Sensationalism

“ People who have appetites of this kind are in need of having them perennially gratified, and accordingly it naturally comes about that the conductors of journals such as I have referred to, if they cannot provide a sufficient quantity of sensationalism true or partly true, have either to invent it or exaggerate some perhaps innocent or innocuous incident. ”

“ In all these cases the increase began more than thirteen years ago, and it must be allowed that the181 development of humanity which they represent is not of that form which can as a rule be traced to the use of sensationalism. ”

“ For who, indeed, shall define the standard of reality? And who, when the senses are such sorry reporters, shall declare with authority that one thing is false and could not happen, and another is true and actually did happen? ”

“ If you wanted to make a sensational report, for instance, you could work in the peaceful night and the deserted street and other things that really have no relation to the facts in such a way as to connect them in the public mind. ”

“ Let us concede that the newspaper writer sometimes, in the passion of the hour, goes far afield. It is equally true that no statement of importance can thus be made that is not immediately challenged, answered and reanswered until, through the fierce fires of controversy the dross is burned away and the gold of established fact remains. Not alone the fact stands out, but also the world's immediate reaction to that fact, the psychology of the event and the man dominating the cause and the effect. ”

“ Believing that the power of a free and fearless press is the greatest power for good that has yet been devised; and believing most sincerely, that wrongs grow greatest where silence is imposed or ignorance of the facts stands between the wrong doer, or the wrong deed, and enlightened public opinion, I decided to learn and to tell just the meaning—all of the meaning—of those six sadly and shockingly suggestive words. ”

“ Who owns the press and why? When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda? And whose propaganda?
Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about life? Is it honest material?
No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for the first time the questions are answered in a book. ”

“ Now there is but one kind of seriousness left in the modern mind, and it is limited to the news brought by the newspaper and the telegraph. Improve each shining hour, turn it to some account and judge it as quickly as possible!—one would think modern men had but one virtue left—presence of mind. ”

“ But most important, news is expressed—and this you simply cannot see—expressed in basic human terms, designed to arouse the basic human curiosity or sympathy that makes an abstract description palatable to people. ”

“ Were I to make public what I know—even if it were possible—I would be derided, held up to ridicule by press and public. For, despite our vaunted civilization, we are still slaves to superstition and ignorance, ever ready like those of old, to strike down one who dares utter the truth. ”

“ I do not know why my news should be so trivial,—considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. ”

“ The gradual accumulation of books about books, of criticisms on both, of reviews of the critics, of newspaper accounts of the reviews, of weekly summaries of the newspapers, seems to be carrying us ever further from the face of reality into a mere commerce of ideas on which no healthy soul can live. ”

“ Now, newspaper finders notoriously seek the latest news, and in the hurry and confusion of reading and selecting, and bringing out, to meet the wants of the day, many of the connecting links are lost, readers get imperfect notions of men and things, and, from a want of a complete understanding of the matter, the mind gives up, without regret, the little and unsatisfactory knowledge it had so casually obtained. ”

“ Let us look at the reason of this carefully, and we shall see that this state of things is the direct result of an irresponsible employment of the gigantic power of thought. Some few excitable brains start an idea, the circulation of which is made possible by the modern facilities for expression in the press. And because the majority of readers do not think for themselves, they are drawn into the current of unrest which has thus been suggested to their imagination, each individual augmenting its strength until it grows into a torrent of folly. ”

“ But are there no errors and no fallacies, in the chronicles of our own day, as absurd as those of the alchemists of old? Our very newspapers may seem to our posterity as full of delusions as the books of the alchemists do to us;—not but what the Press is the air we breathe—and uncommonly foggy the air is too! ”

“ The company of bright minds, certain to be sanguine and optimistic, the excitement produced by unexpected news, the rush to prepare it most attractively and against time, the thousand unpublishable conceits and views and arguments that leap to the mind and are discussed in council, the freaks and blunders of the reporters and contributors—all these elements are in the cup of joy that a journalist drinks off every day. ”

“ Are there not a hundred little rivulets of news which never flow through the journals, but are passed from mouth to mouth, and seem shallow enough, but which, uniting at last, form a great stream of public opinion, and this, having formed itself imperceptibly, is suddenly found in full flow, and is so obvious that the newspapers forget to mention it? ”

“ If this observation be just, it will apply with greater force to literary history itself, which, being often the mere history of the human mind, has to record opinions as well as events—to discuss as well as to narrate—to show how accepted truths become suspicious—or to confirm what has hitherto rested in obscure uncertainty, and to balance contending opinions and opposite facts with critical nicety. ”

“ Nearly every one with any claim to intelligence or experience understands this, yet where will you find a newspaper or any other public medium of expression venturing on this simple truth? The average man is still in leading strings to various silly theories, religious or otherwise, fostered by self-interested groups, or to his hope of temporary{155} human prosperity, and these are the things which still keep him in the wake of various sophisticated journals which cunningly play upon his illusions. ”

“ That we will have, and, if it involves the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it.
You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better. ”

“ The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. [1] The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide. That is a comparatively small part of the whole field of human interest. ”

“ Then a new fact-philosophy appears, which can only spare a smile for metaphysical speculation, and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the megalopolitan palate and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the provincials. ”

“ Is it so certain, after all, that we should not be interesting ourselves in other quite as nugatory matters if these were denied us? In one respect, and no unimportant one, the instantaneous dispersion of news and the universal interest in it have affected the national thought and character. ”

“ Our common sense and our knowledge of the situation incline us rather to the bad than to the good witness, and we are right. But the Press cannot of its nature give a great number of separate testimonies. ”

“ What is the hidden influence behind the press, behind all the subversive movements going on around us? Are there several Powers at work? Or is there one Power, one invisible group directing all the rest--the circle of the real Initiates? ”

“ If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. ”

“ What Provokes Thought is News.—Men apply the same principle, too, in their news reading. Whatever presents a new problem, or injects a new motive or situation into an old one, will be interesting and will be read by those readers to whom the problem or situation is new. ”

“ To be true to reality all events must be seen as interrelated and developing as an organic whole. Editorials and public addresses wholly distinct and appearing apropos to casual occurrences, without any thread of sequence, are thus quite unpromising elements for an integrated story of a people's life. ”

“ My common sense will not let me believe any such reports, which are not reports at all, but something those newspaper men made up all out of their own heads, on purpose to give such fellows as you a subject to talk about. ”

“ Do they consider how mixed a thing is every audience, whose taste and judgment differ, perhaps, every day, not only from each other, but themselves? And how to calculate a discourse, that shall exactly suit them all, is beyond the force and reach of human reason, knowledge, or invention. ”

“ We also take it for granted, that our public men will wait for events to justify the crude speculations, which they toss out in conversations with reporters, before cruelly amusing the good-natured public with their vaticinations. ”

“ The grain of truth which the fallacy carries is really this:—that the habit of treating some subjects in the peculiar fashion most effective in journalism may spread disastrously to the treatment of other subjects which ought to be treated as literature. ”

“ Consider the organs and media of the collective mind as one finds them in England or America now, how hazardous they are and accidental! At the basis of this strange thought-process is the intelligence of the common man, once illiterate and accessible only to the crude, inarticulate influences of talk and rumour, now rapidly becoming educated, or at any rate educated to the level of a reader and writer, and responding more and more to literary influences. ”

“ Detached, well-to-do, strong: irony concerning the "press" and its culture. Our care: that scientific men should not become journalists. We mistrust any form of culture that tolerates news-paper reading or writing. ”

“ What unnatural and dangerous currents of opinion set in motion! what false alarms and malicious interpretations of words and facts! And in domestic affairs we are not much better informed than in foreign. As to commercial, industrial, and agricultural interests, political parties and social tendencies, or the personality of [42] public men, it is alike difficult to obtain a disinterested opinion. The more newspapers one reads, the less clearly he sees in these matters. ”

“ Everything is bound in the leather of reasonableness, in the hide of method, and in the wooden boards of Logic. Instead of on the rich soup of sentiments, men and women in the States are fed on scientific tabloids containing sentiments reduced to their ultimate chemical essences. ”

“ After that there are the instruments by which he broadcasts facts and ideas to the public; advertising, motion pictures, circular letters, booklets, handbills, speeches, meetings, parades, news articles, magazine articles and whatever other mediums there are through which public attention is reached and influenced.
Now sensitiveness to the state of mind of the public is a difficult thing to achieve or maintain. Any man can tell you with more or less accuracy and clearness his own reactions on any particular issue. ”

“ We naturally shrink from exposing to the cold criticism of the public, those hidden influences and inward experiences that contribute most powerfully to the formation of character, the benefit of which may be imparted under the combined imagery of fact and fancy. ”

“ And this evil is likely to continue and increase until news-gatherers learn that more important than the reports of accidents and casualties is the intelligence of opinions and thoughts, the moral and intellectual movements of modern life. ”

“ In one word, the utility of the press, its beneficial influences, its charities, its diffusion of knowledge and true light, and its general maintenance of the right, out-balance, as by ten thousand fold, the occasional obliquities, injustice, falsehood, and advocacy of devil’s doings here on earth, which periodically disgrace its columns. ”

“ The pleasure of telling a piece of news so interesting, of propagating it, and of being the first reporters of it, spreads the intelligence. And this is so well known, that no man of sense gives attention to these reports, till he find them confirmed by some greater evidence. Do not the same passions, and others still stronger, incline the generality of mankind to believe and report, with the greatest vehemence and assurance, all religious miracles? ”

“ The public began to revolt from that spirit of philosophizing on the most common occasions, in consequence of which our modern historians seem to be more ingenious in assigning causes and motives, than assiduous to ascertain facts. ”