The debates about liberty have hitherto all been attempts to determine
just when in the series from Right to Left the censorship should
intervene. In the preceding paper I ventured to ask whether these
attempts do not turn on a misconception of the problem. The conclusion
reached was that, in dealing with liberty of opinion, we were dealing
with a subsidiary phase of the whole matter; that, so long as we were
content to argue about the privileges and immunities of opinion,
we were missing the point and trying to make bricks without straw.
We should never succeed even in fixing a standard of tolerance for
opinions, if we concentrated all our attention on the opinions. For
they are derived, not necessarily by reason, to be sure, but somehow,
from the stream of news that reaches the public, and the protection
of that stream is the critical interest in a modern state. In going
behind opinion to the information which it exploits, and in making
the validity of the news our ideal, we shall be fighting the battle
where it is really being fought. We shall be protecting for the public
interest that which all the special interests in the world are most
anxious to corrupt.
As the sources of the news are protected, as the information they
furnish becomes accessible and usable, as our capacity to read that
information is educated, the old problem of tolerance will wear a new
aspect. Many questions which seem hopelessly insoluble now will cease
to seem important enough to be worth solving. Thus the advocates of a
larger freedom always argue that true opinions will prevail over error;
their opponents always claim that you can fool most of the people most
of the time. Both statements are true, but both are half-truths. True
opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known;
if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones,
if not a little more effective.
The sensible procedure in matters affecting the liberty of opinion
would be to ensure as impartial an investigation of the facts as is
humanly possible. But it is just this investigation that is denied
us. It is denied us, because we are dependent upon the testimony
of anonymous and untrained and prejudiced witnesses; because the
complexity of the relevant facts is beyond the scope of our hurried
understanding; and finally, because the process we call education
fails so lamentably to educate the sense of evidence or the power of
penetrating to the controlling center of a situation. The task of
liberty, therefore, falls roughly under three heads, protection of
the sources of the news, organization of the news so as to make it
comprehensible, and education of human response.
We need, first, to know what can be done with the existing
news-structure, in order to correct its grosser evils. How far is it
useful to go in fixing personal responsibility for the truthfulness of
news? Much further, I am inclined to think, than we have ever gone. We
ought to know the names of the whole staff of every periodical. While
it is not necessary, or even desirable, that each article should be
signed, each article should be documented, and false documentation
should be illegal. An item of news should always state whether it
is received from one of the great news-agencies, or from a reporter,
or from a press bureau. Particular emphasis should be put on marking
news supplied by press bureaus, whether they are labeled “Geneva,” or
“Stockholm,” or “El Paso.”
One wonders next whether anything can be devised to meet that great
evil of the press, the lie which, once under way, can never be tracked
down. The more scrupulous papers will, of course, print a retraction
when they have unintentionally injured someone; but the retraction
rarely compensates the victim. The law of libel is a clumsy and
expensive instrument, and rather useless to private individuals or weak
organizations because of the gentlemen’s agreement which obtains in the
newspaper world. After all, the remedy for libel is not money damages,
but an undoing of the injury. Would it be possible then to establish
courts of honor in which publishers should be compelled to meet their
accusers and, if found guilty of misrepresentation, ordered to publish
the correction in the particular form and with the prominence specified
by the finding of the court? I do not know. Such courts might prove
to be a great nuisance, consuming time and energy and attention, and
offering too free a field for individuals with a persecution mania.
Perhaps a procedure could be devised which would eliminate most of
these inconveniences. Certainly it would be a great gain if the
accountability of publishers could be increased. They exercise more
power over the individual than is healthy, as everybody knows who
has watched the yellow press snooping at keyholes and invading the
privacy of helpless men and women. Even more important than this, is
the utterly reckless power of the press in dealing with news vitally
affecting the friendship of peoples. In a Court of Honor, possible
perhaps only in Utopia, voluntary associations working for decent
relations with other peoples might hale the jingo and the subtle
propagandist before a tribunal, to prove the reasonable truth of his
assertion or endure the humiliation of publishing prominently a finding
against his character.
This whole subject is immensely difficult, and full of traps. It would
be well worth an intensive investigation by a group of publishers,
lawyers, and students of public affairs. Because in some form or other
the next generation will attempt to bring the publishing business under
greater social control. There is everywhere an increasingly angry
disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and
misled; and wise publishers will not pooh-pooh these omens. They might
well note the history of prohibition, where a failure to work out a
programme of temperance brought about an undiscriminating taboo. The
regulation of the publishing business is a subtle and elusive matter,
and only by an early and sympathetic effort to deal with great evils
can the more sensible minds retain their control. If publishers and
authors themselves do not face the facts and attempt to deal with
them, some day Congress, in a fit of temper, egged on by an outraged
public opinion, will operate on the press with an ax. For somehow the
community must find a way of making the men who publish news accept
responsibility for an honest effort not to misrepresent the facts.
But the phrase “honest effort” does not take us very far. The problem
here is not different from that which we begin dimly to apprehend in
the field of government and business administration. The untrained
amateur may mean well, but he knows not how to do well. Why should he?
What are the qualifications for being a surgeon? A certain minimum of
special training. What are the qualifications for operating daily on
the brain and heart of a nation? None. Go some time and listen to the
average run of questions asked in interviews with Cabinet officers--or
anywhere else.
I remember one reporter who was detailed to the Peace Conference by
a leading news-agency. He came around every day for “news.” It was a
time when Central Europe seemed to be disintegrating, and great doubt
existed as to whether governments would be found with which to sign
a peace. But all that this “reporter” wanted to know was whether the
German fleet, then safely interned at Scapa Flow, was going to be sunk
in the North Sea. He insisted every day on knowing that. For him it was
the German fleet or nothing. Finally, he could endure it no longer. So
he anticipated Admiral Reuther and announced, in a dispatch to his home
papers, that the fleet would be sunk. And when I say that a million
American adults learned all that they ever learned about the Peace
Conference through this reporter, I am stating a very moderate figure.
He suggests the delicate question raised by the schools of journalism:
how far can we go in turning newspaper enterprise from a haphazard
trade into a disciplined profession? Quite far, I imagine, for it is
altogether unthinkable that a society like ours should remain forever
dependent upon untrained accidental witnesses. It is no answer to say
that there have been in the past, and that there are now, first-rate
correspondents. Of course there are. Men like Brailsford, Oulahan,
Gibbs, Lawrence, Swope, Strunsky, Draper, Hard, Dillon, Lowry, Levine,
Ackerman, Ray Stannard Baker, Frank Cobb, and William Allen White,
know their way about in this world. But they are eminences on a rather
flat plateau. The run of the news is handled by men of much smaller
caliber. It is handled by such men because reporting is not a dignified
profession for which men will invest the time and cost of an education,
but an underpaid, insecure, anonymous form of drudgery, conducted on
catch-as-catch-can principles. Merely to talk about the reporter in
terms of his real importance to civilization will make newspaper men
laugh. Yet reporting is a post of peculiar honor. Observation must
precede every other activity, and the public observer (that is, the
reporter) is a man of critical value. No amount of money or effort
spent in fitting the right men for this work could possibly be wasted,
for the health of society depends upon the quality of the information
it receives.
Do our schools of journalism, the few we have, make this kind of
training their object, or are they trade-schools designed to fit men
for higher salaries in the existing structure? I do not presume to
answer the question, nor is the answer of great moment when we remember
how small a part these schools now play in actual journalism. But it
is important to know whether it would be worth while to endow large
numbers of schools on the model of those now existing, and make their
diplomas a necessary condition for the practice of reporting. It is
worth considering. Against the idea lies the fact that it is difficult
to decide just what reporting is--where in the whole mass of printed
matter it begins and ends. No one would wish to set up a closed guild
of reporters and thus exclude invaluable casual reporting and writing.
If there is anything in the idea at all, it would apply only to the
routine service of the news through large organizations.
Personally I should distrust too much ingenuity of this kind, on the
ground that, while it might correct certain evils, the general tendency
would be to turn the control of the news over to unenterprising
stereotyped minds soaked in the traditions of a journalism always ten
years out of date. The better course is to avoid the deceptive short
cuts, and make up our minds to send out into reporting a generation
of men who will by sheer superiority, drive the incompetents out of
business. That means two things. It means a public recognition of the
dignity of such a career, so that it will cease to be the refuge of the
vaguely talented. With this increase of prestige must go a professional
training in journalism in which the ideal of objective testimony is
cardinal. The cynicism of the trade needs to be abandoned, for the
true patterns of the journalistic apprentice are not the slick persons
who scoop the news, but the patient and fearless men of science who
have labored to see what the world really is. It does not matter that
the news is not susceptible of mathematical statement. In fact, just
because news is complex and slippery, good reporting requires the
exercise of the highest of the scientific virtues. They are the habits
of ascribing no more credibility to a statement than it warrants,
a nice sense of the probabilities, and a keen understanding of the
quantitative importance of particular facts. You can judge the general
reliability of any observer most easily by the estimate he puts upon
the reliability of his own report. If you have no facts of your own
with which to check him, the best rough measurement is to wait and see
whether he is aware of any limitations in himself; whether he knows
that he saw only part of the event he describes; and whether he has any
background of knowledge against which he can set what he thinks he has
seen.
This kind of sophistication is, of course, necessary for the merest
pretense to any education. But for different professions it needs to
be specialized in particular ways. A sound legal training is pervaded
by it, but the skepticism is pointed to the type of case with which
the lawyer deals. The reporter’s work is not carried on under the same
conditions, and therefore requires a different specialization. How he
is to acquire it is, of course, a pedagogical problem requiring an
inductive study of the types of witness and the sources of information
with whom the reporter is in contact.
Some time in the future, when men have thoroughly grasped the rôle
of public opinion in society, scholars will not hesitate to write
treatises on evidence for the use of news-gathering services. No such
treatise exists to-day, because political science has suffered from
that curious prejudice of the scholar which consists in regarding an
irrational phenomenon as not quite worthy of serious study.
Closely akin to an education in the tests of credibility is rigorous
discipline in the use of words. It is almost impossible to
overestimate the confusion in daily life caused by sheer inability
to use language with intention. We talk scornfully of “mere words.”
Yet through words the whole vast process of human communication takes
place. The sights and sounds and meanings of nearly all that we deal
with as “politics,” we learn, not by our own experience, but through
the words of others. If those words are meaningless lumps charged with
emotion, instead of the messengers of fact, all sense of evidence
breaks down. Just so long as big words like Bolshevism, Americanism,
patriotism, pro-Germanism, are used by reporters to cover anything and
anybody that the biggest fool at large wishes to include, just so long
shall we be seeking our course through a fog so dense that we cannot
tell whether we fly upside-down or right-side-up. It is a measure of
our education as a people that so many of us are perfectly content to
live our political lives in this fraudulent environment of unanalyzed
words. For the reporter, abracadabra is fatal. So long as he deals in
it, he is gullibility itself, seeing nothing of the world, and living,
as it were, in a hall of crazy mirrors.
Only the discipline of a modernized logic can open the door to reality.
An overwhelming part of the dispute about “freedom of opinion” turns on
words which mean different things to the censor and the agitator. So
long as the meanings of the words are not dissociated, the dispute will
remain a circular wrangle. Education that shall make men masters of
their vocabulary is one of the central interests of liberty. For such
an education alone can transform the dispute into debate from similar
premises.
A sense of evidence and a power to define words must for the
modern reporter be accompanied by a working knowledge of the main
stratifications and currents of interest. Unless he knows that “news”
of society almost always starts from a special group, he is doomed to
report the surface of events. He will report the ripples of a passing
steamer, and forget the tides and the currents and the ground-swell. He
will report what Kolchak or Lenin says, and see what they do only when
it confirms what he thinks they said. He will deal with the flicker
of events and not with their motive. There are ways of reading that
flicker so as to discern the motive, but they have not been formulated
in the light of recent knowledge. Here is big work for the student of
politics. The good reporter reads events with an intuition trained by
wide personal experience. The poor reporter cannot read them, because
he is not even aware that there is anything in particular to read.
And then the reporter needs a general sense of what the world is doing.
Emphatically he ought not to be serving a cause, no matter how good. In
his professional activity it is no business of his to care whose ox is
gored. To be sure, when so much reporting is _ex parte_, and hostile to
insurgent forces, the insurgents in self-defense send out _ex parte_
reporters of their own. But a community cannot rest content to learn
the truth about the Democrats by reading the Republican papers, and
the truth about the Republicans by reading the Democratic papers.
There is room, and there is need, for disinterested reporting; and if
this sounds like a counsel of perfection now, it is only because the
science of public opinion is still at the point where astronomy was
when theological interests proclaimed the conclusions that all research
must vindicate.
While the reporter will serve no cause, he will possess a steady
sense that the chief purpose of “news” is to enable mankind to live
successfully toward the future. He will know that the world is a
process, not by any means always onward and upward, but never quite
the same. As the observer of the signs of change, his value to society
depends upon the prophetic discrimination with which he selects those
signs.
But the news from which he must pick and choose has long since become
too complicated even for the most highly trained reporter. The work,
say, of the government is really a small part of the day’s news, yet
even the wealthiest and most resourceful newspapers fail in their
efforts to report “Washington.” The high lights and the disputes and
sensational incidents are noted, but no one can keep himself informed
about his Congressman or about the individual departments, by reading
the daily press. This failure in no way reflects on the newspapers.
It results from the intricacy and unwieldiness of the subject-matter.
Thus, it is easier to report Congress than it is to report the
departments, because the work of Congress crystallizes crudely every so
often in a roll-call. But administration, although it has become more
important than legislation, is hard to follow, because its results are
spread over a longer period of time, and its effects are felt in ways
that no reporter can really measure.
Theoretically Congress is competent to act as the critical eye on
administration. Actually, the investigations Of Congress are almost
always planless raids, conducted by men too busy and too little
informed to do more than catch the grosser evils, or intrude upon good
work that is not understood. It was a recognition of these difficulties
that was the cause of two very interesting experiments in late years.
One was the establishment of more or less semi-official institutes
of government research; the other, the growth of specialized private
agencies which attempt to give technical summaries of the work of
various branches of the government. Neither experiment has created
much commotion: yet together they illustrate an idea which, properly
developed, will be increasingly valuable to an enlightened public
opinion.
Their principle is simple. They are expert organized reporters. Having
no horror of dullness, no interest in being dramatic, they can study
statistics and orders and reports which are beyond the digestive powers
of a newspaper man or of his readers. The lines of their growth would
seem to be threefold: to make a current record, to make a running
analysis of it, and on the basis of both, to suggest plans.
Record and analysis require an experimental formulation of standards by
which the work of government can be tested. Such standards are not to
be evolved off-hand out of anyone’s consciousness. Some have already
been worked out experimentally, others still need to be discovered;
all need to be refined and brought into perspective by the wisdom of
experience. Carried out competently, the public would gradually learn
to substitute objective criteria for gossip and intuitions. One can
imagine a public-health service subjected to such expert criticism.
The institute of research publishes the death-rate as a whole for a
period of years. It seems that for a particular season the rate is bad
in certain maladies, that in others the rate of improvement is not
sufficiently rapid. These facts are compared with the expenditures
of the service, and with the main lines of its activity. Are the bad
results due to the causes beyond the control of the service? do they
indicate a lack of foresight in asking appropriations for special work?
or in the absence of novel phenomena, do they point to a decline of the
personnel, or in its morale? If the latter, further analysis may reveal
that salaries are too low to attract men of ability, or that the head
of the service by bad management has weakened the interest of his staff.
When the work of government is analyzed in some such way as this, the
reporter deals with a body of knowledge that has been organized for
his apprehension. In other words, he is able to report the “news,”
because between him and the raw material of government there has been
interposed a more or less expert political intelligence. He ceases to
be the ant, described by William James, whose view of a building was
obtained by crawling over the cracks in the walls.
These political observatories will, I think, be found useful in all
branches of government, national, state, municipal, industrial, and
even in foreign affairs. They should be clearly out of reach either of
the wrath or of the favor of the office-holders. They must, of course,
be endowed, but the endowment should be beyond the immediate control
of the legislature and of the rich patron. Their independence can
be partially protected by the terms of the trust; the rest must be
defended by the ability of the institute to make itself so much the
master of the facts as to be impregnably based on popular confidence.
One would like to think that the universities could be brought into
such a scheme. Were they in close contact with the current record and
analysis, there might well be a genuine “field work” in political
science for the students; and there could be no better directing
idea for their more advanced researches than the formulation of the
intellectual methods by which the experience of government could
be brought to usable control. After all, the purpose of studying
“political science” is to be able to act more effectively in politics,
the word effectively being understood in the largest and, therefore,
the ideal sense. In the universities men should be able to think
patiently and generously for the good of society. If they do not,
surely one of the reasons is that thought terminates in doctor’s theses
and brown quarterlies, and not in the critical issues of politics.
On first thought, all this may seem rather a curious direction for
an inquiry into the substance of liberty. Yet we have always known,
as a matter of common sense, that there was an intimate connection
between “liberty” and the use of liberty. Every one who has examined
the subject at all has had to conclude that tolerance _per se_ is an
arbitrary line, and that, in practice, the determining factor is the
significance of the opinion to be tolerated. This study is based on an
avowal of that fact. Once it is avowed, there seems to be no way of
evading the conclusion that liberty is not so much permission as it is
the construction of a system of information increasingly independent of
opinion. In the long run it looks as if opinion could be made at once
free and enlightening only by transferring our interest from “opinion”
to the objective realities from which it springs. This thought has led
us to speculations on ways of protecting and organizing the stream
of news as the source of all opinion that matters. Obviously these
speculations do not pretend to offer a fully considered or a completed
scheme. Their nature forbids it, and I should be guilty of the very
opinionativeness I have condemned, did these essays claim to be
anything more than tentative indications of the more important phases
of the problem.
Yet I can well imagine their causing a considerable restlessness in the
minds of some readers. Standards, institutes, university research,
schools of journalism, they will argue, may be all right, but they are
a gray business in a vivid world. They blunt the edge of life; they
leave out of account the finely irresponsible opinion thrown out by
the creative mind; they do not protect the indispensable novelty from
philistinism and oppression. These proposals of yours, they will say,
ignore the fact that such an apparatus of knowledge will in the main
be controlled by the complacent and the traditional, and the execution
will inevitably be illiberal.
There is force in the indictment. And yet I am convinced that we
shall accomplish more by fighting for truth than by fighting for
our theories. It is a better loyalty. It is a humbler one, but it
is also more irresistible. Above all it is educative. For the real
enemy is ignorance, from which all of us, conservative, liberal,
and revolutionary, suffer. If our effort is concentrated on our
desires,--be it our desire to have and to hold what is good, our desire
to remake peacefully, or our desire to transform suddenly,--we shall
divide hopelessly and irretrievably. We must go back of our opinions to
the neutral facts for unity and refreshment of spirit. To deny this,
it seems to me, is to claim that the mass of men is impervious to
education, and to deny that, is to deny the postulate of democracy, and
to seek salvation in a dictatorship. There is, I am convinced, nothing
but misery and confusion that way. But I am equally convinced that
democracy will degenerate into this dictatorship either of the Right
or of the Left, if it does not become genuinely self-governing. That
means, in terms of public opinion, a resumption of that contact between
beliefs and realities which we have been losing steadily since the
small-town democracy was absorbed into the Great Society.
The administration of public information toward greater accuracy and
more successful analysis is the highway of liberty. It is, I believe,
a matter of first-rate importance that we should fix this in our
minds. Having done so, we may be able to deal more effectively with
the traps and the lies and the special interests which obstruct the
road and drive us astray. Without a clear conception of what the means
of liberty are, the struggle for free speech and free opinion easily
degenerates into a mere contest of opinion.
But realization is not the last step, though it is the first. We need
be under no illusion that the stream of news can be purified simply by
pointing out the value of purity. The existing news-structure may be
made serviceable to democracy along the general lines suggested, by the
training of the journalist, and by the development of expert record and
analysis. But while it may be, it will not be, simply by saying that it
ought to be. Those who are now in control have too much at stake, and
they control the source of reform itself.
Change will come only by the drastic competition of those whose
interests are not represented in the existing news-organization. It
will come only if organized labor and militant liberalism set a pace
which cannot be ignored. Our sanity and, therefore, our safety depend
upon this competition, upon fearless and relentless exposure conducted
by self-conscious groups that are now in a minority. It is for these
groups to understand that the satisfaction of advertising a pet theory
is as nothing compared to the publication of the news. And having
realized it, it is for them to combine their resources and their talent
for the development of an authentic news-service which is invincible
because it supplies what the community is begging for and cannot get.
All the gallant little sheets expressing particular programmes are
at bottom vanity, and in the end, futility, so long as the reporting
of daily news is left in untrained and biased hands. If we are to
move ahead, we must see a great independent journalism, setting
standards for commercial journalism, like those which the splendid
English coöperative societies are setting for commercial business. An
enormous amount of money is dribbled away in one fashion or another on
little papers, mass-meetings, and what not. If only some considerable
portion of it could be set aside to establish a central international
news-agency, we should make progress. We cannot fight the untruth which
envelops us by parading our opinions. We can do it only by reporting
the facts, and we do not deserve to win if the facts are against us.
The country is spotted with benevolent foundations of one kind or
another, many of them doing nothing but pay the upkeep of fine
buildings and sinecures. Organized labor spends large sums of money on
politics and strikes which fail because it is impossible to secure a
genuine hearing in public opinion. Could there be a pooling of money
for a news-agency? Not, I imagine, if its object were to further a
cause. But suppose the plan were for a news-service in which editorial
matter was rigorously excluded, and the work was done by men who had
already won the confidence of the public by their independence? Then,
perhaps.
At any rate, our salvation lies in two things: ultimately, in the
infusion of the news-structure by men with a new training and outlook;
immediately, in the concentration of the independent forces against
the complacency and bad service of the routineers. We shall advance
when we have learned humility; when we have learned to seek the truth,
to reveal it and publish it; when we care more for that than for the
privilege of arguing about ideas in a fog of uncertainty.