For the strength of a newspaper owner lies in his power to deceive the public and to withhold or to publish at will hidden things:  his power in this terrifies the professional politicians who hold nominal authority:  in a word, the newspaper owner controls the professional politician because he can and does blackmail the professional politician, especially upon his private life.  But if he does not command a large public this power to blackmail does not exist; and he can only command a large public—­that is, a large circulation—­by interesting that public and even by flattering it that it has its opinions reflected—­not created—­for it.

The power of the Press is not a direct and open power.  It depends upon a trick of deception; and no trick of deception works if the trickster passes a certain degree of cynicism.

We must, therefore, guard ourselves against the conception that the great modern Capitalist Press is merely a channel for the propagation of such news as may suit its proprietors, or of such opinions as they hold or desire to see held.  Such a judgment would be fanatical, and therefore worthless.

Our interest is in the degree to which news can be suppressed or garbled, particular discussion of interest to the common-weal suppressed, spontaneous opinion boycotted, and artificial opinion produced.

VIII

I say that our interest lies in the question of degree.  It always does.  The philosopher said:  “All things are a matter of degree; and who shall establish degree?” But I think we are agreed—­and by “we” I mean all educated men with some knowledge of the world around us—­that the degree to which the suppression of truth, the propagation of falsehood, the artificial creation of opinion, and the boycott of inconvenient doctrine have reached in the great Capitalist Press for some time past in England, is at least dangerously high.

There is no one in public life but could give dozens of examples from his own experience of perfectly sensible letters to the Press, citing irrefutable testimony upon matters of the first importance, being refused publicity.  Within the guild of the journalists, there is not a man who could not give you a hundred examples of deliberate suppression and deliberate falsehood by his employers both as regards news important to the nation and as regards great bodies of opinion.

Equally significant with the mere vast numerical accumulation of such instances is their quality.

Let me give a few examples.  No straightforward, common-sense, real description of any professional politician—­his manners, capacities, way of speaking, intelligence—­ever appears to-day in any of the great papers.  We never have anything within a thousand miles of what men who meet them say.

We are, indeed, long past the time when the professional politicians were treated as revered beings of whom an inept ritual description had to be given.  But the substitute has only been a putting of them into the limelight in another and more grotesque fashion, far less dignified, and quite equally false.