“The new spirit in the Press, which aims, not at influencing statesmen
by giving them an instructed and enlightened public opinion, but at
making them subservient to a power which will exalt them or hound them
out of office, according to whether they will or will not accept its
dictates and its terms.”
“The insolent pretensions of newspaper owners to reduce Downing Street
to the position of an annexe of Fleet Street.”
――_Certain People of Importance_, by A. G. GARDINER.
The freedom of the Press is the freedom of public opinion, that’s the
beginning and the end of it. Can you pretend that public opinion is
free, when more than half the leading journals are the voice of one
man? There is a danger to the freedom of the Press, Janion; and that
danger is you. You are simply a trust crushing out or buying up all
opposition, till you control the market――till you can sit in your
office and say, “What I think to-day, England will think to-morrow.”
――_The Earth_, by J. B. FAGAN.