to know what they think" (qtd. in Hughes 42). The newspaper, expected to be the great mirror of events in the external world, is forced to turn back on itself and begin to reflect the characteristics of its readers. Only then can it afford to publish the news which is about events "out there" in the wider environment where public questions unfold. The mirror analogy may be right after all; but, according to Brisbane's logic, the mirror is held up to the audience, not the world. The economy of the newspaper thus prevents it from being fully "about" events in the external envrionment. In the language of cybernetics, the newspaper must employ the principle of redundancy--repeating what people already know and believe--in order to introduce any information into public affairs.¹⁰

Lippmann's argument was that the low price of the newspaper reflected a lack of effort to learn about the world, which forced the newspaper to devote more and more of its resources to maintaining some sort of hold on the reader.¹¹ This in effect transferred the will to read from the individual reader to the thing read, where it took the form of "human interest" stories and eye-catching design-- anything with immediate or natural appeal. To Lippmann this system amounted to a collective refusal of responsibility, an unwillingness to bear the costs of informing ourselves. We do not want to bear the expense, the time and the mental effort it takes to gain a trustworthy picture of the world; and this refusal is one of the factors preventing the newspaper from assembling such a picture. The newspaper was simply not popular enough to support itself, and so it took on other functions totally irrelevent to its mission in order to achieve solvency.¹² Now, here was a view somewhat at odds with common sense. It stood to reason that the huge audiences gained by the mass circulation dailies were a sign of their popularity. Indeed, on the basis of these figures the newspaper began to proclaim itself a "tribune of the people." But to the extent that cheap prices and sensational treatment were responsible for larger sales, there was a sense in which bigger circulations were an index of the newspaper's unpopularity. Because people do not want news enough to pay full price for it, because they do not want to exert much effort in learning about the world, for these reasons--having to do with the lack of interest in the newspaper--the newspaper puts all its efforts into being interesting. That it often succeeds in the effort does not make the newspaper a popular medium; it simply shows that the technical problem of attracting attention has been solved for the moment. Simple equations between the content of the popular press and "what most people want" are therefore faulty. The formula for the popular newspaper originates in the fact that most people don't want the newspaper enough to pay for it. A truly popular medium--that is, one which the people actively supported--would require neither the subsidy of advertising nor the cheap lure of sensationalism, both of which arise from the absence of interest in the newspaper's primary function: to gather and print news.

News vs. truth

Lippmann's reason for pointing this out was to argue that our "casual relation to the press" reflects a negligible interest in understanding the events about which we are expected to hold opinions (208). Of course, there were other factors as well which prevented the newspaper from fulfilling its sacred functions in a democracy. These had to do with the nature of news. Even assuming an eager citizenry motivated to learn about the world, the newspaper could not do what it was expected to do: provide a secure understanding of events in the "unseen environment" beyond the reader' locale.

Reporting the news, Lippmann argued, is an activity different from discovering the truth. News and truth are not the same thing, not because the news is inaccurate or inobjective but because news reports are a very limited way of understanding the world. Latent in this argument was a distinction between events and the conditions causing them. News "is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself" (216). Until some event occurs which can be reported, the forces at work in the world remain beyond the reach of the news. The more points at which underlying conditions can be fixed, measured, dramatized or somehow given manifest form, the more news there can be. But the quality of news--its ability to reflect an unfolding reality--depends on the character of the events which convert underlying conditions into reportable items. Some events are better than others in reflecting the true state of things. Strikes, for example, tend to be stereotyped struggles between management and labor in which the facts at dispute are often themselves in dispute. Much can escape what Lippmann called "the machinery of record," the means by which the current state of things is translated into reportable form. While the machinery of record works well in converting the state of the stock market into daily prices, or the state of the pennant race into ball scores and standings, it works less well in translating "what is going to happen" into reportable news items today, in converting "states of mind" into a form suitable for the newspapers to report and comment on (217). In short, not everything can be told through the medium of recent events. James Carey re-made this point in a 1974 essay on "Journalism and Criticism." Journalists, he says, "are at a loss for what to do on the days when there isn't any news breaking." Carey continues:

We still do not know how to bring to life the invisible: a slow shift in Black migration patterns out of the South, the relation between grain sales to the Soviet Union and grain elevators failing in small Illinois towns, the significance of the reduction of the birthrate...all these "events" which, because they are not tied to personalities or timeliness, escape daily journalism yet constitute the crucial stories determining our future.

The newspaper offers a disjointed and distorted picture of the world, again, not because the minds of journalists are disjointed or distorted but because the nature of news is to emphasize the episodic, the visible, the dramatic, the stereotypical-- in short, the event rather than the condition causing it. Realizing this bias toward the event, publicity and public relations learned to create events that will get their clients favorable coverage. What these professions had discovered is the element of artifice in the news. Many things that are happening in the world do not take the shape of news "until somebody protests, or somebody investigates, or somebody publicly, in the etymological meaning of the word, makes an issue of them," wrote Lippmann (emphasis in orginal; Public Opinion 217). Unfortunately, journalists do not often think about the shaping of events; they hesitate to admit that the news is made.¹³ They are therefore losing ground to professions who suffer no such illusions.

The development of the publicity man is a clear sign that the facts of modern life do not spontaneously take a shape in which they can be known. They must be given a shape by somebody, and since in the daily routine reporters cannot give a shape to facts, and since there is little disinterested organization of intelligence, the need for some formulation is being met by the interested parties.

Lippmann was a great believer in the disinterested fact.¹⁴ He was convinced that "the truth" about social conditions could be had, if only an adequate machinery of record were set up by public-minded agencies having no particular interest in the outcome of the inquiry. He believed, in other words, in social science as a science. But the news could not be that science, for the press was not large enough, rich enough or organized enough to assemble the machinery of record a modern society required. It was not possible for the press to itself make the world intelligible to its citizens. If journalists had a role in the process it was to prod other institutions, especially government, to improve the machinery of record, so that the press would have better, more reliable facts to report. The press, said Lippmann, "can fight for the extension of reportable truth" (228). But it was ridiculous to expect it to provide the truth about every issue of concern to a democratic nation, for the press

is very much more frail than the democratic theory has as yet admitted. It is too frail to carry the whole burden of popular sovereignty, to supply the truth which democrats hoped was inborn. And when we expect it to supply such a body of truth we employ a misleading standard of judgment. We misunderstand the limited nature of news, the illimitable complexity of society; we overestimate our own endurance, public spirit, and all-round competence. We suppose an appetite for uninteresting truths which is not discovered by any honest analysis of our own tastes. (228)

Lippmann thought we must abandon the hope that the press will make up for the defects in democratic theory, which had never faced the problem of knowledge honestly. In passing from a self-contained village environment to a wider world where events unfold at a distance, democracy failed to ask how the unseen environment could be brought into contact with public opinion. Instead it just shoved the press into the breach between beliefs and realities, expecting it to magically create a responsible citizenry. "The press has often mistakenly pretended that it could do just that," Lippmann added. We thus have unrealistic expectations for public opinion.

The Court of Public Opinion, open day and night, is to lay down the law for everything all the time. It is not workable. And when you consider the nature of news, it is not even thinkable. For the news, as we have seen, is precise in proportion to the precision with which it is recorded. Unless the event is capable of being named, measured, given shape, made specific, it either fails to take on the character of news, or it is subject to the accidents and prejudices of observation.

Lippmann's solution, then, was to prod government and industry into improving the means by which they name, measure and describe social conditions, and to urge that this inquiry be conducted in a disinterested manner by trained experts. The press would then benefit from these improvements in "organized intelligence," and the news might move closer to the truth. But even this improvement would not make the mystical dream of omnicompetence a workable reality. An adustment had to be made in the role ordinary people are asked to play in the settling of public questions. Democracy must give up the "intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs," Lippmann wrote (19). The idea of an improved machinery of record is therefore "not to burden every citizen with expert opinions on all questions, but to push that burden away from him towards the responsible administrator" (250-1). The disinterested expert will sift through the evidence and the opinion which exists on public issues, and advise the legislature and the executive of his findings. The public would be called on to make a decision only when the facts are all in, the problem is preceived clearly and a concrete choice can be presented. Only at that point does the ordinary citizen, whom Lippmann labelled an "outsider," take over from the "insider" whose job it is to know. The outsider cannot know the facts himself; he can only insist that certain procedures be followed in obtaining them (252).

Transcending the professional attitude

So runs the argument in Public Opinion. Three years later, in 1925, Lippmann published its sequel, The Phantom Public, which took up in more depth just what the public can be expected to do. Here the verdict is even harsher. Public opinion is "itself an irrational force," said Lippmann, which can at best be placed at the disposal of those with a workable knowledge of social problems. "With the substance of the problem it can do nothing usually but meddle ignorantly or tyrannically," he wrote.

The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he could know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorances in masses of people will produce a continuous directing force in public affairs.

The only legitimate function of public opinion is to occasionally come to a Yes or No decision, to support the Ins or the Outs, to buy or to boycot, but never to direct the course of government (57). The job of the public is "not to express its opinions," Lippmann argued, but to line up on one side or the other. We must therefore

abandon the notion that democratic government can be the direct expression of the will of the people. We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilizations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern. We must say that the popular will does not direct continuously but that it intervenes occasionally.

The response at the time to Lippmann's analysis can be summarized as follows: enthusiasm and broad agreement over his critique of democratic mythology, (some calling Public Opinion a major advance in political theory) and, at the same time, skepticism and in some cases ridicule toward the solutions offered. Why democracy should trust experts to be any more "disinterested" than ordinary citizens was a question Lippmann had failed to answer. Also, the faith in facts and an improved machinery of record did not seem to be equal to the problem as he had sketched it, leading the Nation to say that, while the observations Lippmann had made about the ordinary citizen were "tragically and obviously true," his suggestions for improving public opinion amounted to "aiming at a conflagration with a squirt gun."¹⁵ Once again his solutions seemed overwhelmed by the depth and clarity of his insights into the defects of democracy.

Still, a genuine advance had been made. As we showed in the previous chapter, in Liberty and the News Lippmann fell back on greater professionalism in the press as the solution to the problem of public opinion in a modern democracy. But he was clearly not satisified with this first treatment of the question, so he had another try at it in Public Opinion. There he went beyond the professional attitude--which focuses attention on the proper conduct of journalists--to the way people form a picture of the world outside their immediate environment. This was a key step, for it focused attention on a whole range of issues professionalism had ignored. To show how this is the case is the remaining task of the present chapter. We shall interpret Lippmann's view of press and public in light of the "professional attitude" in journalism.

The key assumption of a professional press is that information made public will mean a public that is informed. The only possible question, then, is the journalist who furnishes the information. Will he be free? If he is free, will he be fair? If fair, accurate? If accurate, complete? When these things are assured, all else follows. The republic is secure if the integrity of its news columns can be maintained. Do we exaggerate? Just such a conclusion is drawn in Joseph Pulitzer's proposal for a school of journali. Let us quote him at some length and observe the logic unfolding:

The Greeks thought that no republic could be successfully governed if it were too large for all the citizens to come together in one place. The Athenian democracy could all meet in the popular assembly. There public opinion was made, and accordingly as the people listened to a Pericles or to a Cleon the state flourished or declined. The orator that reaches the American democracy is the newspaper. It alone makes it possible to keep the political blood in healthful circulation in the veins of a continental republic. We have--it is unfortunately true--a few newspapers which advocate dangerous fallacies and falsehoods, appealing to ignorance, to partisanship, to passion, to popular prejudice, to poverty, to hatred of the rich, to socialism, sowing the seeds of discontent--eventually sure, if unchecked, to produce lawlessness and bloodshed. Virtue, said Montesquieu, is the principle of a republic, and therefore a republic, which in its purity is the most desirable of all forms of government, is the hardest of all to preserve. For there is nothing more subject to decay than virtue.

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cyncial, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations. This is why I urge my colleagues to aid the important experiment in journalism education which I have ventured to endow. (680)

The line of reasoning runs as follows: The Greeks recognized that the people can rule only if they remain in close contact with one another. Therefore democracy is limited by the factor of distance. But the press wipes out distance as a factor, making possible a republic larger than any the Greeks could imagine. This gives the press tremendous power, which can be used for good or ill depending on the character of the journalist. If the journalist shows virtue the republic will be safe. If the journalist is corrupt the republic will fall. Thus the importance of professional training: on its success rests the future of democracy.

Lippmann interrupted this logic at the point where democracy is extended over distance.¹⁶ As soon as citizens had to deal politically with an "unseen environment," a fundamentally new predicament arose, he contended. The world had to be reduced, summed up, symbolized--in a word, represented--when it could not be experienced directly, and there were a number of difficulties inherent in representation. These became obvious as soon as one looked beyond the conduct of journalists to the way people formed a picture of the world. Here the stereotype was the archtypal case. The trouble with the stereotype was not simply that it reduced and therefore distorted the world, but that it did so according to an existing prejudice or predisposition in the audience, giving to distant events a familiar shape and preventing people from judging each new problem on its own terms.

In Lippmann's treatment, the stereotype is the human organism's way of taming the unfamiliar, much as the neurotic symptom is a way of hanging on to past behavior in the Freudian discourse. Indeed, it was nothing less than a psychology of perception which Lippmann wished to add to democratic theory. According to this psychology, it is the reducing and familiarizing power of the stereotype which characterizes politics conducted across distance, not the enlightening power of information distributed through the press. People bridge the gap between a familar world and a distant environment by projecting a familiar image onto the unknown, Lippmann argued. Let us be certain about what this means. The hope of the press has always been to enlarge the reader's world by bringing word of events unfolding in distant places. But that is not how the psychology of perception works, said Lippmann. What people do is shrink the world to make it conform to a known territory. Political behavior proceeds from the inside out, so to speak, rather than the outside in. "For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see," he wrote in Public Opinion (55). It may be the intention of the press to broaden the citizen's picture of the world by providing information from an unseen environment. But what actually happens is that the reader reduces the news to make it fit a simplified image that "works" for him. This must be the case given the hugeness of the outer environment and the limited means the average man has for perceiving it. As Lippmann says of the citizen,

What reaches him of public affairs, a few lines of print, some photographs, anecdotes, and some casual experience of his own, he conceives through his set patterns and recreates with his own emotions. He does not take his personal problems as partial samples of the greater environment. He takes his stories of the greater environment as a mimic enlargement of his private life. (111)

Democratic theory had always ignored this possibility, Lippmann charged. The press, clearly capable of distributing information across great distances, had given rise to a dangerous illusion: that each of us can have a say in every question of public consequence by converting the information in the press into rational opinions. Failing to realize how ludicrous this belief is, we have allowed the problem of knowledge to rest untreated, an achilles heal from which democracy was sure to suffer. Rather than revamp our expectations and create new institutions for recording and studying social forces, we have expected the press to magically cure a deep flaw in democratic theory: its failure to accept any limits on what the average man can know of the world. As a result, the "unseen environment" remained largely unseen. Private feeling substituted for truly "public" opinion. Stray bits of knowledge and the accidents of experience formed the basis of political reasoning, opening the way for the propagandist and publicity man. As D. Steven Blum writes, interpreting Lippmann,

democracy was dangerously vulnerable on account of its desultory habits; if it was willing to accept fragmentary knowledge and secondhand opinion as a substitute for wisdom, and to let the "unseen environment" remain out of view, then it would continue to founder in a quagmire of its own making. For special interests accepted no limitation on their education, on the sophistication with which their aims were pursued. Those whose objective was to wrest the spoils from the commonwealth, to accumulate and agrandize for exclusively private purposes, did not share democracy's timidity in defending its own best interests. Their appetities were voracious and the skill of their manipulative methods was awesome. Every conceivable enticement, as a consequence, would be placed before the populace to sell it something, to enlist its support for one particularist scheme or the next. (82-3)

This was the warning Lippmann had issued: if those who are "public-minded," including the press, do not wake up to the defects in democratic theory, elements who are merely interested in private gain will capitalize on those defects. By exploiting the machinery of modern communications and their knowledge of human psychology, they will widen the gap between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads" (Public Opinion 3).

Mass Communication and the dissolution of the self

As we saw in the previous chapter, the professional attitude in journalism precluded any concern with these issues. Professionalism draws a limit around the problem of the press, inside of which only questions about the conduct of the journalist are deemed relevant. Questions about the tendencies of the audience are classified as "business" rather than "editorial," and the invisible wall separating one department of the newspaper from another becomes, for the press, the line defining a professional journalist. He was the man who would brook no interference in the news by those with unclean hands, the circulation and advertising types. And yet, as communicators, the men attempting to sell more papers or shoes or oatmeal competed in the same symbolic environment, the same "pseudo-world" of representation, as did the journalist. For that matter so did the public relations man and the propagandist. All these professions worked a territory located somewhere between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads," as Lippmann had put it, an environment structured by the modern media of communication but structured in people's thoughts and images.

It is difficult to speak about this environment because it is neither entirely public nor entirely private, neither equivalent to the "outside world" nor contained in the individual mind.¹⁷ Attempting to characterize the territory created by fashion, the critic Kennedy Fraser calls it "an amalgam of mental and material-- a miasmic half world where ideas have functions and prices, while objects are hung about with thoughts and dreams" (151). The same qualities have been evoked by Christopher Lasch in his attempt to describe what consumer advertising does to a sense of self. Lasch refers to "the insubstantiality of the external world" in an age of mass produced images.

Commodity production and consumerism alter perceptions not just of the self but of the world outside the self. They create a world of mirrors, insubstantial images, illusions increasingly indistiishable from reality. The mirror effect makes the subject an object; at the same time, it makes the world of objects an extension or projection of the self. It is misleading to characterize the culture of consumption as a culture dominated by things. The consumer lives in a world that has no objective or independent existence and seems to exist only to gratify or thwart his desires. ("The Minimal Self" 30\)

Professional journalists may have wanted a haven from what they saw as the crude demands of a mass readership. But the advertising and public relations professions, the press agents and circulation managers, wanted no such protection. They willingly took the psychology of perception into account in fashioning their appeals to the audience, giving mass communication the ability to reflect some portion of many selves. Thus, while journalists went off to mirror the world, other communicators were holding a miror up the audience. The point Lasch wanted to make about this process is that it helps dissolve the external environment. Looking out at the world through the mass media is not like looking through a window; it is like looking at a window that dimly reflects the image of the looker. What is seen is a shadowy world--half self, half scene--a confused melange of images that is neither a mirror nor a window but a third type of representation we can call mass communication. The principle was expressed by Arthur Brisbane, the man who made Hearst's editorials readable. "Nobody wants to know what you think," said Brisbane, "People want to know what they think." But how did he present pople with what they think? By pushing an opinion poll about what most people think? No, by giving the predispositions of readers the form of a newspaper editorial, so that the reader's inclinations, once personal and private, could take public form. Giving people "what they think" was not a matter of fashioning an object which represented common opinion but of merging the subject into the representation. This was the art of Brisbane's editorials. By reading one of them you discovered what you thought; you recognized yourself. What Lippmann called the stereotype worked in a a similar way: the popular image or slogan gave public form to a point of convergence among many selves. This process developed from an art to something like a science with the onset of market research in the twentieth century.

Mass communication, then, institutionalizes the original defect Lippmann saw in democracy: the fact that, confronted with the gap between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads" people refashioned the world to make it fit a familiar picture. Democracy did this at the level of theory by projecting a notion of citizenship appropriate only to a village environment onto a complex and interdependent world. Individuals did this in their own behavior by taking the public world as a "mimic enlargment of their private life," as Lippmann put it. In the twentieth century mass communication became the social structure sponsoring this kind of projection with market research as its quasi-scientific basis. The newspaper, of course, was heavily involved with these developments. Not only was it the place where mass advertising originated; but the newspaper's success in exploiting "human interest" for its circulation value was the original act of mass communication, defined here not by the size of the audience but by the "feedback loop" which allows receivers of messages to send messages to the newspaper about what messages to send. In a practical sense the object of such a loop is to sell more papers or products or, in the case of today's media campaign, to get more votes. But the effect of the process is much broader: it is to collapse the boundary between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads" by constantly aiming pictures from our heads at us as if they were the world outside. That, after all, is what "image management" is about: a successful image aims back at the audience what it would like to see in a candidate, or pop star or corporation.¹⁸ The effect is to blur the boundary between subject and object, since the image is partly "about" the audience whose urges have created it. The popular image as purveryed through the mass media is the most paradoxical of objects, for it is always part subject. Perhaps this is why soap opera viewers write letters to actors berating them for things their characters did on the show. It is not the difference between actor and role that is forgotten, but the distinction between the character on television and one's own character, the world on the soap and one's own world.

Objectivity as epistimology

Now, in the face of these facts, which concern the "insubstantiality of the external world," as Lasch phrased it, what is the meaning of "objective journalism?" The world which one is to be objective about is under attack: mass communication is out to dissolve it into the self, which has become a commodity in its own right, that is, something to be mass produced.¹⁹ Similarly, the "public" for a public relations man is an unformed thing, a force to be given shape by his own exertions; and "public opinion" is a product to be manufactured.²⁰ What objectivity became in journalism is a way of bracketing or containing this entire problem. The objective existence of events was taken for granted, as was the public. With these two solid anchors assumed at the outset the only thing in doubt was the journalist's objectivity in negotiating between one pole and the other. As sociologists Molotch and Lester observe, the assumption underlying objectivity in journalism is

that there is indeed a world "out there" and that an account of a given event reflects that world, with some degree of accuracy. The "objective assumption" states not that the media are objective, but that there is a world out there to be objective about.

In saying that mass communication challenged this assumption we are not attempting to escape into solipsism. There is no point in denying that things happen in the world outside people's imaginations. The question is, how do we characterize the world with which journalism must deal? Is it primarily the world of physical forces and objects? Or is is the world of reports and representations, symbols and language? What exactly is the press doing when it fashions its reports of the world? Mark Fishman takes up this question in considering the nature of a "crime wave."

The media were both the means by which anyone in New York "knew" about the crime wave and the means by which the crime wave was assembled. News organizations created the wave, not in the sense that they invented crimes, but in the sense that they gave a determinant form and content to all the incidents they reported. Out of newswork arose a phenomenon transcending the individual happenings which were its constituent parts. A crime wave is a "thing" in public consciousness which organizes people's perception of an aspect of their community. It was this thing that the media created.

Fishman is arguing that journalism is always involved in producing the events it reports. Why? Not because journalists are liars and fabricators, but because an event like a "crime wave" takes place in the world of symbols and perceptions, a world which has no existence independent of the way it is represented. What are called "the issues" have a similar sort of existence. An issue is not a set of physical conditions but the organized perception of a problem that has moved into the political arena. The issues may be about the world, but they are not "in" the world in the sense that an earthquake is. The press often has the job of organizing perceptions into political issues; in effect it "produces" the issues not by dreaming them up but by concentrating attention in one spot rather than another. When the press says, as it did in 1980, that Chappaquiddick is going to be an issue in Edward Kennedy's Presidential campaign, it is not making a statement about the world but declaring its own intentions as an arranger of perception. Epistimologically, "the issues" are a different order of event when compared to something like the weather, the stock market or the previous night's ballgames.

The conventions of objectivity often fail to recognize this fact. In this sense they obscure the problem of representation as discussed by Lippmann. As a medium the objective news story has a bias; it attempts to convert every sort of event into one which "happened" in the world the way a rainstorm or robbery happens. Only then can the news be purged of "opinion" and the integrity of the journalist assured. Now, there is a trick to this epistimological transformation. The trick is to quote official statements about that aspect of events--namely, their meaning--which does not occur in the same sense that a train wreck or a baseball game occurs. Failing that, one can at least attribute different aspects of an event to vague sources whose only identity is that they are not the writer of the story. "Critics say...," a routine phrase in newswriting, is a barely disguised method of introducing an interpretation. But even in this relatively transparent example, the effect is to convert what "critics say" into a reportable fact-- the fact that critics say it. Much of the work of journalism is of this kind. Reporters ask spokesmen and authorities for their views, which are converted into a kind of second-level event--the statement--which can then be accuratly (or inaccurately) reported.²¹ By this method interpretations are magically given the status of facts: the fact that X said this and Y, his opponent, said that. The problem, of course, is that a linguistic statement does not "happen" in the same way that a tornado happens. The main difference is that a linguistic statement can take its perceiver into account--indeed, it must do so--while a tornado is neutral with respect to the perceiver.

This is such a commonplace in journalism that its significance can easily be overlooked. Everyone knows that, in fashioning a statement, a man being quoted by the press is using his knowledge of the press, of the likely audience for the statement and of the culture as a whole in shaping his reply. In this sense the event is partly determined, or caused, by the very system deploying it as news of the world. A certain redundancy enters the relationship between news and events journalists are continually getting back as content the forms they have invented. Thus, a spokeman for the Interior Department will claim that the Reagan Administration is totally dedicated to preserving the environment; while the leader of an environmental group will say that Reagan is totally committed to exploiting the environment for material wealth. These statements mirror the bias of the objective news story as a form, in which opposing views are thought to match and balance each other and thus, in some unexplained way, produce the truth by the symmetry of their opposition. Journalists are continually frustrated by the lack of candor, the exaggeration and predictablity of the statements that are given to them. And yet the objective news story has helped to produce this form of talk by implying that extreme conflict between views--supporters say this, opponents say the opposite--somehow adds up to the truth, or at least the opportunity for perceiving it. It never seems to occur to the press that it is simply getting back the bias of its own objective news format. Instead, bias is thought to be exclusively located in the people with whom the press deals.

The real problem is that the statements of authorities and spokeman who are trained to deal with the press are routinely presented as naturally occuring events which must be reported because they "happened." But they did not just happen; they were produced in part by the routines of journalists, just as terrorism is an offshoot of media coverage. What is really happening is that the professional routines of the press are being exploited by those who have learned how the system works. Control over the news has passed into the hands of the officials and experts, those Fishman calls "authorized knowers," who accomplish the epistimological conversion that is at the root of objectivity. Sociologist Bernard Roscho captured the absurdities of the quotation game in this lament from an editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Here is a lie. I know it is a lie, but I must print it because it is spoken by a prominent public official. The public official's name and position make the lie news. Were the sources some unknown person, I could and would gladly throw it in the wastebasket. I have done what I can to show that I know the statement is untrue by putting it under a small headline and printing only enough of it to make an entry in the record of the day's news. Printing these lies, even in this way, is one of the hardest things I have to do. (qtd. in Roshco 50\)

Let us recount an extraordinary turn of events. The long fight for freedom of the press was gradually concluded with the triumph of the commercial newspaper. There then began the fight of reporters and editors within the newspaper for freedom from the pressures of the market, the very arena within which the press had gained its independence in the first place. This is the movement we have identified with the professional attitude. The crowning achievement of this movement is the routinization of virtue and character through the instrument of the objective news story. But the objective news story it so oddly fitted to the nature of journalism that it ends up enslaving the journalist to the experts and officials who must constantly be quoted in order to convert interpretations into reportable facts.²² This is the way the professional journalist solves a fundamental epistimological problem-- the fact that the realm in which the journalist dwells is primarily one of meanings and perceptions, representations of events, rather than the realm of objects and physical forces. The solution objectivity offers is to convert one realm into the other through the trick of quotation and attribution, thus preserving the professional journalist's character, now equated with accuracy, fairness and balance. But a drastic price is paid: somehow the journalist has invented a system which forces him to print lies, even when he knows they are lies. Freedom of the press has thus vanished from the place where it seemed to be safely ensconced: the professional newsroom. "Here is a lie," said the knowing editor, "but I must print it because it is spoken by a prominent public official."

The trick does not work. Interpretations are not converted into facts but frequently into lies. Even worse, the illusion the trick of objectivity offers is unconvincing. Journalists know they are being used, and their professional pride must certainly suffer for it. Consider, then, the ironies in the tale. If lies must be printed, then the man who prints them has certainly lost what we would ordinarly construe as freedom of the press. But to what has this freedom been lost? Not to a ruthless tyrant or a greedy businessman, but to the very system the journalist has invented. Freedom of the press has vanished from a profession devoted to its principles. So, for that matter, has the element of professionalism. In no sense can the journalist be considered a self-governing professional if his own routines force him to print statements he knows to be false and would rather not print. What a weird turn of events: a free press, professionalized under the rubric of objectivity, holds itself captive to officials and experts, thereby ruining all three goals of freedom, professionalism and objectivity.

Summary

How did this situation come about? The point we have been trying to make in the last two chapters is that the crucial step, from which the press has yet to recover, was the separation of the press as an institution from the newspaper as a means of gaining attention. What Walter Lippman added to this was a theory of origins. The professionl attitude in journalism--which focuses the entire problem of public life on the conduct of the journalist--only recapitulates an original defect in democratic theory: the failure to account for the way in which people, not journalists, form their picture of the world. The press was merely participating in a long tradition of ignornace and avoidance when it sought to isolate itself from the means by which attention was gained. Objectivity emerged as a mechanism by which the press could achieve this isolation and yet be said to be serving the public interest. For the objective journalist does his job by refusing any responsibility for how people come to an understanding of their environment, by, in effect, ignoring the argument sketched in Public Opinion. The objective news story says to the audience "get both sides and decide for yourself," which leaves to the journalist the apparently simple task of presenting both sides. The lesson Lippmann had for the press was that "get both sides and decide for yourself" is not an account of human behavior; it does not describe how people bridge the gap between an unseen environment and a world they know by experience. He proposed a radically different formula for how public opinion is made: "For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see." As if this were not trouble enough for the journalist's professional model, there was the added factor of those other communicators--advertisers, press agents, propagandists--who did not play by the same rules as a scrupulous press. Their motto was not "get both sides and decide for yourself" but "let's get the self on our side." Showing no pretense of objectivity, they set out to dissolve the audience into the act of communication and blur the boundaries between subject and object. And these other communicators helped create the environment within which the press had to operate.

What we are describing here is a functional gap between the objective news story and the realities of political behavior, and, at a deeper level, between the assumptions of a professional press and the logic of twentieth century communications. The press contends that furnishing information will lead to an informed public. But the logic of the mass media is to employ an opposite principle: redundancy, the re-presentation of what people already believe, enjoy and expect. The press takes for granted the world outside, on the one hand, and the audience or public, on the other. But the effect of mass communication is to dissolve the environment into the audience to create a shadowy world of images increasingly indistinguishable from the self. The press assumes the objective existence of events "out there" in the world. But to other communicators, especially those that deal with press, events are to be structured, the world is to be arranged, in order to get favorable news coverage. This is the point made vividly in Daniel Boorstion 1961 book, The Image, which introduces the notion of the "pseudo-event," that is, an event created to be reported. Of course the practice of creating pseudo-events was introduced much earlier, with the rise of the press agent and a self-conscious profession of public relations after World War I. But the point is an important one: while journalists attempt to assemble objective accounts of events "out there" beyond the newsroom, related professions such as public relations and publicity are creating the events journalists are to be objective about. And, of course, they are giving those events a certain shape. The newsroom has been invaded, not by publishers and business managers, but by other communicators who have learned how to exploit the routines of journalists.

Conclusion: McCarthyism as a crisis in public life

Perhaps the most effective deployer of the pseudo-event ever, at least in America, was Senator Joseph McCarthy (Boorstin 21-23). The manipulation of the press by McCarthy shows how deep the gap can be between the assumptions of the professional journalist and the realities of communication in a modern political environment. McCarthy, writes Richard Rovere, "knew the newspapermen and how they worked and what they needed and when their deadlines were and what made a 'lead,' and what made an 'overnight, and what made a 'sidebar'" (162). In addition to this practical knowledge of how a professionalized press operated, McCarthy grasped intuitively that an outpouring of lies was easier to put over than one or two, that as long as he could attract attention to himself every day the gaps and reversals in his charges would cease to make a difference. He knew also that whether or not Smith was a member of the communist party was not as important as the fact that a United States Senator had said Smith was. McCarthyism was in large part an exploitation of the weaknesses in the objective news story: its disjointedness, its spurious conversion of interpretations into facts, its total dependence on the pronouncements of authorities, its inability to recognize a statement made with the prejudices and predilections of the audience in mind. The facts were against McCarthy, but facticity--the bias of the objective news story--was entirely on his side. Rovere concludes that McCarthy's

whole approach made it, one the one hand, practically impossible for the press to deny him publicity-- and, on the other, impossible for it to provide for its readers any comprehensible accounting of the ratio of truth to falsehood in what he was saying.

McCarthyism overwhelmed the technology of the press. Although there was ample criticism of his crusade, and thus some opportunity to "get both sides and decide for yourself," his ability to get and hold attention proved more important. McCarthy's success in manipulating the press did not go unnoticed at the time; and soon after it forced a wave of anxiety over the weaknesses of objectivity. "Interpretation" became the password of a professionalized press awakened to its own helplessness. This reform movement proceeded entirely within the conventions we have identified with professionalism. The problem was confined to the way in which journalists arranged the facts in their news stories. "Interpretation" ended up meaning the right of the journalist to counter a false or misleading statement with other information which suggested a different conclusion (Roscho 52). The reliance on the statements of authorities remained intact, although there was widespread discomfort with it. There was no attempt to examine the nature of the public the press was presumably addressing, or the communication environment as a system that included the press. It was assumed that if the objective news story could be tinkered with, the information necessary to prevent another McCarthy would be furnished to the public. This information, facts countering lies, would offset the attention a demagouge was certain to get, the press believed.²³

Had there been the inclination, McCarthyism might have signified something much deeper to the press: the loss of "contact between beliefs and realities," as Lippmann had once phrased it. It could have signaled a crisis, not just in the routines of objectivity, but in the whole character of public life, in the entire system by which a democracy conducted its public discourse. For McCarthyism proved that "the facts" made small headway against a demagouge armed with the machinery of mass communication. But to give McCarthyism such a meaning might have meant asking, "is there a public?"-- a question the press was organized to avoid. For John Dewey this was the pre-eminent question. Modern conditions threw into doubt the very existence of the public, Dewey believed; and so he endeavored to describe what a modern public would be like, if indeed it did exist. An examination of his views will shed further light on the limitations of the professional attitude in journalism. That is the task we take up in the next chapter.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF FORMING A PUBLIC

John Dewey thought Lippmann surrendered "the case for the press too readily" ("Review of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann" 288\) Why hand over the responsibility for knowing about social problems to bureaucrats in government and industry when the ability of the press to interest people in the issues of the day had yet to be tested? Rather than stressing the limits on the citizen's knowledge--Lippmann's theme--Dewey argued that such limits could not yet be known, for propaganda and other distractions were short-circuiting the process by which a public could be enlightened. "Until secrecy, prejudice, bias, misrepresentation, and propaganda as well as sheer ignorance are replaced by inquiry and publicity, we have no way of telling how apt for judgment of social policies the existing intelligence of the masses may be," wrote Dewey in The Public and its Problems, published in 1927 partly as a response to Lippmann (209).

Instead of exposing the myth of an informed public, Dewey was interested in how such a public might come to be. He recognized as valid almost all of what Lippmann had said in Public Opinion, calling it in a review "perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned" (286). But the defects Lippmann saw in public opinion were not inherent in human nature or in the nature of democracy, Dewey argued. They were partly the result of the way we have thought about the public and the use to which the agencies of public communication had been put. There was a chance, he thought, that the very powers now preventing an informed public from coming into existence could be employed in a different fashion. Mass communication offered the hope of distributing intelligence on a scale equal to the challenges a democratic public faced. But if such a dream were to be realized, it would involve much more than the presentation of information in the newspapers. Like Lippmann, Dewey did not equate information publicly available with an informed public. To him the public was never something one could assume was "out there." The public was a condition democracy had to struggle to achieve. With this view he transcended the assumptions of the professional journalist and offered a new perspective on press and public, which, like Lippmann's, has yet to be assimlated into theory or practice.

Origins of the democratic public

Dewey agreed with Lippmann that World War I was a good starting point for discussing the problem of the public. The scope of the Great War showed that a new scale had entered world relations. Everything was now connected to everything else through technology, finance and the new tools of communication. It was possible to declare a nation neutral, but not to actually remain uninvolved. The effects of the war extended through a complex of causes to every nation and region on earth, regardless of its political affiliation. So there was a sense in which the world had become more united. For Dewey the problem was the basis of this new unity. It was not conscious and rational but hidden and unplanned. Unseen forces created by modern industrialism compelled states to interact, but the war was proof that they had not understood how to recognize and manage this new scale of interdependence.

The connection and ties which transferred energies set in motion in one spot to all parts of the earth were not tangible and visible; they do not stand out as do politically bounded states. But the war is there to show that they are as real, and to prove that they are not organized and regulated. It suggests that existing poltical and legal forms and arrangements are incompetent to deal with the situation. (The Public and its Problems 128\)

What was true at the level of world politics was true for the nation, as well. Technology and the scale of modern capitalism created a more interdependent society in which no part was isolated from any other. But this new level of interdependence had yet to be recognized and assimilated into forms of thought. An outdated individualism was upheld at just the moment when the individual--whether it be a person, a village, a corporation or a nation--could no longer be considered apart from the whole. L The result was a functional gap between the causes of social change and the means available to recognize and control it.

Persons are joined together not because they have voluntarily chosen to be united in these forms, but because vast currents are running which bring men together. Green and red lines, marking out political boundaries, are on the maps and affect legislation and jurisdiction of the courts, but railways, mails, and telegraph wires disregard them.

This was the perspective from which Dewey developed his philosophy of press and public: on the one hand, association as a social fact caused by advances in technology and industry on the other, association as an achievement of conscious, thinking people. The gap between one form of association and the other was the area he sought to explore. "Symbols control sentiment and thought," he wrote, "and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities" (142). How this disjunction between ideas and conditions bore upon the problem of a democratic public was the focus of The Public and its Problems.

Dewey did not equate the public with "the people" or the voters; nor did he assume that the public was created by fiat with the adoption of the Constitution. He was more interested in the social conditions which caused a public to come about. These could be investigated, he thought, by counterposing the terms "public" and "private." A public begins, Dewey said, when private actions begin to affect people other than the actors themselves. (This line of demarcation is expressed banaly in the popular phrase from the 1960s, "Do your own thing as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.") As soon as private actions begin to intrude on "someone else," the territory with which a public is concerned comes into being. This territory--an area of indirect consequences in which private actions bear upon many lives--is the first meaning of the term "public" (15-16). A public actually begins to exist as a political unit when the community becomes aware of these indirect consequences and organizes itself to control them in the common good. The name given to that organization and its officials is the state (67-9). So there are two meanings to the term "public" in Dewey's conception. One is the territory private actions enter when they begin to affect the common interests. The other is the body of citizens who perceive the scope and significance of that territory and have organized themselves to control what happens within it. Without the ability to identify the problems in which it has a legitimate interest, the public remains "inchoate," unconstituted, a fact that has failed to come to light. There could be public institutions and public officials, a whole state apparatus and yet no "public" in Dewey's sense of the term, no body of citizens who understand those problems that are truly public.

Too much public

The argument in The Public and its Problems is that the scale of modern society greatly increases the territory in which the public has a legitimate and necessary interest. It does so because it involves every local unit and every individual in a web of interrelationships, where the outcome of action in one sphere inevitably affects action in another. The railroad, the telegraph, the steam engine and the new scale of corporate capitalism had put a decisive end to the self-contained community. Much of what happened in the modern citizen's daily life was now an indirect result of this new complexity, Dewey observed. But the causes of social change are so remote in origin that they are "felt rather than perceived; they are suffered, but they cannot be said to be known" (131). In essence, there was "too much public," meaning a realm of public problems to large and dense to understand, and at the same time, "too many publics," groups whose attention was fixed narrowly on matters of local or private interest (137). The challenge, then, was one

of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests.

The agencies of mass communication offered the best hope that this problem could be solved in democracy's favor. Dewey shared with Charles Cooley and other progressive thinkers the faith that modern means of communication could extend the territory over which humans could exert conscious, rational and democratic control. The fact that it was possible to communicate on the grandest possible scale meant, to them, that ideas could now be distributed on the grandest possible scale, making it feasible for everyone to participate in the rational direction of society.² The speed and scale of modern technology meant that the public had to know more, and that knowing it would be more difficult. But the same technology also provided the means to know, and these means reached everyone in the society. This was the promise of modern communication. But the promise had remained only a theoretic possibility, Dewey conceded. Technology had been "deflected" to private ends (Individualism Old and New 65). Propaganda and publicity were creating only the most superficial sort of agreement. Public sentiment careened from crisis to crisis, incident to incident. "We think and feel alike--but only for a month or a season" (86-7). It was misleading to call opinions based on ignornace or prejudice "public opinions" simply because they came from ordinary people, Dewey said. For in truth the public had not yet been brought into existence.

Unless there are methods for detecting the energies at work and tracing them through an intricate network of interactions to their consequences, what passes for public opinion will be "opinion" only in its derogatory sense rather than truly public, no matter how widespread the opinion is... Opinion casually formed and formed under the direction of those who have something at stake in having a lie believed can be public opinion only in name. Calling it by this name, acceptance of the name as a kind of warrant, magnifies its capacity to lead action astray. (The Public and its Problems 177-8)

There was no public, Dewey thought, because there was no method for bringing about a general understanding of social causes that would allow people to trace problems back to their sources. Dewey agreed with Lippmann that news was not providing this understanding. The physical means for collecting and distributing information had "far outrun the intellectual phase" of the journalism problem, Dewey wrote (179). This other phase involved the fashioning of news into a coherent picture of a complex society at work. Without such coherence, news could never inform people. "Only continuous inquiry, continuous in the sense of being connected as well as persistent, can provide the material of enduring opinion about public matters," he argued (178). The failure of the news to provide a structure for understanding recent events is one explanation for sensationalism. Sensationalism is what "the new" degenerates into when there is no way of placing recent events in context and perceiving causes (180).

Science and the democratic citizen

Like Lippmann, Dewey thought that social science would have to pick up where the news was faltering-- specifically, at the point where journalism failed to place events in relation to one another. But where Lippmann would assign this task to expert bureaus of research, Dewey insisted that the results of social inquiry had to be more fully communicated to citizens. Both believed in social science as a treatment for the problems confronting democracy. But Lippmann emphasized the science and Dewey the social. Science to Dewey offered the ideal method by which a society could operate democratically. The problem at present, he wrote, is that "we use scientific method in directing physical but not human energies." The scientific community, based on public review of results and general agreement on what is known to be true, could be a model for the wider human community. "Suppose," said Dewey, "that what now happens in limited circles were extended and generalized?" (Individualism Old and New 154-5) As David W. Marcell observes, Dewey was confident that "the method of experimental science and the processes of democracy were congenial, even parallel." Therefore democracy's best hope was science. "Science had to be democratized and democracy made more scientific before true progress could be assured. Thus the real scientific revolution was yet to come," Marcell writes (244).

Part of that revolution involved the press, which was obviously the best hope for democratizing scientific inquiry. Dewey went so far as to say that a "genuine social science" would present itself as an advanced form of journalism (The Public and its Problems 180). In 1892 he had even joined in an effort to start a newspaper devoted to that principle. The journal was to be called "Thought News," and the idea was to create a form of journalism which overcame the superficiality and disjointedness which seemed to be inherent in the news. "Thought News" would use the insights of philosophy and sociology to reveal structure and function and pattern, not as abstract concepts but as forces at work in current events. And it would aim for an audience, not of academics but of ordinary citizens. Take the organicist model of society which Dewey, Cooley and others inherited from Herbert Spencer. As Dewey wrote in explaining the "Thought News" project,

When it can be seen, for example, that Walt Whitman's poetry, the development of short stories at present, the centralizing tendency in the railroads and the introduction of business methods into charity organizations are all parts of the organic social movement, then the philosophical ideas about organism begin to look like something definite.

Dewey was excited by the project because it seemed like a way to make real his conviction that thought should never be cut off from action, that idealism must find its expression in the world of practical problems. To show "the idea in motion," to sort out "typical facts" from mere happenings, to get at the laws underlying actual events-- these were to be the aims of "Thought News." But the paper never appeared. Dewey, at the time a professor at Michigan, drew a good deal of criticism from the local press and backed out of the project. Later he recalled that the idea was a sound one, but that he and his colleagues had not the means nor the maturity to carry it out.³

The "Thought News" project is an interesting example of Dewey's faith, not only in the ability of science to explain the social world but also in the potential interest ordinary people might take in the process of scientific inquiry. To him it was not a matter of popularizing science, but of creating a scientific spirit in the population. He never doubted that the ordinary person was capable of the scientific attitude. No arguments about the "limits of attention" or the ignornace of the masses impressed him. There was no natural or inevitable limit on what most people could know of the world; the only limit that did exist, the inability to reach everyone quickly and cheaply, had been overcome by modern communication. So why not a nation of educated citizens discoursing in the spirit of science? As Henry J. Perkinson observed in discussing Dewey's program for the schools,

The progressives' educational program, Dewey's version of it, envisions a society wherein all citizens are nothing less than scientists, working together and jointly solving their common problems.

This was the real promise of democracy: not the right to vote or to compete in the marketplace, but the right to make sense of the world using the best methods available for knowing about it-- the tools of science. And the press was the logical defender of that right. With this vision Dewey placed himself with those mid-nineteenth century dreamers who thought that the newspaper would usher in a new world harmony by making possible a "universal town meeting." But unlike the earlier utopians of the newspaper he did not believe that information alone would be enough to create an informed citizenry. To place events in relation to one another, to penetrate surfaces and see structures at work, to trace occurences back toward their causes-- these were as necessary as information.

Pleasure and the art of arresting attention

But where would the demand from such in-depth reporting come from? From the same people who demand murder stories and ball scores and advice to lovers. Thirty years after the "Thought News" experiment, Dewey argued in his review of Public Opinion that "a competent treatment of the news of the day," one based on scientific research and organized intelligence, could be "more sensational" than the sensationalist press.

To see underlying forces moving through events seemingly casual and disjointed will give a thrill which no report confined to the superficial and detached incident can give. (288)

News offering the thrill of real discovery might conceivably attract the artistic talent needed to make the scientific report interesting. Dewey agreed with Lippmann that news and truth had parted ways, one concerned soley with events, the other with the conditions causing them. The solution, however, was not to hand over the pursuit of truth to experts, as Lippmann seemed to say, but to move news closer to truth by simultaneously improving its intellectual content and its aesthetic form. A "union of social science, access to facts, and the art of literary presentation" was "the only genuine solution to the problem of an intelligent direction of social life," Dewey wrote (288). The problem of improving the press and informing the public must be attacked from two angles: science and art. Only the two in tandem could redeem the promise of modern communication. In The Public and its Problems Dewey set out his vision of how "an organized, articulate Public" might come into being:

The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possesssion of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication. (184)

Dewey was under no illusions about why people read newspapers, if indeed they do. They read because an item interests them, because there are pleasures and thrills to be found in the news. Lippmann was inclined to see the role of pleasure and desire as inherently limiting. The desire to be entertained meant that the average citizen could know very little about the world, since he obviously had no "appetite for uninteresting truths" (Public Opinion 228). Lippmann's view went along with a long-standing belief that the higher arts and a higher understanding of the world were difficult--perhaps even boring--in any event not immediately pleasurable. As Michael Schudson observes, the division between news as "human interest" and as "information" has often take on a moral tone. "People control themselves to read of politics in fine print," he writes. "They let themselves go to read of murders or to look at drawings of celebrities. Information is a genre of self-denial, the story one of self-indulgence" (Discovering the News 119). Dewey would not accept this opposition. Thinking and inquiry are pleasures themselves, he argued. Why not make them available to everyone? (Individualism Old and New 161). This was the point at which art must enter journalism, he argued. Art must be freed from purely commercial motives, on the one hand, and purely academic audiences, on the other, to become the means by which a democracy took an interest in itself. The question was not how to get people to "control themselves" so that they could read the inherently uninteresting but important news. It was to discover the forms of presentation which would make the important news interesting and turn the work of citizenship into a kind of play.⁴ Creating an informed public, Dewey wrote,

is an artistic as well as an intellectual problem, for it supposes not only a scientific organization for discovering, recording and interpreting all conduct having a public bearing, but also methods which make presentation of the results of inquiry arresting and weighty. I do not suppose that most persons buy sugar because of belief in its nutritive value; they buy from habit and to please the palate. And so it must be with the buying of the facts which would prepare various publics in particular and the wider public in general to see private activities in their public bearings and to deal with them on the basis of the public interest. ("Practical Democracy" 54\)

The communicators most concerned about "the art of presentation" were the advertisers and propagandists, the experts in appealing to emotions and impulses. They were doing for private interests what journalism ought to be doing for the public domain. "Any separation between the two sides of the problem is artifical," Dewey wrote (The Public and its Problems 181). Propaganda and journalism were both concerned with interesting large numbers of people in their message. Whereas one "deflected" its discoveries to the pusuit of private gain, the other ought to be making the same discoveries and putting them to public ends. The job of the press, in Dewey's conception, is to interest the public in the public interest. For again, there is no public until there is a body of citizens made aware of those problems that affect the common good. There were many other communicators attempting to interest the public for other than public reasons. The press was therefore engaged in a battle which could not be won by simply improving the accuracy, depth or breadth of the news. The entire communication environment was journalism's domain. The press had to keep one eye on worldly events and the other on the world of symbols and representations, the aesthetic dimension of the mass media, in which there were discoveries and events, trends and reversals.⁵

"All the News That's Fit to Print" could not serve as a motto for the press in Dewey conception. For it was not the printing of news, but its being read and understood and worked into political behavior that counted. Journalists are communicators, not transmitters. Their job is not to send messages, even very good and complete ones, but, working against their adversaries in the private domain, to create competence among the great mass of citizens and thereby allow a public to exist. "Dissemination is something other than scattering at large," Dewey wrote. "Seeds are sown, not by virtue of being thrown out at random, but by being so distributed as to take root and have a chance of growth" (177). Advertisers did not consider it their job to simply print ads; they were out to affect behavior. Propagandists were not content to simply present their appeals; they wanted to change minds or move people to action. Any success these other communicators had was a small defeat for journalism, for it meant that common symbols, each a clue to the national life of feeling, were being deflected to private ends (168-9). Therefore it was not enough to print news. The goal of journalism was to communicate in a public way about public problems, and to succeed against those using the public channels for more limited goals. Success could be measured not by reference to the content of the newspaper or the power of the journalism profession, but by the degree to which a public actually emerged. And a public could only emerg by demonstrating an understanding of common problems and organizing itself to control them.

Politics without polity

So goes our summary of Dewey's vision of press and public. Let us now interpret his ideas in light of the professional attitude in journalism. It is possible to call Dewey a utopian on the subject of the press. After all, the notion that sociology could be made "thrilling" to mass audiences might strike even the most faithful democratic as a little bizzare. But from a different angle Dewey can be seen as the hard headed realist, especially when it came to the question of "informing the public." He would have thought it utopian for the press, or anyone else, to assume that the public was "out there." It was misleading to speak of the "public" and "public opinion" as if these things existed, he argued.

For public opinion is judgment which is formed and entertained by those who constitute the public and is about public affairs. Each of these two phases imposes for its realization conditions hard to meet. (emphasis added; 177\)

It stands to reason that "conditions hard to meet" in Dewey's time are certainly more difficult today. Not only is there "more public" than ever, meaning more problems and issues bearing on the common good, but there is now a new range of powerful distractions available to mass audiences through television. TV worsens every defect Lippmann and Dewey saw in public opinion, making it less likely than ever that a public worthy of its name could be brought into existence. Market research and image consulting have given new power to the stereotype, which can now be distributed with something akin to scientific precision. The principle behind the USA Today--to create a newspaper totally tuned to reader demand--signals a retreat from the challenge Dewey issued. While the paper has made brilliant discoveries in what Dewey called "the art of presentation" it has not put them in the service of a more subtle understanding of social reality, but instead reduced reality to the common level of understanding. That is why sports, weather, entertainment and trivia comprise most of "the world" for the USA Today. In consciously trying to compete with television, the Gannett Company has ended up expanding TV's influence. There is now a form of print journalism which, as the paper's ads say, is "quick instead of slow, interesting instead of dull, visual instead of verbal."⁶ Dewey's hope was that that a public-minded press could begin to compete with the art of arresting attention as it was being practiced by other communicators. The press would then lend the power of this art to the science of social inquiry thereby creating a new form of journalism. If, as the USA Today experiment suggests, it is not possible to compete with television at the level of form and surpass it at the level of content, then Dewey's dream of interesting the public in the public interest may have been overwhelmed by the logic of mass communication. Interesting the public is one sort of problem, finding and advancing the public interest another; "and never the 'twain shall meet."

A possibility Dewey never considered is that, over time, the means for gaining the audience's attention change the audience, so that certain avenues of communication and forms of learning are no longer available to democracy. If television has altered the way we attend to the world, then it is entirely feasible that there are social problems which demand levels of attention no citizen can muster. It would be reasonable to argue, for example, that "deficit spending" is an impossible problem to solve democratically because it exists in a time dimension--namely, the future--whose relationship to the present cannot be communicated effectively. Now, there could be no better example of a "public" problem, in Dewey's sense of the term, than large government deficits. And yet it may be that deficits are structured in such a way that there can never be a public for that particular problem that is, no body of citizens that understands what makes the problem a public concern. It could further be argued that provoking large deficits has become a new political stratgey, a kind of second level or meta-political act, the effect of which is to remove from political discourse an issue which is clearly political. In other words, creating large deficits is a way of acting politically without being held responsible: politics removed from the polity. Traditionally governments have used secrecy and censorship when they did not want to be held accountable for their actions, Basically, they have lied or covered-up. But the example of deficit spending suggests that these methods are outdated. It is now possible to act without public scrutiny simply by creating problems so large and complex and removed from the present that no public can emerge around them. One can take "covert action" out in the open as long as one is certain that the meaning of the act cannot be communicated effectively.

The possibility of such a strategy gives new significance to the idea of a "democratic" government or politician. A truly democratic politics would have as part of its agenda the effort to restrict the scope of political problems so they do not overwhelm in breadth and depth the means for gaining public attention. One could mount an argument against Ronald Reagan's so-called "Star Wars" program on this basis alone: whatever its merits, the technology is so complex it overwhelms public discourse and is therefore a threat to the principle of democratic control. Of course, it is hard to imagine any politician making such an argument, for the fiction of an informed (and informable) public is deeply rooted in political discourse. The effort to "give democracy a chance" by restricting the scope of problems would no doubt be seen as anti-democratic, as an arrogant and arbitrary effort to decide which problems "the people" can and cannot grasp. Given these difficulties, it is likely that more and more public problems will unfold beyond the reach of public understanding, especially when one considers that the limits of that understanding are shaped by communications media.

This possibility, which for Dewey means the end of the public, does not seem to concern the press. Journalists refer to "the public," "public opinion" and "the public's right to know" all the time, quite causally, as if there were no question about the relevance of these terms. Clearly, then, the meaning the press assigns to the public is not the same as that which Dewey sought. For if the press shared his understanding of what a public is it would have to conclude that none exists, or that the one that does exist is a fragile, evanescent thing whose standing is always in doubt. Were Dewey's conception to prevail the questions would always be: how much to most people understand about that territory of problems where the common interests are at stake? Do they attend to public problems? If they do, can they trace events to their causes? Can they relate one event to another? Do they show any mastery of the principles of change?

Polling and the informed citizen problem

The press today is remarkably uninterested in these questions, perhaps because it suspects the answers to be so dismal. Occasional articles will appear on how many Americans do not know this fact or that, but there is no systematic coverage of what people know and understand. This lack of interest is all the more significant since the same technologies routinely used to ask people what they believe--the statistical sample and questionairre--could be employed to discover what people know. In fact, it can be argued that the "science" of polling is more suited to gauging knowledge than opinion, since opinions formed on the basis of sketchy or absent knowledge are so volatile and unreliable. They may "represent" only that day's semi-conscious urges. Neverthess, it is public opinion that consistently interests the press, while public knowledge, interest and motivation to learn remain unexamined, except for an occasional expose'.

Since the perfection of sampling technique after World War II it has frequently been shown that citizens have neither the knowledge about nor the interest in political questions that democracy traditionally assumes. In other words, survey evidence has confirmed what Lippmann observed in Public Opinion and the Phantom Public. In 1948 Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee ended their study of opinion formation in the Dewey-Truman election with the following observation, based on polling and interviews with 1,000 residents of Elmira, New York.

The democratic citizen is expected to be well informed about political affairs. He is supposed to know what the issues are, what their history is, what the relevant facts are, what alternatives are proposed, what the party stands for, what the likely consequences are. By such standards the voter falls short. Even when he has the motivation, he finds it difficult to make decisions on the basis of full information when the subject is relatively simple and proximate; how can he do so when it is complex and remote? The citizen is not highly informed on details of the campaign, nor does he avoid a certain misperception of the political situation when it is to his psychological advantage to do so. (308)

Thomas Patterson's 1980 study of voting, though more sophisticated, repeats most of these observations and adds that television news makes the assumption of an informed citizenry even more untenable (153-169). "Casual daily news exposure does not produce informed citizens," Patterson writes. "It results only in a partial awareness of those subjects that repeatedly appear at the top of the news" (174). In an article on "the informed citizen problem in voting research," political scientists Michael Grant and Dwight Davis first quote from Berelson et al. on what the citizen is expected to know, then state that the bulk of the evidence "indicates that the average U.S. citizen cannot come close to meeting such information standards" (133).

The empirical evidence of an uninformed and inactive citizenry threatens to make statistical surveys of public opinion meaningless and plunge the whole enterprise of polling into doubt. A number of strategies have therefore arisen to prevent the skepticism from spreading beyond the research community. One such strategy is to rely on the fact that most people will give an opinion even when they do not know or care about an issue. Thus a kind of "public opinion" can be produced simply by the willingness of citizens to give pollsters answers to most of their questions. A second and slightly more sophisticated strategy is to attempt to give the respondent the knowledge necessary to have a meaningful opinion. For instance, a pollster may explain what the different tax cut proposals are and what the net effect of each is, then ask which one the respondent favors (Adler 145). The problem of the uninformed citizen is thus "solved" by the intervention of the pollster himself. A third approach is to eliminate from the reporting of "public opinion" those who do not know or care about an issue. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll, for example, examined public support for Reagan's "Star Wars" defense program. At the bottom of a chart summarizing the results was this note: "Those who had no answer or said they did not know are not shown." There was no indication of how many people chose not to answer or claimed not to know, yet the Times felt justified in equating the answers of those who did respond with the views of "the American public" (A10). The same sort of trick is practiced routinely in pre-election polling, where only those people who intend to vote are counted as "the public." By this method apathy as a political reality is defined out of existence. In a study of polling as a manipulative tool Michael Wheeler observes that newspaper polls

rarely reveal whether people who know nothing about the issue were filtered out of the sample. It makes little sense to ask people how they feel about the president's policy on deregulation of natural gas prices if they have not previously considered the matter; a surprisingly high percentage of the population does not think about such questions. (280-81)

A fourth method pollsters use to get around the problem of the uninformed or inert citizen is to identify something called the "attentive public" and distinguish it from the "inattentive public." The opinions of each can then be surveyed and speculation about their relationship can ensue (Adler; Key 544). The genius of this approach is that it takes a problem which undercuts the whole science of polling--that most people do not know enough or care enough to make their opinions meaningful--and transforms it into a methodological issue: how to identify the attentive public, for example. Dewey would consider an "inattentive" public an outrageous contradiction in terms. To the extent that it is inattentive a public simply fails to exist. But for the political scientists and pollsters who practice what C. Wright Mills called "abstracted empiricism," an inattentive public is just another category to be created so that the polling can go on. Creating new categories, reclassifying things, developing new measures-- these are the ways the science of public opinion adjusts itself to the conditions which so concerned Dewey and Lippmann.

Volatility as a technical question

The polling firm of Yankelovich, Skelley and White offers a good example of such an adjustment with a technique called the "Mushiness Index." "Mushiness," according to the firm, arises from the fact that people are often polled about issues they have not discussed or thought about in any depth. Answers are given, but since they are grounded so thinly they are extremely volatile. This becomes a problem for anyone who wants to rely on the polls. Now, for Dewey the volatility of popular opinion is a problem involving the insubstantiality of our common life. Since a public has not emerged around a shared understanding of the problems affecting common interests, a superficial level of agreement is obtained by other, more mechanical means-- entertainment, marketing, publicity (The Public and its Problems 83-4), Volatility, then, reflects the failure of "the public" as a set of shared concerns to sink deeply into the selves and give a secure basis to opinion. At a deeper level it indicates the failure of communication to create a compelling sense of community across the new dimensions of the Great Society. Yankelovich, Skelley and White are not interested in any interpretation of this sort. They state openly in their report that in developing the "Mushiness Index" their "aim was a refinement or a 'wrinkle' to be added to the current tool kit, rather than a major upheaval" (7). This new "wrinkle" involves adjustments in polling technique designed to measure the solidity of an opinion. The "mushiness" factor is reduced to a mathematical variable which can be thoroughly intergrated into current practice. The volatilty problem is thus taken care of without disturbing the way pollsters go about their business.

To summarize: for Dewey volatility is part of a larger social problem, a defect in our civilization which prevents a democratic public from emerging and trivializes our common life. For Yankelovich, Skelley and White, volatility is a technical problem preventing the instrument of polling from enjoying wider use. In the fifty or so years between The Public and its Problems and the "Mushiness Index" the discourse on public opinion has shifted dramatically. The question of whether or in what form the public exists has disappeared, not because it was in any sense answered but because the technical means for ignoring it presented themselves.⁷

Behind manuevers like the "Mushiness Index" is an effort to preserve the fiction of a concerned and competent public holding a vast array of opinions on the issues of the day. This effort proceeds despite the knowledge that such a public does not exist. Pollsters know that most people do not know much, care much or learn much about public affairs. But this knowledge threatens to put the pollster out of business, or, worse perhaps, reveal the fact that, in the absence of a solid basis for opinion, polling is not a means for studying public opinion but for creating and manipulating a fiction about it, a de-politicizing force posing as a neutral tool of politics. As Lippmann observed,

If the voter cannot grasp the details of the problems of the day because he has not the time, the interest or the knowledge, he will not have a better public opinion because he is asked to express his opinion more often. He will simply be more bewildered, more bored and more ready to follow along. (Phantom Public 36-7)

Most pollsters do double duty. They work as social scientists "reporting" on the public mood and, at the same time, as hired guns helping politicians and businesses fine-tune their appeals. Part of their job is to get the bored and bewildered citizen to "follow along," just as Lippmann said he must do. This presents a difficulty for the polling profession: how to rationalize as "democratic" a technique which capitalizes on the defects of democracy? A naive, pre-Lippmann conception of the democractic citizen is the best solution. A competent, critical and informed public must be assumed to exist, despite all evidence to the contrary. Not only is such a public armed with opinions that must be surveyed, thus giving the pollsters a vital role in the political system, it is also capable of defending itself against deceptive advertising and the phony appeals of pandering politicians. An informed public thus renders the pollster as hired gun harmless, since it is capable of putting the "buyer beware" defense into action in the marketplace of ideas. To make the same point another way: it is not in the interests of professional pollsters to act on their knowledge of widespread ignorance and indifference. Pollsters have more to gain by pretending that such problems do not exist, first, because the illusion of an informed and competent public gives their surveys of public opinion more meaning, and second, because it makes their work for candidates and corporations more defensible.

The public today: a rhetorical strategy

What polling has become, then, is a way of restoring the solidity of the concept of public opinion after a period of intense scrutiny in the 1920s. It was not only Lippmann and Dewey who were finding fault with inherited assumptions about a democratic public. Sir Roger Angell voiced nearly identical sentiments from England in a pair of books, The Public Mind and The Press and the Organization of Society. In 1924 a Round Table of the National Conference on the Science of Politics found itself unable to agree on any meaning to the words "public opinion" and concluded that it was best to avoid using the term (C. Clark, "The Concept of the Public" 311). To say that this advice was ignored would be polite. The literature on public opinion is immense, the polling of the population now a huge industry both inside the academy and out. Much of this literature simply ignores the tradition in which Lippmann and Dewey wrote. The study of public opinion goes on as if doubts about its meaning were never raised. Polling offered a way of escaping these doubts, for it was now possible to furnish evidence for the very assumptions that had been called into question. Is it impossible for the citizen to grasp the broad array of issues that affect his life? Look, here are his views on everything from economic policy to foreign affairs. Have problems grown so complex no one can understand them? Here is the New York Times reporting that 56 percent of the public believe the "Star Wars" system will work. Has government gotten so big and bureaucratic that the citizen no longer has a say in running it? Here is a way for officials to keep in constant touch with public desires: polls can make "government by the people" a daily reality. Is the average person immersed in private affairs? Here is the evidence that he thinks about public questions, too.⁹

This is where social science and journalism achieved their union-- not in the "Thought News" Dewey had hoped for, but in the reconstruction of the "omnicompetent citizen" myth Lippmann had exposed. Social science and journalism come together in the publicity the press gives to public opinion polls, a partnership which helps to suggest that there still is a public "out there" discoursing with a general competence on the issues of the day. In a dramatic moment during his review of Public Opinion, John Dewey, a man whose faith in democracy was remarkably tenacious, paid Walter Lippmann the following compliment. The book, said Dewey,

shivers most of our illusions, and this particular Humpty Dumpty can never be put together again for anyone who reads these chapters with an open mind. (287)

In a way Dewey was right; but in a way he was wrong. The illusions he thought irretrievable returned not for their intellectual but for their strategic value. Both the press and the pollsters found it convenient to speak of the public as if Lippmann's critique had never been made, despite their knowledge that people do not behave like omnicompetent citizens. What the public has become, then, is a rhetorical strategy employed for different purposes depending on who is doing the speaking. If the speaker is a pollster "the public" will be said to believe this and reject that as if it has settled and meaningful opinions on every question. In other words, the public will be equated with the results of polls. Meanwhile, among pollsters themselves, all evidence that the public is not informed, does not have secure opinions and is not generally interested will be converted into methodological problems which admit only technical solutions.

The press allows the pollsters to speak through the medium of the news, accepting uncritically the equation between poll results and public opinion--even though journalists know the polls are manipulable--and helping the pollsters out by, for example, defining out of existence those who do not know, do not care or do not intend to vote. If the speaker is the press, the public is most frequently invoked in the phrase "the public's right to know." The public is that body of persons whose concerns and thirst for knowledge justify the demands of the press for more access and information. It is never the press that wants and deserves to know; it is the public. That is the main use the press has for the public as a rhetorical tool.

Press and government as figure and ground

To show how this tool is used we can examine one of the few statements ever made which could be said to characterize the "position" of the press. Ten major professional organizations, including the wire services, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Association of Broadcasters and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, declared in a public announcement their belief that the press has a right to accompany U.S. troops into battle and observe military operations first hand. The statement was made in response to restrictions on the press during the October 1983 invasion of Grenada. It concluded with the following observation:

Our society remains healthy and free primarily because our public has an independent source of information about its Government. Preservation of this principle is essential to the proper functioning of our constitutional democracy and to our national well being. Without this open flow of information, our system of self-government would not work. (New York Times, "Text of Journalists' Joint Statement" A10).

This kind of talk issues from official bodies so frequently that its assumptions can barely be heard. Let us see if we can articulate them: first, that American society is a system of "self-government" no different in principle from the smallest and purest democracy; second, that this self-governed society is "healthy and free," nothing being seriously wrong with the body politic; and third, that it enjoys this health primarily because the press furnishes the necessary information, the essential characteristic of which is its independence from government. Here we have a clue to what seperates a professional press from the tradition of Lippmann and Dewey. For Lippmann and Dewey the important question was the result of communication. Did communication in a democracy achieve what is was assumed to achieve? This focus explains why for both thinkers the problem of journalism and the problem of propaganada were the same. When one is interested in what actually gets communicated, then all communicators are equally important. But for the press professional status lay in distinguishing itself from other communicators. This distinction could not be achieved in the actual communication environment where journalism was practiced. The citizen at whom the news was aimed did not exist. He was also the consumer at whom advertisements were aimed, the reader for whom the newspaper was edited, the voter at whom propaganda was directed, the idle dreamer whose illusions and urges had become the content of mass culture. More to the point, as a political actor he was likely to assume any of these identities.

Since it was not possible to distinguish journalism from other forms of communication in terms of effect, that is, since people in their roles as citizens did not rely exclusively on news aimed at the citizen--using instead the full repertoire of images lent by their environment--the press looked for another realm in which to achieve its distinction as the upholder of democracy. The communication environment contained too many ambiguities. Originally that other realm was the internal world of the newspaper. The lines between "business" and "editorial," "news" and "advertising," "facts" and "opinions" helped the press establish its professional reputation. These were the founding distinctions which made professional training possible and which created a code of ethics separating journalists from other members of the newspaper staff.

But soon there developed another realm in which the press could actualize its status as the defender of democracy. That was the world of reporters and officials. By becoming a government "watchdog," a permanent critic of elected officials, the press could define and continually reemphasize its status as a public servant. The role of watchdog offered a way for the press to turn away from the public and yet remain the public's representative, for being a watchdog required no contact with an actual audience, no pandering to mass tastes or to the knowledge level of the average citizen. The solution is ingenius: one dismisses the public entirely, but gives up none of the force in the phrases the "public's right to know," the "public interest," "public accountabilty," "public information" and so on.

It may sound sacreligious to say so but the press is not really interested in informing the public. If it was it would be very interested in what the public actually knows, what it understands, the reasoning it uses to come to its conclusions, the apathy and ignornace it demonstrates and the political effects of all of these things. The press would be more interested in these questions than in the results of polls, since the results of polls are meaningless outside a grasp of what the population knows and understands. And yet the coverage of public opinion in the press shows a total imbalance, opinion always dominating what little inquiry there is into what people know and learn of public questions.¹⁰ To ask people their "opinion" on the quite technical question of whether a strategic defense system launched from space will work--without knowing or caring how much they understand about the system--is to keep alive what Lippmann called the "intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs." It is to ignore what Dewey said about public opinion, that it is the judgment of those who have formed themselves into a public by achieving a competent grasp of public problems. This condition, he wrote, is "hard to meet." It is something a democracy makes or fails to make of itself. To the press, however, the public is not something made; it is something that exists the way the air and water exist.

Let us be certain of the point we are making. It is hard to see how a series of well documented articles on the ignorance and feeble-mindedness of the average citizen would solve the problem of the public in a modern age. It is hard to see how it would change anything at all, given the structure of the problem. Our interest, however, is in why the press, supposedly dedicated to "informing the public," is so uninterested in what the public knows, and yet so willing to lend coverage to what the public believes and feels. What explains this lack of curiosity about the competence of actual citizens and the willingness to further the myth of the omnicompetent citizen? The answer we have suggested is that the press creates its professional identity, gets its sense of self, by turning away from the actual public and inhabiting a world where "the issues" are on everyone's lips and politics is the most real and pressing of problems. It is in this realm that the press acts as a public servant defending the rights of the citizen. How can the press be said to be "serving" the interests of a public in which it has so little genuine interest? By setting itself in opposition to government officials. The press dramatizes its public functions by demanding a level of accountability and candor that politicians are not inclined to accept, thus provoking constant conflict between the press and government out of which the press emerges as the public's defender.

In this conflict the battle cry is the "public's right to know." The absent questions are what the public can, does and wants to know. The press has built an entire self conception on this opposition between journalist and elected official, which it sees as a permanent, inevitable feature of a free society. Because journalists expose the errors and misplays of every Administration, whatever its political stance, because they harass all officials with equal fervor, journalism always appears to be working in "the public interest," rather than for any particular interest. The permanence of the conflict between journalists and officials becomes proof of the profession's sense of public duty. In its own mind, the press is never "on" anyone's side: it is always "against." This "against" is similar to the ground against which any shape becomes intelligible. A very fundamental principle of meaning is therefore involved. As the criminal creates the figure of the cop, the official who tries to lie, cheat and cover-up creates the figure of the journalist. A secretive government withholding vital information is an essential element in the conception the press has of itself. Here is James Deakin, White House correspondent for the St. Lous Post-Dispatch from 1955 to 1980, on the inevitability of the conflict between the press and the government.

The government wishes its point of view to prevail. It believes its policies are the correct courses of action for the nation. The press reports the government's position. Then it insists on reporting other points of view. The government, except on rare, heartening occasions, does not wish to have its mistakes brought to public attention. The press brings the government's mistakes to public attention. The government, composed as it is of human beings, does not like to be criticized. The press criticizes the government. The government and the press then disagree over whether a mistake was actually a mistake. They disagree over whether criticism was justified. They disagree.

"None of these problems can be resolved," says Deakin. "None of the conflicts can be removed. The fundamental differences between the government and the press are beyond the wit of man to reconcile" (qtd in Thompson 8). What is interesting about this view is that it sees as inevitabie not an ideological conflict between a press that is "for the people" and a government that is for "the interests," between liberal reporters and conservative politicians, but a non-political conflict centered around freedom of information. The government wants to restrict information, the press wants to free it from government control. By emphasizing this conflict above all others, the press puts itself in the best possible light. It is always on the side of the public against a government that is always interested in protecting itself. Remember, according to the press, American society "remains healthy and free primarily because the public has an independent source of information about its government."

Conclusion: the limits of sowing seeds

If information free of government control is the essential ingredient in an informed public, then freeing information from government control is the essential act of journalism. This conception of the press reached its dramatic highpoint in the Watergate scandal, in which the reporters Woodward and Bernstein saved the nation by triumphing over the goverment's cover-up. The myth of Woodward and Bernstein states that the truth wins out if it can just be released. The reporters become heroes by freeing the truth from government control. Everything else takes care of itself: Nixon is revealed as a crook, justice prevails, normalcy returns, America remains "healthy and free."

Of course there cannot be a Watergate every month. Instead there is the press conference, a ritual in which the press dramatizes itself as the interrogater of a reluctant government symbolized by the figure of the President. As Grossmann and Kumar observe, the Presidential press conference offers little in the way of information. It is "most important to news organizations because it is an event in which they are important public actors," they write (241). Televising the conflict between a demanding press and a reluctant government shows the journalist in the act of informing the public, the essential characteristic of which is the freeing of truth from official control. Dewey and Lippmann thought that the problem of informing the public had grown far beyond this stage. The environment created by mass communication overwhelmed the issue of censorship, which, after all, is still at the heart of the journalist's sense of self. One could free all the facts in the world and still not be informing the public, for the important question was not what was released into the environment, but what took shape in the beliefs and behavior of the average citizen.

"Seeds are sown," wrote Dewey, "not by being thrown out at random, but by being so distributed as to take root and have a chance of growth." His interest in the conditions of their growth is what makes Dewey the great philosopher of the democratic public.

CONCLUSION

TOWARD AN ECOLOGICAL VIEW OF PRESS AND PUBLIC

Providing information is not all there is to informing the public. It is not the only, or even the primary factor in shaping the relationship between press and public. The present study has attempted to insert a range of other factors between these two key terms. Among them are the size of the world one is to be informed about, the way in which the audience is organized, the competition for attention, the limitations inherent in language and other symbols. When these other factors fail to come to light, those who study and criticize the press are left with a very limited set of questions. Is the press fair? Is it accurate? Is it complete? Are journalists "objective?" These are the issues that dominate when one assumes a public "out there" and a press that is supposed to inform it.¹ There is nothing wrong with these questions, but there is nothing sacred or magical about them either. They have their limits.

To take a simple but frequently overlooked example: most inquiry into the press is concerned quite naturally with the news. When we ask, "has the press been fair?" we mean "has the news produced by the press been fair?" Again, this is not an illegitmate question, but it is a limited one. For nobody is ever presented with the news alone. Readers of a newspaper encounter pages on which there are advertisements, headlines, photos and news stories. Television viewers are given 22 minutes of news spliced with eight minutes of commercials. "The news" as a corpus of material separate from advertising and other features does not exist in the experience of citizens. In a word, it is an abstraction. The question of fairness or bias in the news therefore has a bias of its own. It is biased toward the experience of the journalist--who produces news, but not advertising--and against the experience of the citizen. Questions about the accuracy, fairness and completeness of news coverage overlook the fact that no one is ever presented with "the news." People encounter a newspaper or a newscast, where the news is embedded in a symbolic structure whose functions may be quite different from that of the press.

If we are interested in what the press does in the world--rather than what it prints or broadcasts--if we want to know about journalism as communication--as opposed to the mere sending of messages--then this other structure must be taken into account. The information the press presents may be accurate, fair and complete, but it may be more than offset by the distracting power of other features. The world the press constructs for the citizen may be coherent and explicable, but the world implied by the newspaper as a whole, or television as a whole--the world presented through the mass media--may be opaque and nonsensical. The press may speak to people in their public role as citizens, but the aim of mass communication in general may be to reach into private life and merge with the sense of self. The press may indeed be presenting information, in the cybernetic sense of the term. But the media may be working on the principle of redundancy.

The reason for all these "buts" is to stress a point we made in the Introduction to this study: journalism needs to be thought of, not as something journalists do, but as a transaction between producers and consumers, writers and readers, the press and the public. And this transaction must be viewed ecologically. That is, it must set in a particular social context where the world one is to be informed about is symbolized and summed-up, arranged and distorted by a number of communication media. The failure to view journalism as a transaction which takes place in a particular symbolic environment leads to an exclusive and uncritical emphasis on the accuracy, fairness and completeness of the news as information. All other questions then subside. It is assumed that, if the press will just be accurate, fair and complete, democracy will be restored to the scale of a small town and the omnicompetent citizen can again direct the course of government. If this sounds like a parody of the prevailing approach to the press, let us hear from two scholars who exemplify that approach. Writing in 1971, Wilbur Schramm and Donald F. Roberts had this to say about press and public:

Because we are so large, because we must make numerous decisions about highly complex and specialized issues, only the media can provide us with much of the information necessary to enable public participation in government. Only the media can insure that this information is complete. Theirs is the responsibility of making sure that the public receives all available information about various issues before those issues are resolved by our elected leaders. Theirs is the responsibility of seeing that information is not censored, not distorted, not incomplete.... To the degree that such responsibility is accepted, the public has the opportunity to consider all the information and to influence the course of their governance. (emphasis in original; 640\)

Schramm and Roberts recognize that the world has grown more complex and distant from the daily lives of citizens. But the only conclusion they are able to draw from this fact is that more and better information--indeed, all the information--must be provided to citizens. And it is the duty of the press to provide that information. End of issue. In remarking on the same fact, the increasing complexity of the world that one is to be informed about, sociologists Bensman and Lilienfeld note a problem we explored earlier in this study: that the conditions which make citizens dependent on the press for information have other consequences as well, many of which are important for an understanding of press and public. They write:

The information talents of the journalist develop in response to needs for substitute sources of information when genuine or direct sources of experience are not available. But this situation, in which the individual is not capable or is presumed to be not capable of evaluating issues and events in terms of direct experience, is precisely the situation which makes possible large-scale fraud, charlatanry, and deceit by misdirection.

As Bensman and Lilienfeld observe, "It is no accident that the beginning of professional propaganda began with the beginnings of professional journalism" (211). The two professions are responses to the same social conditions. They are therefore equally important as factors in the relationship between press and public, a point which Dewey also recognized when he argued that journalism and propaganda are essentially the same problem. This is what we mean by an ecological approach to journalism. The focus is on the conditions linking journalists and their audiences, which are also the conditions linking other communicators to the same audiences. The social conditions which make citizens dependent on the press also make them susceptible to manipulation by other professions, no matter how sound the information the press provides. An ecological approach to the press attempts to include such facts in its view of press and public.

An outstanding example of this sort of approach is contained in the 1947 report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press, chaired by Robert Hutchins. It is not possible to speak about the citizen in the abstract, the Commission noted, for

the citizen is a different man when he has to judge the press alone, and when his judgment is steadied by other social agencies. Free and diverse utterance may result in bewilderment unless he has access--through home, church, school, custom--to interpreting patterns of thought and feeling. There is no such thing as "objectivity" of the press unless the mind of the reader can identify the objects dealt with.

Objectivity, the Commission says, is not a statement about journalism or the journalist, but a relation, a state of affairs, that may or may not exist among the press, the mind of the reader and the external world. Institutions other than the press have a role to play in establishing this relation; and if they are unable to do their part the fact that the journalist is "objective" is meaningless. We have conducted a similar argument about information. Properly considered, "informing the public" is not a statement about the press but a relation that is established (or fails to be established) among the press, its audience and the social context in which communication is taking place. More than the free flow of information is involved. Here we can review the range of other factors that bear on the relationship between press and public, the sorts of questions an ecological approach to press and public would take up. We have discussed five, each of which is summarized and discussed below.

1\. The size and scale of the world the public is to be informed about. The Greeks thought that there was a natural limit to the size of a democratic state. In his Politics Aristotle says, "A state when composed of too few members is a state without self-sufficiency (and the state, by its definition, is a self-sufficient society). A state composed of too many will indeed by self-sufficient in the matter of material necessities (as un uncivilized people may equally be); but it will not be a true state, for the simple reason that it can hardly have a true constitution. Who can be the general of a mass so excessively large? And who can give it orders, unless he has Stentor's voice?" (VII. iv, Sec. 11 in Barker 292\) Here is where the problem of press and public begins, for the press appears to offer "the voice of a Stentor" to government and citizen alike and thus to remove any inherent limit on the size of a democracy. This is one of the reasons freedom of the press is enshrined in the American constitution in the eighteenth century. As the press grows and absorbs new communication technologies it appears to allow constitutional government to be extended over increasingly longer distances, until in the mid-nineteenth century a "universal town meeting" is said to be possible.

But a hidden complication develops. At the same time that the press is expanding its power to bridge distance, the distances the press must bridge are themselves expanding. An important paradox of communication is involved here. Improvements in communication also make communication more difficult because they ensure that there will be more to communicate about. The marginal gain in access may be more than offset by the geometric increase in the material one needs access to. The printing press, for example, brings more knowledge within the grasp of the reader. In that sense it encourages an "informed public." But print also creates an explosion of knowledge which almost guarantees that the modern reader will be less informed in relation to the total body of knowledge available. Even as it offers citizens a new and powerful source of information the printing press creates an "uninformed public" on a scale unimaginable before print.

Jack Goode and Ian Watt make this point in their essay on "The Consequences of Literacy." The "unlimited proliferation" of knowledge which accompanies widespread literacy "means that the proportion of the whole which any one individual knows must be infinitesimal in comparison with what obtains in an oral culture," they write. A literate culture thus "prevents the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition to anything like the extent possible in non-literate society" (57). What Goode and Watt suggest is that first and only "informed public" is an oral culture, where the sole source of information is speech and ritual and where forgetting is a social act in which everyone shares equally. Writing introduces the possibility of being uninformed, not only by creating new social divisions between the literate and non-literate, but also by expanding the amount of information so drastically that no one can comprehend it all. The printing press magnifies many times over this original "fall from grace" attributable to writing. After writing, there is no hope of creating a society of equally informed citizens. How ironic, then, that literacy has been so closely associated with the dream of democratic citizenship, for it is also one of the social conditions which insures that the dream can never be realized. And so it has been with every improvement in communication: each seems to promise a more educated public; each increase in scale and complexity the the education problem.

It is not only the body of knowledge which expands when communication improves. The world the citizen is to be knowledgeable about is also enlarged. This is a particularly important factor in the relation between press and public. Improved mail service, for example, allows the merchant to be sent newsletters from the foreign capitals where he may want to do business. But what makes it possible for him to do business in foreign capitals? In part it is the improved mail service. Communication technologies bring news from distant points, but they also make sure that news will be needed since they allow for action to be conducted at a distance. Moreover, there is no guarantee that improvements in news-gathering will keep pace with the increase in the number of points from which news is needed. Nor is there any reason to assume that improvements in information delivery will be accompanied by improvements in the ability to store, manage and interpret information, a point stressed in Chapters Two and Three. These are all reasons why the growth of the press cannot be equated with an "informed public." As the press expands so does the world the press is attempting to "cover." And this relation is not coincidence. The social changes which cause the press to expand also cause the world of the citizen to multiply in scale and complexity.

The best example here is urbanization. The daily newspaper is a child of the city; urbanization is what creates the modern newspaper. But urbanization also creates an environment in which individuals do not share a common world, where their fates are not linked by a common past and where action in one realm can easily escape the notice of another. Thus, while the popular newspaper is able to reach and inform more citizens than ever, it can only arise in an environment whose size and scale guarantees that the city dweller will be less informed than the resident of a small town. A certain loss of coherence accompanies the growth of the city, which the newspaper, a child of the city, does not make up for.

Jefferson is one of the few advocates of the press who understood this fact. That is why he wanted his countrymen to live in small towns and to organize their government into wards. Many have perceived that the world is becoming a bigger and more complicated place. But the conclusion they have always drawn is that the press must therefore improve its performance in informing us about the world. Jefferson had a different idea: shrink the world, or, if that is not possible, keep it to a manageable size. In some ways the suggestion is utopian, part of Jefferson's idealization of the small agrarian community. But in another sense it is the most practical of ideas. If an "informed public" is truly a value to be upheld--and every defense of democracy suggests that it is--then what needs to be defended is not only the right of the press to furnish the information on which such a public depends, but also the right of the public to a world which is capable of being grasped. Freedom of information is important, but so is the freedom from an unduly complicated and interrelated public realm.

It would be possible to attribute the success of Ronald Reagan to his recognition of the popular desire for relief from the confused and impenetrable world of public affairs. In this sense Reagan is a democratic politician par excellence. In word if not always in deed he stands for a world which is small in scale and simply ordered, where individuals rather than social fores are responsible for what happens, where religion, family and custom still have a grip on the important problems and can show us the way. Reagan himself denies the necessity for any special expertise in governing. He is known for not getting involved with the details of problems, and his explanations of policy often rely on a kind of folk wisdom drawn from years of campaigning. Some of the programs Reagan has sponsored actually try to put into practice his vision of understandable government. The principle of returning federal programs to states and localities could be interpreted as a Jeffersonian inspiration for creating a better informed public. The call for tax simplification can be seen in the same light. Of course in his defense build-up Reagan has followed exactly the opposite course, favoring technologies (such as the "Star Wars" system) which not even the experts appear to understand.

But whether or not Reagan has created a more understandable government is not the point. What we are trying to illustrate is one of the ways in which "informing the public" involves more than providing information. It also includes the size and complexity of the world one is to be informed about. It would be interesting indeed if a politician appeared in the land with this as a goal: a government the average citizen can grasp. Such a campaign might raise a whole series of issues that have never been treated as political problems. For example, one might object to nuclear power on the grounds that, whether it is safe or not, it is impossible for the average citizen to understand how it works. Nuclear technology could be seen as inherently "undemocratic" no matter what its merits. A campaign for an understandable world might also create political issues out of the forms of discourse used in politics. Campaign advertising on television could be seen as a political problem, a form of discourse which is so limited that it cannot help but muddle the citizen's understanding of problems. A ban on such ads could be one plank in a platform for an understandable world. The admitedly utopian character of such a platform might also raise important questions about the limits of democracy as a way of life. It might become clear, for example, that a society cannot dedicate itself to technological progress and also expect ordinary citizens to understand its problems. The notion of "appropriate" (or understandable) technology might then obtain new life as part of the democratic dream, alongside a free press, public education and economic opportunity.

Along with Jefferson, John Dewey stands out as one of the few thinkers concerned about the size and complexity of the world the public was to be informed about. This led him to observations the American press is incapable of making. For example, the press equates public affairs with politics, a leap of logic Dewey would never make. Political problems are not the public's problems, he would say, until they are understood as public by the people affected. Similarly, political opinion is not public opinion unless it is based on an understanding of what makes the question a public question. A kind of politics can be conducted in the absence of these conditions, Dewey recognized. There can be issues and parties, platforms and programs, despite the functional derangement of politics from public understanding. When this happens politics is not a dramatization of the problems facing the community, but a circus of distractions, a symptom of a diseased polity. The main reason for paying attention to politics today, Dewey thought, "is that politics so well exemplify the existing social confusion and its causes" (Individualism Old and New 114).

This is an idea which would never occur to the press. That politics is not the arena in which the society's problems are addressed but a showcase for the inability of society to organize itself democratically; that the world of politics is a mirror, not of American life, but of the confusion from which Americans suffer as a political people; that the political realm is effectively disfunctional, of interest not as a reflection but as a distortion of reality-- these possibilities cannot be assimilated by a press which equates public affairs with government policy and election campaigns. But they might arise as legitimate issues if the size and scale of the world one is to be informed about were inserted as factors in the relationship between press and public. It might then become clear that much of what passes for politics in America--"leadership" as a campaign issue, for example--is not based on the perception of a problem facing the commonwealth, but a sign of the inability of the political realm to make clear just what the public's problems are.

Recall that there two meanings to the term "public" in Dewey's thought. One is the body of citizens in a democratic state. The other is the realm of problems in which those citizens have an interest. Citizens do not form a public, Dewey argued, until they collectively understand the problems which concern them as citizens. What is so useful about this formulation is that it allows for a more complex view of change, especially of the changes brought by communication media. Improvements in the speed and reach of communication technologies have traditionally been applied to one "public" but not the other. They have been seen as new and more powerful links between the citizen and the world. Debate has centered around the quality of the communication made possible by new technologies-- in the case of the press, around the accuracy, fairness and completeness of the news. But there is a whole other dimension to the problem of communication and an informed public: the effect of communication changes on the realm of problems in which the citizen has a legitimate interest.

Dewey's argument was that modern technologies were making more and more issues "public" issues by involving every local unit in national structures of commerce and government which linked every citizen in a web of complicated inter-relationships. The same changes which brought news from all over the world to the newspaper office and a copy of the newspaper to every home were also responsible for a geometric increase in the realm of public problems. The modern business corporation, for example, raised new sorts of public problems by controlling production and distribution across state and local lines. Inability to understand this new scale had loosened the average citizen's grip on the world. And yet the modern business corporation was made possible, in part, by the printing press, railroad, telegraph and telephone-- the very improvements which, in another context, seemed to offer the citizen a firmer grasp on the world. An ecological approach to the history of communication would have to take this sort of complication into account. With every improvement in the delivery of information comes a new level of difficulty for citizens seeking to understand their world. No doubt this is one reason why we saw often seem to have more information and yet be less informed.

2\. The character of the social bond among members of the audience.

The second factor that needs to be placed between press and public is the type of social arrangements prevailing among members of the audience. We saw in the second chapter, for example, that an item of gossip has a different function when it is whispered in a small town and when it is published in a metropolitan newspaper. Gossip is a form of news in both cases; but where it functions as information in a small town, supplementing more public forms of talk, in a city newspaper it is an act of story-telling, a small drama in which the reader can participate as a spectator. What news does for people varies depending on how the people are grouped as a social unit. Thus, the "public" addressed by the newsletter of a thriving labor union is likely to be interested in the problems which unite its members. It is likely to see them in political terms, and to be capable of receiving information about them. The editor of a journal addressing such a public should not have to concern himself with getting the attention of readers because the world the readers share does that job for him. Everyone knows what the important issues are: pay scales, working conditions, benefits. A union newspaper is also unlikely to contain advertising, since the need for news is obvious and common enough to the people involved that they are willing to support the publication more directly through union dues. If there is no advertising there is no need to continually maximize circulation, which in turn means that news coverage will not have to compete with attention-getting devices like gossip and crime.

All these features arise from the way the audience is organized as a group, or, to rephrase the idea slightly, from the common activity members of the audience share. The less compelling that common activity, the more work the journalist has to do just to hold the audience together. When there is nothing substantial holding the audience together, anything and everything can become "news" if it suceeds in gaining the attention of a sufficently large circle of readers. This is the setting in which most local TV newscasts take place. Another name for this development is sensationalism. Sensationalism is not a quality inherent in certain publishers or newspapers; nor is it a reflection of the audience's "true" desires. It arises from the ability to link through media of communication people who would not otherwise perceive themselves as a group. Sensationalism is what happens when communication outruns the sense of community.

With his skeptical view of the telegraph Thoreau showed an advanced understanding of the roots of sensationalism. Texas and Maine can now communicate, he noted; but what if they have nothing to say to one another? Thoreau suggested the answer when he wrote, "We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear is that princess Adelaide has the whooping cough" (52). Gossip about the health of a princess is likely to characterize trans-Atlantic communication because, as Thoreau suggested, there was not neccessarily a trans-Atlantic community to accompany the cable. Or at least such a community had not yet been brought to life. Here is where Dewey's insistence that the public understand its problems becomes so important. The existence of common concerns--let us say between England and America--may be the theoretical basis for a trans-Atlantic community. In this sense a "public" linking the peoples of the two nations would be possible; and informing such a public could become the function of a press equipped with a trans-Atlantic cable. But if the common concerns are not recognized and understood as such by the people involved, then this Anglo-American community will not function as the basis for the journalism which links one continent to another. Instead the news from England will be Adelaide's whooping cough, or, in our own time, the wardrobe of Princess Di.

Now, it is possible for the press to go ahead and publish the news which a trans-Atlantic public would require to "stay informed" if it existed. Indeed, the New York Times publishes news of this sort all the time, from almost every foreign capital in the world. Whatever the character of this news, the Times cannot be said to be "informing the public" if there is no understanding of why the news from foreign capitals makes a difference to Americans in the first place. Without a common recognition of the problems linking governments and people all over the world, foreign news does not function as information, even if it is presented that way by the press. More is involved here than the common complaint that the news arrives without a "context" for understanding it. It is not simply a disfunctional, events having surpassed it. In a sense there is no public on the issue of nuclear war; its functions have been wiped out by the permanence and inevitablity of Mutually Assured Destruction.

As an activity journalism arises when the affairs of people are extended across space. But it is also deeply bound by conceptions of time. Without the belief that events unfolding in the present make a difference for the future there can be no journalism in any significant sense. The National Enquirer is a good indication of what journalism becomes when the sense of time which supports the journalistic enterprise degenerates. In the Enquirer it is "the miraculous" which prevails over any linear notion of progress. Miracle drugs and diets, astounding scientific discoveries which disprove all previous knowledge, calamities and plagues, unspeakable crimes commited for no apparent reason, invasions from outer space, and, above all, life after death-- all are incompatible with the linear progression of history out of the past and into the future. The world erupts out of nowhere and goes nowhere. Life either ends in a bang or goes on forever. By contrast consider information journalism in its purest form: the sports pages. Last night's baseball scores are fit into today's league standings; tonight's games are previewed. The pennant race stretches out of the past and into the future through a report on the present state of affairs.

One of the oddities of journalism is that the press cannot itself create the sense of time which makes possible its own information functions. In fact, it has had much to do with the destruction of that sense. The feeling of things spinning out of control, of events as eruptions from nowhere, of crisis as a permanent condition-- these have all been nourished by the press, and not only by the likes of the National Enquirer. Television news may be inherently biased against the sense of time on which the whole concept of news depends. Although it is surely capable of relaying the latest word about events--and in that sense can perform journalistically--the larger question is whether television can reproduce in its audience the belief that events progress out of the past and into the future, and that the way in which they do progress matters. Indeed, the same question can be raised about the newspaper as a form. It is possible that the newspaper is by nature a discontinuous medium, which is something that Marshall McLuhan, for one, admired about the daily press (Understanding Media 207).

Here is another way in which "informing the public" is a very limited description of what the press does. Over time the press may be un-forming the public by destroying the mental conditions which make "informing the public" possible. The Hutchins Commission recognized this possibility in its report.

Whether at any time and place the psychological conditions exist under which a free press has social significance is always a question of fact, not of theory. These mental conditions may be lost. They may also be created. The press is always one of the chief agents in destroying or in building the bases of its own significance. (13)

But not the only agent. The historical forces which group people together in new ways and allow for different types of sociability are also a primary factor in the relation between press and public. The rise of the city, the political party, the nation as social structures, the creation of national communities of interest surrounding such topics as sports and business, the assembling of a permanent nightly audience for television-- these new forms of sociability (some of which are decidedly un-social) imply different functions for journalism and different relationships between press and public. In each case, it is the common activity members of the group share (or fail to share) which accounts for the forms of journalism that develop. In general, the greater and more compelling the common activity, the more the press serves information functions aimed at public life. The more insubstantial the common life of the group, the more journalism tends toward the production of attention and the privatizing of public discourse. In all cases, there is one fact which needs to be kept in mind: improvements in communication do not necessarily create bigger or better communities.

3\. Structural characteristics of the mass media. Journalism does not stand alone as a social institution. It is contained within a larger structure, the mass media, which limits and shapes the relationship the press can establish with its public. There are two important structural features of mass communication which bear on the themes of this study. The first is the privatizing effects of mass communication; the second is the competition for attention which the mass media sponsor.

James Carey is one of the few communication scholars still interested in the concept of the public. Fully aware of the questions left unanswered in the work of Lippmann and Dewey, Carey has ventured to update the problem of the public by adding the perspectives of Harold Innis. For Carey the public is now a myth. As a "sphere of rational discourse" it does not exist; its place has been taken by the public opinion poll which is nothing more than a "statistical artifact," a "concatenation of individual judgments" bearing no resemblance to an active democratic public. One of the forces producing what Carey calls "the eclipse of the public" is the professionalization of the press, which was discussed in Chapter Six. Another is a feature of mass communication examined in Chapter Four, what we called "public transmission, private reception." Carey writes:

Our system of communication is not addressed at the public but at private individuals. We have evolved a radical form of mobilized privacy: the individual hooked into long lines of communication from remote sources. This transformation involved the displacement of the reading public--a group who spoke to one another about the news in rational and critical ways--into a reading and listening audience. It involved the deverbalization of public space into a zone of privacy and intimacy. Whether one examines the technology of communication, transportation, housing, power, or whatever, the general story is told: a service is piped into the private zone of the isolated individual from a centralized source.

The best example of the dynamic described by Carey is the television audience, each member of which is sitting in a private home experiencing the news as a kind of invasion of personal life. That some may welcome the invasion (that is, enjoy the news) does not change the fact that the news is aimed at private individuals occupying a private zone of experience, each tempted to descend into private flights of fancy by the commercials and entertainments. Imagine how different the news would be as a communication ritual if it were broadcast in public areas, where individuals gathered each evening to learn of their common fate. To be "public" in character journalism must not only be about public affairs; it must communicate publicly, which is a far more difficult question. The most public form of communication is obviously speech, the original method of "informing the public" and the only method possible according to the Greeks. In a sense, then, journalism has been biased against the public realm from the beginning. Why? Because it has always been experienced through reading, an oddly private act. The very possibility of an "informed public," a group of citizens actively discoursing about the news of the day, is undermined by the fact that each citizen receives the news from the private act of reading, an encounter with the text whose outstanding feature is that it can be structured and re-structured according to the desires of the individual reader. The idea that many people will read the same thing and come away with a common understanding of problems actually cuts against the dynamics of textual interpretation, which allow for many versions of the same "story" to arise from the text.

These contradictions between the reading of newspapers and a hearing, speaking public have never been fully acknowledged in discussions of press and public. The pressure has been in the opposite direction: toward equating the community of readers with a speech community. The First Amendment, in guaranteeing freedom of speech and the press in the same breadth, suggests that the two are equally public, equally vital to the health of a democracy. The press is seen as sponsoring the same kind of public life as speech, but with the added advantage of print's properties as a medium: durability, portability, etc. It is assumed that more people and more topics can now be included in the speech community because the boundaries of that community have been extended by the press. The assumption that print was an extension--rather than a reversal--of speech eased the way for an equally uncritical equation between print and television two centuries later. The fact that most people now get their news from television has not led to a wholesale rethinking of the concepts of public opinion and "informing the public." Why should it? If democractic theory could gloss over the contradictions between a hearing public and a reading public, it can certainly make allowances for television, which, as Walter Ong suggests, has a certain "oral" character to it anyway (136-7).

The somewhat contradictory dream of a "community of readers" is emodied also in the myth of collegiality as spoken on college campuses. The university is assumed to be a place where scholars who descend into a private life of the mind through print can nonetheless recover the close communal world of speech and share a universe of discourse with each other. Among the difficulties the university has in realizing this vision is the rapid accumulation of knowledge, which, of course, is one of outstanding features of print civilization. If scholars find it difficult to "keep up" in their own specialist worlds, how can they find the time to do the common reading without which collegiality cannot exist? No wonder, then, that parking problems and enrollment figures are the most frequent topics at faculty meetings. The university, the citadel of print culture, must struggle to maintain itself as a speech community because it is actually organized against that community's principles.

The point is relevant to the present study because an "informed public" and a "community of scholars" embody the same faint hope that by isolating themselves from the community through the encounter with the printed page, people will in fact realize a higher form of community, one based on the wider world of knowledge print makes available to the reader. If the idea of a public informed by the press is to be taken seriously, then the discussion must not only include the information the press press provides but the "public-ness" of the medium providing it. Such a perspective would reveal contradictions in the idea of an informed public which are obscured by an uncritical emphasis on information alone. Not only the printing press, but the entire communication system can be evaluated for the way in which it encourages or undermines public life. As should be clear by now, this evaluation must focus on the formal characteristics of communication media. For a medium can offer a very "public" content and yet be privatizing a privatizing force as a form.

A second structural characteristic of mass communication which needs to be taken into account is what we have called the competition for attention. Here is where the economic basis of the mass media enters the relationship between press and public. Briefly summarized, the argument is this: At a certain point in its development a capitalist economy solves the problem of production and turns its efforts to consumption. It begins to produce consumers. The American economy reached this point in the decades around the turn of the century. To accomplish the goal of producing consumers the economy must have access to the hearts and minds of the people who are expected to consume more and more. The press becomes one the chief means for gaining that access. The press offers business a product: the attention of the consumer. To create the product the press must discover, first through trial and error, later by inductive research, the features which persuade large numbers of people to pick up the newspaper. This search is spurred on by the competition among newspapers for the advertising dollar. The result is a new climate for communication, in which much of the content of communication is concerned with securing the conditions under which communication can take place.

In Chapter Six we interpreted these events as a shift in the character of public life. Where attention had once been granted, in the new environment created by the mass communication attention was something that had to be gained. The struggle to gain attention changes the terms on which communication can take place, not only for those competing to sell papers and products, but for all communicators. Journalists who did not compete in the hysterical race to boost circulations were still affected, as communicators, by the new imperative to gain the attention of an easily distracted consumer. The question then arises whether it is possible to "inform the public" when entire industries are at work to distract and amuse the people who are supposed to be informed.

John Dewey attempted to come to grips with this problem by suggesting that journalists must compete with the attention-producing industry in order to maintain the public character of the public realm. Discoveries in the art of arresting attention must be put to good use by public-minded journalists rather than exploited for private gain, Dewey thought. Walter Lippmann was more interested in a possibility Dewey had overlooked: that audience-centered communication, symbolized by the stereotype, was incompatible with the goal of "informing the public." Opposite principles were involved, said Lippmann. The stereotype began with the private beliefs of the individual and reinterpreted the world in those terms, while the information vital to public affairs began with events in the world and aimed itself at the belief structure of private individuals, hoping to adjust that structure to more accurately reflect reality. Extraordinary levels of time, effort and intelligence were needed to continually revise one's opinions in light of new information, Lippmann observed; and there was no evidence to suggest that most people approached the news in this sober and scientific fashion. They were more likely to take the path of least resistance and to believe what the limited horizon of their experience led them to believe, especially since the advertiser, propagandist and politician were encouraging just such a path. This path of least resistance is what the production of attention was all about.

What Lippmann's argument suggests is another sense in which mass communication sponsors the privatization of the public realm. The competition for attention forces communicators to work from belief toward reality, from private toward public life, rather than the reverse. The dream of an informed public has always assumed that communication will bring the individual out from the darkness of private life into a public world. But a commercialized mass media attempts an opposite course: to refashion the world in the shape of the individual's beliefs and desires. To re-state the point in Freudian terms: the notion of an informed public suggests that communication works on the reality principle; but the structure of the mass media forces communication to work on the pleasure principle. (Which, of course, does not mean that pleasure is actually delivered.) So, while the press may be saying, as Walter Cronkite did, "And that's the way it is," the rest of the communication environment is offering what Burger King offered, "Have it your way." Adjusting desires to a world which does not always fulfill them is what Freud called the reality principle and it is the principal principle of journalism. But it may have nothing to do with reaching a mass audience.

Criticism of the commercial, advertising-based structure of the press has historically been misplaced. It tends to focus either on the direct manipulation of the news by the advertiser--which is a rare and unnecessary act--or on the pressures to "sell papers" and "keep the ratings up," neither of which ought to be seen as antithetical to the goals of journalism. A truly public press would have to be concerned with selling papers and succeeding in the ratings, for it would want to be reaching the citizens in whose name it toils. The real problem with the commercial structure of journalism is that it compromises what can only be called the "objectivity" of the press. By this we mean not the ideology of journalists or the alleged nuetrality of the news, but the separation between journalism as a report of the world and the citizen as a subject in it. The most insidious pressure a commercialized press exerts is on the boundary between subject and object, inner and outer world, private life and public events. Mass communication attacks this boundary in order to sell goods, and as it does so it changes the terms on which all communication takes place. The reality principle loses its power and with it go the classical functions of the press: "to orient man and society in an actual world," as Robert Park put it.

4\. The nature of language and symbols. For years Time and Newsweek have used almost identical cover photos in ads designed to promote their magazines. It is a picture taken from space in which the earth appears as a little blue ball in a black sky. This image dramatizes the central conceit of journalism: that it can deliver the world, complete and intact, from a point outside the world. Naturally a photograph is used to express this idea, for as Roland Barthes has written, photography is a "message without a code," a way of representing the world which seems to escape the limitations of language ("The Photographic Message" 17). But in fact there is no escape. Even with photography there is the position of the camera, the choice of what to shoot, the "way of seeing" which a culture works into its photographs, all of which make photography a kind of symbol system, or a "language" in the broader sense of the term. Every system of symbols is by necessity a reduction of what is given to the senses.

Attention must be called to this very elemental fact of human experience because it is so often denied by the myths surrounding such concepts as "information" and "objectivity"-- indeed, by the very notion of "the news." The famous motto "All the News That's Fit to Print" started out as a moral message meant to emphasize the uprightness of the Times in comparison to other, sleazier papers. The important word was "fit." But the emphasis has since shifted to the word "all," as if it were not only possible, but desirable to gather and print "all the news." An apparently innocent phrase like, "Here's what's happening," which might be heard on any local newscast around America, expresses the same conceit: that journalism is not a selected sample of events but the events themselves. How odd (and accurate) it would be if, at the top of the show, an announcer said, "Good evening. Here's one version of what's happening."

Like all systems of representation, the news transforms the world into a set of symbols which are smaller in number and poorer in diversity than the events to which they refer. That is what Barthes means by a "code." A code limits and shapes the messages that can be communicated in ways that have nothing to do with the "bias" or neutrality of the communicator as an individual. In the case of the news it has been pointed out many times that news collects at certain points and in certain forms which have become part of the journalistic routine. Violence, for example, has always been a collection point for the news, as a succession of aggrieved social groups has discovered. When conditions explode into violence they become "newsworthy," not because they are more real--in the case of terrorism they are actually less real--but because they are now expressed in a symbolic form which can easily be translated into news. A press release is a very simple example of this same translation process. The art of writing a press release is to give the event that is to be publicized the symbolic form of a news story.

In considering, then, whether or under what conditions the press "informs the public," it is not enough to ask about the completeness, accuracy and fairness of "the news." For all systems of representation, including the news, are by necessity incomplete, inaccurate and, in a way, unfair, as any poet who has tried to put love into words knows. So we must also consider the limitations of news as a symbol system. Lippmann was extremely aware of such limits. The news is biased toward the observable event, he noted. But great portions of the truth about a culture are not observable as events. They exist as conditions, constants, or slow creeping changes which do not disturb the surface. Others have noted that the news as a symbol system is biased toward the statements of official authorities. This bias is important because there is no guarantee that the authorities will say anything of interest or tell the truth. There are other limitations: The way in which the world is divided up by the news is not the only way to divide up the world. The business pages, for example, an accepted division of the world practiced by every metropolitan newspaper in the country, address the world of business from the point of view of a person in business. But business touches lives in many forms other than this. As consumers, as parents, as teachers and students, as artists, as political actors people may meet up with business in ways the business pages do not speak to. The business section implicity says, "Here's what's happening in business" but what it actually offers is "what's happening in business for people who are in business and want to improve their position," which, after all, is only one way of representing "what's happening" in business and a very limited one at that.

One of the remarkable things about the American press which goes almost unnoticed by scholars and critics is the degree of unanimity which exists about how to divide up the world into news. Put 100 reporters in a room and hold a press conference or a debate and there will be very little disagreement about what was newsworthy in the event.² Take 100 papers from 100 cities and there will be almost no difference in the division of the paper into sections: general news, sports, business, lifestyles. In fact, these papers will show very few differences of any kind. Perhaps this unanmity is evidence of a solid grip on the world. The conventions of journalism may constitute a proven method for representing the day's events which is widely adopted because it works so well. But consider another possibility: that they are the sort of conventions George Orwell was talking about when he referred to the "Geneva Conventions of the mind"-- that is to say, agreed upon ways of thinking which hold their place simply because they make life easier for those who rely on them. If that is the case, then "informing the public" may require a constant experiment with the conventions of journalism. Perhaps we need a press which emerges with 100 hundred different versions of "the news" when it attends a press conference. Or perhaps we need a press which, instead of attending press conferences at all, is at 100 different places looking for news.

The point of these suggestions is that between press and public is a symbol system, the news, which, like any symbol system, limits and shapes what can be communicated. As the world changes, it may be necessary for this symbol system to change. But even a sensitive and shifting set of conventions will run up against a basic fact of all languages: the necessity (and danger) of reduction. Presenting "all the news" is therefore an impossible goal, and the press that avows it can only be an impossible press.

5\. The professional attitude. Points we have made about communication could also be made about transportation. We could say, for example, that the automobile appears to promise an increase in travel power. And on one level it does: we can go more places. But when a culture adopts the automobile as its basic unit of transportation there is also a loss in travel power. One must suddenly travel greater distances to obtain the same things which were once obtainable by walking. And since total travel increases the net gain for the individual may be negligible, a fact best typlified by the urban traffic jam. All those commuters simmering in their individual cars do not seem to be experiencing a gain in personal mobility. If we are interested in the automobile as a social instrument we would have to take these complications into account. We cannot just say, "people buy cars because they need to go places" for in an important sense they need to go places because they buy cars. In tangling with this sort of fact we are likely to come across another, equally interesting fact: that there is a myth, a romance about the automobile which accounts for much of its effect. Regardless of what it does for people, people think of the automobile in a certain way, and they are encouraged to do so by their culture. Such a myth must also be a part of our inquiry, for in a way it is just as "real" as the traffic jam and partly responsible for it.

So it is with press and public. Part of our inquiry must involve the myth or romance that surrounds these terms. The trick, of course, is to reveal such myths without particpating in them, and, at the same time, to avoid that more subtle myth which sees scholarship as a simple act of debunking. The most important set of myths we have examined is what we have called the "professional attitude" in journalism, which can be described as a certain view of press and public. In this view, it is the performance of the journalist in presenting information accurately, fairly and completely which determines whether or not the press "informs the public." The professional attitude then prescribes a set of standards for the performance of the journalist which, if upheld, will make certain that "the press informs the public." Criticism, scholarship and the training of journalists in turn concern themselves with the problem of meeting and refining these standards, especially those which concern objectivity.

The most important finding of this study is that the professional attitude is a very limited view of press and public. It assumes too many things and ignores others completely. "Informing the public" involves much more than presenting information accurately, fairly and completely, we have said. It involves the whole problem of what a public is, and whether it is possible to establish a public in a modern environment. It involves the difficult question of what exactly information is, and the social conditions which call its functions into being. It involves all the other forms of comunication which surround the press, including, of course, the new form of television. It involves the competition for attention which changes the terms on which the press can communicate. It involves the type of social structure shared by the people who are to form the public. It involves the nature of news as a symbol system. Finally--and here is where the myth comes in--"informing the public" involves the beliefs and conventions which prevent students of the press and the press itself from realizing these other factors.

What overall conclusions, then, can be drawn from this study? They have just been named. "Insert the competiton for attention" is a conclusion. "Include the conditions which make information possible" is also a conclusion. "Consider the nature of news as a symbol system" is a conclusion as well.

Granted, these conclusions do not conclude very much. Their only value lies in what they may start: a re-thinking of press and public.

Toward that end let us conclude with a negative, a warning about a way of thinking which this study has sought to overcome. For any press anywhere, making things public does not a public make.

NOTES

Chapter One

1. In distinguishing between a democracy and a republic Madison was no doubt referring to the Greek's view that a democratic state had to be limited to a certain size. Aristotle argues in the Politics that a territory that is too small cannot be a democratic state because it is not self-sufficient. But a territory that is too large cannot be governed democratically, either, "for the simple reason that it can hardly have a true constitution. Who can be the general of a mass so exessively large? And who can give it orders, unless he has Stentor's voice?" (VII, iv, sec. 11 in Barker, The Politics of Aristotle 292\)

2. Letter to John Jay, Aug. 23, 1785 (Koch and Peden 377).

3. Letter to John Adams, Oct. 28, 1814 (James Adams 14).

4. Notes on the State of Virginia (Koch and Peden 280); see also Tocqueville 1: 289-90. "In cities men cannot be prevented from concerting together and awakening a mutual excitement that prompts sudden and passionate resolutions" (1: 290).

5. First Inaugural Address (Koch and Peden 322).

6. Jefferson once wrote that "it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society" (Letter to John Adams, Oct. 28, 1814). Man is by nature a social animal, Jefferson reasoned, and nature--God's design--would not make man a social animal and then fail to equip him "naturally" with the mental habits required to be social (James Adams 14).

7. Letter to Edward Carrington Jan. 16, 1787 (Koch and Peden 411).

8. In his Second Inaugural Address Jefferson said that an "experiment" had been tried in front of the world to see "whether a government, conducting itself in the true spirit of its constitution, with zeal and purity, and doing no act which it would be unwilling the whole world should witness, can be written down by falsehood and defamation." The people proved wiser and steadier than the press which inflamed them, Jefferson concluded. He therefore recommended no restraints on the press other than those of libel law in effect at the time (Koch and Peden 343-4). But throughout his life Jefferson felt he had suffered unfairly at the hands of a licentious press (Mott, American Journalism 171).

9. Here we should point one of the reasons why Jefferson's idea of limiting the demands on the public mind has had a neglible effect. Any agency which attempted to define a "reasonble demand" on the citizen's intellect would appear to be acting as a censor, arrogating to itself the right to decide what the people can and cannot know.

10. Letter to J.C. Cabell, Jan. 31, 1814 (James Adams 124).

11. The day when the United States will have to become a mercantile nation is stiil distant, Jefferson wrote, "and we sould long keep our workmen in Europe, while Europe should be drawing rough materials and even subsistence from America" (Letter to Count van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785 in James Adams 72).

Chapter Two

1. On journalism history being mostly a chronicle of events see Schudson, Discovering the News. "Most histories of American newspapers have sought only to describe, not to explain, the changes in American journalism" (39). As an example of what Schudson means, consider the explanation Mott offers for the rise of the penny press. He writes: "Since the newspaper man's definition of news is conditioned by what his public looks for, the great change in that public occasioned by the advent of the cheap dailies inevitably caused a shift in the news concept." The passage appears to argue that the new audience for the penny press caused the journalist to fashion a new concept of news. But the only reason there existed a new audience for journalism was that the penny papers had invented a new concept for news, which drew new classes of people to the newspaper. Mott therefore has it backwards. In any event, the question does not concern him very deeply. It gets less than a page before Mott moves on to chronicling other events (American Journalism 243).

2. On the tower and the intelligibility of the city see Roland Barthes's intruiging essay on the Eiffel Tower in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies 3-17.

3. Perhaps the most interesting solution was tried by the publishers of what Daniel Boorstin calls the "booster press." These were enterprising men of the nineteenth century who owned a printing press in need of a community to give it business. They would set up shop in some frontier outpost and begin issuing a newspaper whose sole purpose was to advertise the town to potential settlers and investors (The Americans: the National Experience 125). If he succeeded and the town grew, the booster printer could count on a healthy trade for his printing shop. If he failed, he could simply load the press on a barge and move on to another spot (Rutland 126). If William Bradford offered daily news before the arrival of the daily newspaper, the booster printer furnished a variety of the newspaper in advance of the need for news-- a different but equally interesting case of one history departing from the other. With no news to report, no social problem to solve, the booster paper was simply a means of supporting the capital investment of the printing press. This relationship between the newspaper and the printing press held even for daily papers in established cities. Looking back on his publishing career, Benjamin Day acknowledged that "for a long time the principal object of the newspaper was to advertise the job office" (Mott, American Journalism 242). This from the publisher of the first penny paper.

4. On newspapers never having been fully indepedent see Lippman, Public Opinion 203-4; see also White, "How Free is Our Press?"

5. On the exclusivity of the newsletter see Bleyer 12-13. See also Hughes 3; the newsletter, she writes, "was not a public record; it did not circulate indiscriminately."

6. Discovering the News 119; on this point see also Mencken, "Newspaper Morals." Mencken writes that the righteous fervor aroused by the human interest story and newspaper crusade "does not constitute an intelligble system of morality, for morality, at bottom, is not at all an instinctive matter, but a purely intellectual matter: its essence is the control of impulse by an ideational process, the subordination of the immediate desire to the distant aim" (294). The popular newspaper audience was incapable of this sort of self-control, Mencken observed.

7. This basic tenet of structuralist thought originates with Saussure's study of language as a system of differences. See Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics and Barthes, Elements of Semiology.

8. The detective story can be thought of as an information drama centered around the question: what is news and what is not? What the good detective really knows is not how to get information, but how to turn ordinary details into information by filtering them through his intelligence. The relationship between Sherlock Holmes and the hapless Dr. Watson illustrates this nicely. The two men witness the same events, but Holmes always learns more than Watson. The reason, of course, is that Holmes has in his head an ordered knowledge of crime, criminals, and human behavior--his genius--which can turn the smallest detail into "news" about the case, while Watson can only make wild guesses at what Holmes is thinking. In any given encounter Holmes will see and hear more than his friend, but that is not the reason he knows so much. Rather, it is the other way around. Holmes gathers more information from each event because he has such amazing equipment for creating knowledge out of passing facts. In devising these two characters Arthur Conan Doyle showed an advanced understanding of what (and where) information is. To Doyle, information is not a "thing" in the world or a property of events but a function of the way a perceiver approaches the environment. Anything can be information if one has a sufficiently elaborate mental structure for sorting and arranging facts. Holmes and Watson are extreme examples of the presence and abscence of such a structure. Holmes, the hero, is a super-informed man who gets excited about nothing because he is always ahead of the happenings in the story. Watson, the ordinary man, is constantly astonished by Holmes and the turn of events in the tale. To Holmes, everything is news; to Watson everything is sensation.

9. On the uncritical equation journalists make between events in nature and other types of events see Gaye Tuchman, "Professionalization as an Agent of Legitimation." She writes: "Like tornados and earthquakes, economic fluctuations are presented as though they were acts of God or Nature, whose mysterious workings are not subject to human control" (110).

Chapter Three

1. On newspapers that failed the test of trial and error see Bleyer 169\.

2. My understanding of feedback and information theory in general is taken from Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings and Campbell, Grammatical Man.

3. Letter to John Norvell, June 11, 1807 (Koch and Peden 582).

4. The conflict between sober, factual reporting and comic exaggeration was partly a result of the complex system the newspaper evolved for meeting the costs of production. In effect, Bennett subsidized the "important" news with profits from the "interesting," which were themselves generated indirectly through the sale of advertising. Important news is thus twice removed from the demands of the marketplace: once through the subsidy lent by the human interest story and again through the advertising system which turns the popularity of human interest items into actual profits. One of the problems this system raises for students of the press is the existence of features which are demands on rather than demands of the audience. Much of the news and commentary which makes its way into the press has, since the penny papers, been a demand on rather than a demand of the public it supposedly informs. There are no simple equations, then, between the content of the newspaper and the actual interests of the audience. Anthropologically, the newspaper is fraught with interpretation problems, for it is partly a record of popular interests and partly a record of what journalists or other special classes deemed important.

5. Samuel Morse opened the first telegraph line on May 24, 1844 by sending the famous message, "What hath God wrought?" from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore (Czitrom 6). Newspapers were among the first users of the telegraph and their capital played a major role in the spread of the device. In 1848, Czitrom reports, Bennett was boasting of the money his paper was spending on telegraph dispatches (15-16). By the time of the Civil War the telegraph was fully integrated into the newspaper industry and had radically altered the process of newsgathering.

6. Bleyer 257\. On the fantastic hopes inspired by the telegraph see also Czitrom 10-14.

7. Harold Innis's views on space-binding and time-binding media are found in The Bias of Communication. See also James Carey, "Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan" and "Canadian Economic Theory: Extensions and Interpretations of Harold Innis."

Chapter Four

1. On changing notions of who "the people" are see George Boas, Vox Populi: Essays in the History of an Idea 8, 39, 53-4.

2. Freud thought hypnosis a more concentrated form of the relationship which prevailed between leaders and followers (Group Psychology 47, 59).

3. Freud's analysis is particularly relevant to discussions of charisma, politics and television. It would be possible to argue, for example, that television allows the modern political leader to establish individual relationships with each citizen. These para-personal relationships may happen to converge at the ballot box, but that does not make the leader's followers a political movement with a declared goal and set of shared principles. One could go on to interpret the "Reagan mandate" as the covergence of libidinal ties the President is able to establish with each member of the television audience. On the usefulness of Freud to a discussion of modern politics see Rieff 236-8.

4. On the utility of the distinction between community and society see Richard Bendix, "Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered." On modernity being both a freeing and restricting experience see Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air.

Chapter Five

1. To recover "culture" (and its history) from what purports to be "nature" is the task Roland Barthes assigns to himself in Mythologies, where he defines myth as--among other tnhings--that which transforms culture into nature.

2. On the need to produce consumers in the twentieth century see Ewen, Captains of Consciousness. By the 1920s, Ewen reports, "foresighted businessmen began to see the necessity of organizing their business not merely around the production of goods, but around the creation of a buying public" (25-6). See also Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising: "Marketing mass-produced consumer goods demanded a revisded model of buyer behavior. Manufacturers had to catch the consumer's attention, arouse desires, and transform desires into purchases. Moreover, they had to perform these tasks wholesale, as it were, for hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers. To do this, advertisers and agents had to become as familiar as possible with the behavior of consumers and with the means of persuading them" (248-9). As we will see in Chapter Six, at the same time that advertisers were struggling to include the audience in their communications, the press was attempting to elude the audience by building a wall between the "editorial" and "business" sides of the paper.

3. On the degradation of work see Ewen, 105-6 and Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital. On the connection between mass circulation newspapers and the degradation of work see George Herbert Mead's suggestive essay "The Nature of Aesthetic Experience."

4. On the blurring of public and private realms see, in addition to Arendt and Sennett, Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism and its sequel The Minimal Self. Also see Juergen Habermas's theories of the public sphere, summarized in Habermas, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article" and in Peter Hohendahl, "Introduction to Habermas."

5. Opposed to Williams's view of "massness" as a relation or process would be Ortega y Gasset's perspective in The Revolt of the Masses, where he writes, "In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is 'mass' or not" (14). For Ortega "massness" is clearly an essence, a quality which inheres in individuals; while for Williams it arises from a particular set of social relationships.

6. The history of the term "individual" illustrates the onset of a mass society, Williams argues. Originally "individual" was equivalent to "inseperable" or "indivisible." It was used to designate the individual members of group, who could not be talked about outside the community or role which gave them their identity. The modern meaning of the term refers to the individual in his own right, a person considered apart from any corporate structure which would limit or shape his identity. Today, the individual is what is left over after all group identities have been revealed as empty or arbitrary conventions. The overall tendency, Wiiliams writes, is "the abstraction of the individual from the complex of relationships by which he had hitherto been normally defined." At the same time, the group or totality also became more abstract, with terms like "society" and "state" coming to signify huge, opposing forces bearing down on the individual, threatening to oppress him (Long Revolution 76). Against this background, mass communication can be seen as the new means for linking abstracted individuals to abstracted totalities like the state or the corporation.

7. For a contemporary version of Kirkegaard's perspective on the public realm see a pair of books by the French critic Jean Baudrillard, Simulations and In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. What the "public" is to Kierkegaard the "mass" is to Baudrillard: a void into which meaning and community disappear. "The mass is without attribute, predicate, quality, reference. This is its definition, or its radical lack of definition. It has no sociological 'reality. It has nothing to do with any real population, body or specific social aggregate. Any attempt to qualify it only seeks to transfer it back to sociology..." (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities 5).

8. On the utility of "ideal types" in social thought see Bendix 313-17. Bendix warns against the reification of ideal types in history, where the student searches only for examples which confirm the type, all other evidence being seen as a temporary pause along the path of the type's rise. Ideal types are useful in illuminating history, he says, if the student is also interested in the conflicts and reversals which occur within the contours of some large-scale historical change. It is from this perspective that Bendix undertakes an examination of the terms "tradition" and "modernity."

Chapter Six

1. Dewey, The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson 15\. On there being no new ideas in the Declaration of Independence see also Brown, Modernization 85\. On the vitality of an oral tradition reinforced by print see Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death and Eagleton, The Functions of Criticism. Postman points to "a kind of printed orality" which prevailed in America up through the nineteenth century, in which the strength of the printed word created audiences for public speakers and gave a more serious and rational character to public discourse (39-42). Eagleton notes that in the eighteenth century the coffee house was a place where "communal reading" went on, meaning that the discussions taking place in the eighteenth century public sphere were based on the common reading members of the public had done, often in public places (23).

2. On the conflict between the city as a social environment and the public as a body of citizens prepared to act in the common good see Wiebe, The Search for Order. Wiebe observes that the rush to the cities around the turn of the century created new social problems which had to be met by large scale planning and united action-- a true challenge to democracy. Water and sewer lines had to be built, roads paved, parks planned, public transportation designed. But "the same conditions that made the need s0 imperative diminished the capacity to meet it," Wiebe writes. "Pell-mell expansion destroyed the groups and neighborhoods that sustained social action. The thousands recently arrived, the thousands more moving about, concentrated narrowly on their own security. Men struggling to learn new skills or to preserve old ones in a rapidly-changing economy could not afford to think about city-wide issues. Without stability at home or on the job, the civic spirit had no place to take root" (13). The same conditions of flux and rapid expansion, inherently hostile to what Wiebe calls "the civic spirit," were also a boon to journalism. The cheap newspapers of the 1880s and 90s appealed to the immigrant's low level of literacy with big type, splashy photos and color comics. The point is not only that a newspaper composed of pictures and headlines fails to inform its audience, but that such a newspaper arises out of conditions which make an informed audience of civic-minded citizens nearly impossible. The city presented such conditions; the newspaper took advantage of them.

3. For a suggestive treatment of the decline of party politics and the rise of television see Terence Moran, "Politics 1984: That's Entertainment."

4. On the re-shaping of events for media coverage see Daniel Boorstin's The Image. Boorstin's analysis of the "pseudo-event," so prescient in some respects, is weakened by the lack of any theoretical explanation for the phenomenon. He seems to blame the rise of the pseudo-event on the fact that we expect life to be more interesting than it is and therefore encourage the image-makers to deceive us. He concludes with a plea for each of us to "moderate his expectations" (260). As a sociological understanding of mass imagery this view has some rather obvious limitations. As a historical analysis of the image-producing industries Boorstin's book barely exists. If somehow we do "expect too much" out of the world, there are a number of reasons why, among them the drive by business to produce dissatisfaction among consumers and offer products as the cure.

5. Arthur Brisbane, Hearst's most trusted editor, once made explicit this comparison between the newspaper and the department store.

Perhaps headlines do take up too much space. The display windows of the big stores take up too much space also. But in a busy nation the first necessity is to attract attention. The big store window, wasting space, and the big type, apparently wasting space, are necessary features of quick development.

6. On the telegraph promising a cure for democracy's problems consider, for example, what the House Ways and Means Committee wrote in recommending passage of an 1845 bill subsidizing the telegraph:

Doubt had been entertained by many patriotc minds how far the rapid, full and thorough intercommunication of thought and intelligence, so necessary to the people living under a common representative republic, could be expected to take place throughout such immense bounds. That doubt can no longer exist.

7. Schudson's Discovering the News is an exemplary effort to inquire into the social conditions which make news matter. Schudson's answer is that the rise of a "democratic market society" is what led people to demand new forms of journalism (46-47, 57-60, 121-22).

8. A typical observation of the "journalism has become a business" type would be a 1909 Arena article which noted:

The American newspaper of today is a business enterprise. The gathering and publishing of news, more or less doctored, is necessary to that business success. The circulation depends on the news columns--therefore the news must be sensational--and the amount of advertising depends on the circulation. The highest salaries, therefore, go to the business-getters and the news-fakers-- the better the faker the better the salary.

9. Will Irwin argues in his Collier's series that before Hearst and Pulitizer came along, the newspaper had already transformed itself into a profitable, commercial enterprise:

Enough of the old editorial ideal lingered to keep our newspaper publishers editors instead of businessmen.

10. Three works which pursue the theme of outdated notions being fit to a new scale of commerce and social life are Wiebe, The Search for Order, Hays, The Response to Industrialism and Dewey, Individualism Old and New. The latter, of course, was written in 1929, during the period in question.

11. A.M. Lee 173\. On the increase in the capital required to run a newspaper see White, "How Free is Our Press?"

A paper could have been started in the 1880s with a dollar for each five of the town's population. After World War I, it required $10 per head of population to start a newspaper in America, a fifty-fold increase.

12. On the cycle of price cuts and circulation wars see A.M. Lee 270-72. Also see James Curran's analysis of the same tendency in the British press in "The Press as an Agent of Social Control." Curran notes that low prices virtually wiped out the radical press:

The capital required to establish a newspaper in the mass competitive market became steadily larger because the circulation level papers needed to reach before they broke even became progressively higher.

It was not only profits which depended on advertising, he notes, but the solvency of the operation. In the expanding market for newspapers around the turn of the century it was necessary to boost circulation just to stay in business, meaning that every newspaper had to adopt the methods of mass appeal or die out. On this point see also Alan Lee, "The Structure, Ownership and Control of the Press: 1855-1914" 124\.

13. For an early observation on the manufacturing of events for news coverage see an 1873 editorial in the Nation on "The Professionalization of Journalism." The Nation wrote:

It has hitherto been considered the proper function of the newspapers to see or hear and report; but competition is now driving them into producing the facts which they record... If a journal hires an explorer or aerornaut or excavator, there is no reason why it should not eventually come to employ its own warriors and statesmen.

14. A.M. Lee 285\. See also Schudson, Discovering the News on how the Times was not immune to attention-producting tactics (114-120).

15. On how newspapers shaped the environment in which all messages compete for attention see E.L. Godkin, "Newspapers Here and Abroad." Godkin charged that the continuous exertion of effort necessary for reading books was being undermined by newspaper reading, which does not require the mind to concentrate for very long (202). On this theme generally see Susan Maushart Noone, Press Literacy, Book Literacy and the American Renaissance 1830-1860.

16. On the act of reading being shaped by market research see Jay Rosen, "Structuralism in Reverse."

17. The key technological developments in the growth of the modern newspaper began with the telegraph in 1844 (Mott, American Journalism 247-8; Czitrom 14-19) and the rotary press in 1847 (A.M. Lee 113-27), followed by the stereotyping process in the 1860s (Lee 117-8), the substitution of woodpulp for rags in paper-making in the 1870s (Lee 102), the typewriter in the 1870s and the telephone in the 1880s (Lee 628), photoengraving in 1873 and the photographic half-tone in 1880 (Lee 129), the linotype in 1886 (Lee 122), four-color printing in 1892 and the substitution of electric for steam power in printing in 1896 (Lee 123). By the 1890s most of these advances had been assimilated into the modern newsroom, whose divisions of labor began to reflect the new technological complex of newspapering.

18. On the "crisis of interpretation" brought on by the tactics of Hearst and Pulitzer see Birkhead, Presenting the Press. Birkhead argues that yellow journalism posed deep philosophical questions, not only about the nature of journalism but also about democracy and the common man (119). On journalism operating without a philosophy to guide it see also a 1912 essay in Living Age, "The American Yellow Press" 69 and Will Irwin, "The Power of the Press" 15\.

19. Quoted in Birkhead 73\. On journalism being a business which buys paper "by the ton to be sold at a profit retail" see Lincoln Steffens, "The Business of a Newspaper" 447\.

20. The classic look at the manipulating of news by advertisers is Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check, written in 1919 at the height of muckraking era. On this theme see also Edward Alsworth Ross, "The Suppression of Important News"; Will Irwin, "The Advertising Influence" and "The Unhealthy Alliance"; Haste, "The Evolution of the Fourth Estate." Haste writes: "Those (newspapers that are not owned, stock and bonds, body and soul, by corporations with interests to protect, are rendered nerveless and opinionless by the fear of losing their advertising patronage." This was a typical sentiment at the time (351).

21. On the more sutble effects of the newspaper's economic structure see the Nation, "The Myth of a Free Press." The Nation argued: "Control of editorial opinion is rarely direct or specific. The modern daily newspaper is a great industrial organization, and everything which enters into its financial sustenance has an effect upon its policies, editorial or otherwise" (576).

22. On the endowed newspaper see Ross, "The Suppression of Important News" 310-11. On the municpal newspaper see A.M. Lee 190; on Scripps and the ad-less daily see Lee 188-9. A more recent attempt to market a paper without advertising was the PM experiment in New York. PM, a "writer's paper" with a radical bent, refused to accept any advertising, although it did follow the curious practice of listing other paper's ads. By 1948 the paper had a new name and owner and by 1952 the experiment had died.

23. Emery's view of yellow journalism as a set of useful (and basically harmless) techniques perverted by unscrupulous journalists is shared by Mott. See News in America 56-7.

24. For a critique of the assumption that the newspaper was "freed" from outside control by commercial success see Graham Murdock, "Class, Power and the Press: Problems of Conceptualization and Evidence."

25. As an example of what Birkhead means by a "textbook tradition" of journalism history consider Mott's American Journalism, the standard work in the field. In the Preface to the Third Edition Mott specifically addresses the book to teachers in journalism schools, rather than to historians or students of American culture generally (v). Also, in the Preface to First Edition, reprinted in subsequent versions, he acknowledges his "sympathetic admiration for American journalism" (vii).

26. On the journalist as a "hired man" who does not have the autonomy of a true professional see Mencken, "Journalism in America" 216-7.

27. On journalism lacking the esoteric knowledge that makes for a professional mystique see Schudson, Discovering the News 8-9; Herbert W. Horwill, "The Training of the Journalist" 107-110 and Oliver Boyd-Barett, "The Politics of Socialisation: Recruitment and Training for Journalism" 311\.

28. On the beginnings of the journalism school see A.Μ. Lee 661\.

29. On the great editor as the first incarnation of the journalist as a professional see also Birkhead 75 and Irwin, "The Fourth Current" 15\.

30. In a speech entitled "A Plea for the University Tradition" James Carey told journalism educators the following: "Despite the fact that the public is regularly invoked as the final justification for the press, the simple fact is that the public has disappeared. There is no public out there. As Gertrude Stein has said of Oakland: 'Out there there is no there there.' In professional circles talk about the public continues, of course, but no one any longer knows what they are talking about: a definition of the public and public life has been smuggled in but it is not subject to critical scrutiny" (853-4).

31. Carey is one of those who have argued that the "public's right to know" has become a catch-all phrase used to justify the claim of the press to higher status ("Journalism and Criticism: The Case of an Undeveloped Profession" 232).

Chapter Seven

1. The paper Lippmann joined was the New York World, where he worked for nine years. Joseph Pulitzer died in 1911, and his son Ralph took over the paper with the aim of making it more respectable. The most important figures in that move were Frank Cobb, who directed the editorial page, and Herbert Bayard Swope, the World's star reporter and a somewhat legendary figure around New York. The tone set by Cobb and Swope attracted an unusual number of talented writers, among them E.B. White, Ring Lardner and Heywood Broun. Lippmann was hired in 1922 as a writer for the editorial page of the World and ended up as its editor. The paper was sold in 1931 and Lippmann left. But he wrote two of his most important books, The Phantom Public (1925) and A Preface to Morals (1929) while working daily for a daily newspaper. On Lippmann's tenure at the World see Steel 176-7, 197-210, 269-274.

2. For an account of the goings-on at the Paris Peace conference among government, press and publicity men see Roy Stannard Baker, "Publicity at Paris" New York Times April 2, 1922\. On the Conference as a seminal event in government-press relations see Schudson, Discovering the News 164-5. See also Steel 141-154 on Lippmann's role at Paris as a propagandist for the United States. This was another dimension to Lippmann's perspective on press and public. In addition to being an intellectual, an advisor to Presidents and a journalist he also had experience in creating (and in some ways manipulating) public opinion.

3. On the American expectation that the schools can solve all social problems see Henry J. Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education 1965-1965.

4. Smith, Goodbye Gutenberg 165\. On the remarkable persistence of objectivity in journalism see also Schiller, Objectivity and the News 2-3 and Schudson, Discovering the News 1-10.

5. Public Opinion 155\. On the greater creedence given to the visual portion of public problems see also Le Bon, The Crowd 21 and Wallas, Human Nature in Politics 107-8.

6. The relationship between bureaucratization, on the one hand, and a heightened reliance on political imagery, on the other, is discussed in depth in Wiebe 185-229. Undoubtedly the most important figure here is Theodore Roosevelt, the first real media-conscious President and the man who invited the press into the White House by giving reporters a room for themselves. On Roosevelt and the press see Robert Pollard, Presidents and the Press 570-79.

7. Lippmann thought that Machiavelli served an important function for democrats in that he came to terms with facts the democratic heart could not bear to face, in particular the need for government to practice some form of coercion. Machiavelli's very name became synonomous with anti-democratic politics, not because he had nothing to say about the problems of democracy, thought Lippmann, but simply because the democrats refused to admit that he did. Weaknesses in their own theories could be associated with "Machiavellian" ideas and therefore dismissed. Machiavelli remained unassimilated into democratic thought, collecting under his sullied name all the doubts and illogic that remained in the ideas of the "pure" democrats. See Public Opinion 168-9, 186\. See also Blum, Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitanism in the Century of Total War 65-7.

8. On democratic theory failing to become learning theory see Phantom Public: "Democracy, therefore, has never developed an education for the public. It has merely given it a smattering of the kind of knowledge which the responsible man requires. It has, in fact, aimed not at making good citizens but at making a mass of amateur executives. It has not taught the child how to act as a member of the public. It has merely given him a hasty, incomplete taste of what he might have to know if he meddled in everything" (148-9).

9. Among the attitudes Lippmann ran up against in Public Opinion was the still-powerful idea that truth wins out over falsehood if left free to compete with it. The classic statement of this position, of course, is Milton's: that the facts "in open encounter with Error" cannot fail to triumph. It was given a modern formulation by Oliver Wendell Holmes: "The best test of truth is the power to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." See Ernest Hocking, Freedom of the Press: A Framework of Principle 91-2, 106-9.

10. On the role of audience feedback in altering the nature of journalism see Smith, Goodbye Gutenberg 138-9, 157\. Smith's most provocative idea is that "the locus of sovereignty over text" is shifting from writer to reader as new technologies make it more possible for the audience to select--and journalists to predict--what is desired in a newspaper (313). This change threatens to undo the classical conception of the newspaper as a forum for general information serving a general reader, who has duties of citizenship the newpaper will help him perform (321).

11. The connection between low prices and a diminished "will to read" is even more relevent in the case of television, which costs the viewer nothing (directly) and is therefore totally concerned with maintaining the viewer's attention. On this point see Lou Cannon, Reporting: An Inside View 71-2.

12. The particular ways the newspaper has developed to meet its costs are now seen, not as devices, but as definitions of the form. Siebert et al. write that in the "libertarian" theory of the press "the functions of the mass media are to inform and entertain. A third function was developed as a necessary correlate to the others to provide a basis of economic support and thus to assure financial independence. This was the sales or advertising function" (51; see also Mott, American Journalism 53). By this logic the "Wingo" game the New York Post runs each morning is also a "function" of the press. To information, entertainment and advertising we should therefore add "conducting games of chance" to journalism's "functions." Clearly this is absurd. By refusing to make any distinctions between the public functions of the press and the peripheral tasks taken on to achieve solvency as a private enterprise, Siebert at al. reify the commercial structure of the newspaper as an inevitable form, or, as they put it, a "necessary correlate." A different view would hold that neither entertainment nor the "advertising function" is inherent to the newspaper as a form. Rather, these are devices the newspaper develops to stay alive in a particular society, specifically an industrialized, urban economy, where people are presumably not willing to pay the full costs for their news. If a newspaper began to speculate in real estate in order to make money it would not be synthesizing a new "function" for the press. It would be struggling for survival or seeking out profit as a business which, after all, is only one way of organizing a newspaper or news agency. Conversely, if a newspaper found a circle of readers willing to pay a good deal for their news it would find no need for the advertising or entertainment "functions" which, to Siebert et al. define the newspaper form. For many newsletters and news services serving private industry this is precisely the case: a hefty subscripiton fee eliminates entertainment and advertising altogether.

13. The claim that news is made not found is the basis for a now substantial body of literature concerned with the sociology of newswork. The titles of many of the works in this vein emphasize the active role journalists have in constructing the news. See Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News, Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What's News, Bernard Roscho, Newsmaking, Gaye Tuchman, Making News, Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials.

14. On social science as a science for Lippmann see Public Opinion 235-6, 248\.

15. Ernest Gruening, "Public Opinion and Democracy" 97\. See also John Dewey's reviews of both Public Opinion and The Phantom Public published in the New Republic, the journal Lippmann helped to found. Dewey's criticisms of Lippmann are discussed in Chapter Eight.

16. Lippmann's view that the problem of representation arose after the extension of the community's affairs in space ignores the very powerful argument that all perception, even of events close at hand, is a reduction and refiguring of what is given to the senses. In his remarks on stereotyping (Public Opinion 53-69) Lippmann acknowledges this fact, but he still leaves the impression that at some point in history people had some more or less "direct" way of perceiving their environment. It would be posssible (and useful) to fashion a critique of Lippmann on the grounds that this has never been the case.

17. On images dissolving the "hardness" of the material world see Susan Sontag, On Photography. Sontag writes: "The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletion. Our oppressive sense of the transcience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to 'fix' the fleeting moment. We consume images at an ever faster rate and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body, images consume reality. Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete" (158).

18. One of the first people to write about market research allowing the audience to communicate with itself was Marshall McLuhan in his first book, The Mechanical Bride. See, for example, the discussion of ad agencies as the assemblers of a collective dream (97). See also Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord, a work heavily influenced by McLuhan.

19. See the Conclusion of the present study for a discussion of the view the Commission on Freedom of the Press had on objectivity. The Commission thought objectivity was meaningless as a statement about journalists if the audience was incapable of receiving objective information as information.

20. On the difficulty of "locating" the public as a being see John Dewey, The Public and its Problems. Dewey compares the question to the philospher's attempt to locate the self or soul (117).

21. The quoting of official authorities is by now so central to journalism practice that it is easy to forget that interviewing was virtually unheard of before the Civil War and did not become routine until after the turn of the century. Roscho observes that the reporter-as-interviewer arose with (and is essential to) the ideology of objectivity (41-2), which does not develop in full until the Twentieth Century.

22. That reporters are dependent on officials is one of the most frequently observed facts about the profession of journalism. See Fishman, 44-45, Gans 128-136, Roscho 49-50, Schudson, Discovering the News 184-5, Sigal, 119-140, Tuchman 82-97.

23. On McCarthy and the issue of "interpretation" in the news columns see Roscho 48-57 and Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press 75-87. For an earlier treatment of the interpretation question see Herbert Brucker, The Changing American Newspaper, published in 1937\.

Chapter Eight

1. Dewey's critique of outdated notions of individualism is found in Individualism Old and New. See also The Public and its Problems 97-8.

2. On Cooley and his faith in communication see Czitrom 96-102. See also Philip Rieff's introduction to Cooley's Social Organization and, of course, the text itself.

3. On the "Thought News" project see Czitrom 104-8; Fred W. Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology 22-28; and Lewis S. Feuer, "John Dewey and the Back to the People Movement in American Thought."

4. The New Journalism movement in the 1960s could be interpreted as an effort to lend more of the power of art to the practice of reporting, just as Dewey suggested. The experiment did not go far enough, however, since the practicioners of the genre did not generally attempt to enter the world of public affairs and compete with conventional reporters for the right to interpret public events. The handful of exceptions--most notably, Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson in their writing about election campaigns--produced some of the best work associated with the New Journalism.

5. On there being trends and discoveries in the art of shaping messages for the public mind see C. Clark, "The Concept of the Public" 319-20; and Hardt, Social Theories of the Press 87-88.

6. The USA Today ad ran in the New York Times Oct. 4, 1984\.

7. See the criticisms of C. Wright Mills on the equation between public opinion with polling results (The Sociological Imagination 52-3).

8. On the "forgotten roots" of public opinion research see Michael Margolis, "Public Opinion, Polling and Political Behavior" 66-67. On this problem in social thought generally see James Carey's remarks in the forward to Hardt's Social Theories of the Press: "The history of the human sciences reveals significant problems that have been lost or defined away, concepts of power and scope that have been trivialized or thoughtlesly abandoned, methods and concerns that need to be rejuvenated and not merely picked over like the remains in a historical museum" (10).

9. See George Gallup and Saul Forbes, The Pulse of Democracy: The Public Opinion Poll and How it Works for a hymn on the pollster as lifeblood of a modern democracy. Gallup and Forbes argue that the ability to poll people on every public question "may help to bridge the gap between the people and those who are responsible for making decisions in their name" (14). What is interesting about this claim is that it is preceded by a discussion of the problem of public opinion which comes directly out of Lippmann, who is cited by the authors. It is clear that Gallup and Forbes see the technique of polling as a solution to the defects in public opinion sketched by Lippmann (10-15). For a contrasting view see Michael Wheeler, Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics, especially chap. 9\.

10. As an example of the bias toward opinion rather than knowledge in the reporting of poll results consider a New York Times article of March 2, 1984 headlined "Many Who See Failure in His Policies Don't Blame Their Affable President." The article reported on a New York Times/CBS News Poll which showed that Ronald Reagan's personal popularity remained high even though most people thought his policies--in Lebanon and on cutting the deficit--were failing. Here was an anomoly which might have been at least partly explained by what people knew of Reagan's actions. If most respondents did not understand the combination of factors creating a huge federal deficit, then it would make sense that they would not blame the President for his part in the budget crisis. And yet the Times was not interested in exploring this possibility. It provided no information about what people know, only about what they believe. So even where the poll results themselves call out for an investigation of public knowledge the Times contents itself with the measurement of opinion.

Conclusion

1. On accuracy, fairness and completeness as the dominant questions in studies of the press see, for example, the recent study Responsibility and Freedom in the Press, edited by Keith S. Collins, which concentrates almost exclusively on the above themes and assumes from the outset the existence and competence of a public (4). Nowhere present are the concerns of Lippmann and Dewey. The study was published in 1985\.

2. On the lack of diversity in the way the press determines the news value of an events see Timothy Crouses's account of the 1972 Presidential campaign, The Boys on the Bus, especially the portrait of AP correspondent Walter Mears (20-23).

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