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Hilaire Belloc >> The Free Press
THE FREE PRESS
by
HILAIRE BELLOC
London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
Ruskin House 40 Museum Street W.C 1
First published in 1918
(All rights reserved)
DEDICATION
KINGS LAND,
SHIPLEY, HORSHAM.
_October 14, 1917._
MY DEAR ORAGE,
I dedicate this little essay to you not only because "The New Age"
(which is your paper) published it in its original form, but much more
because you were, I think, the pioneer, in its modern form at any
rate, of the Free Press in this country. I well remember the days when
one used to write to "The New Age" simply because one knew it to be
the only paper in which the truth with regard to our corrupt politics,
or indeed with regard to any powerful evil, could be told. That is now
some years ago; but even to-day there is only one other paper in
London of which this is true, and that is the "New Witness." Your
paper and that at present edited by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton are the
fullest examples of the Free Press we have.
It is significant, I think, that these two papers differ entirely in
the philosophies which underlie their conduct and in the social ends
at which they aim. In other words, they differ entirely in religion
which is the ultimate spring of all political action. There is perhaps
no single problem of any importance in private or in public morals
which the one would not attempt to solve in a fashion different from,
and usually antagonistic to, the other. Yet we discover these two
papers with their limited circulation, their lack of advertisement
subsidy, their restriction to a comparatively small circle, possessing
a power which is not only increasing but has long been quite out of
proportion to their numerical status.
Things happen because of words printed in "The New Age" and the "New
Witness." That is less and less true of what I have called the
official press. The phenomenon is worth analysing. Its intellectual
interest alone will arrest the attention of any future historian. Here
is a force numerically quite small, lacking the one great obvious
power of our time (which is the power to bribe), rigidly boycotted--so
much so that it is hardly known outside the circle of its immediate
adherents and quite unknown abroad. Yet this force is doing work--is
creating--at a moment when almost everything else is marking time; and
the work it is doing grows more and more apparent.
The reason is, of course, the principle which was a commonplace with
antiquity, though it was almost forgotten in the last modern
generation, that truth has a power of its own. Mere indignation
against organized falsehood, mere revolt against it, is creative.
It is the thesis of this little essay, as you will see, that the Free
Press will succeed in its main object which is the making of the truth
known.
There was a moment, I confess, when I would not have written so
hopefully.
Some years ago, especially after I had founded the "Eye-Witness," I
was, in the tedium of the effort, half convinced that success could
not be obtained. It is a mood which accompanies exile. To produce that
mood is the very object of the boycott to which the Free Press is
subjected.
But I have lived, in the last five years, to see that this mood was
false. It is now clear that steady work in the exposure of what is
evil, whatever forces are brought to bear against that exposure, bears
fruit. That is the reason I have written the few pages printed here:
To convince men that even to-day one can do something in the way of
political reform, and that even to-day there is room for something of
free speech.
I say at the close of these pages that I do not believe the new spirit
we have produced will lead to any system of self-government, economic
or political. I think the decay has gone too far for that. In this I
may be wrong; it is but an opinion with regard to the future. On the
other matter I have experience and immediate example before me, and I
am certain that the battle for free political discussion is now won.
Mere knowledge of our public evils, economic and political, will
henceforward spread; and though we must suffer the external
consequences of so prolonged a regime of lying, the lies are now known
to be lies. True expression, though it should bear no immediate and
practical fruit, is at least now guaranteed a measure of freedom, and
the coming evils which the State must still endure will at least not
be endured in silence. Therefore it was worth while fighting.
Very sincerely yours,
H. BELLOC.
The Free Press
I PROPOSE to discuss in what follows the evil of the great
modern Capitalist Press, its function in vitiating and
misinforming opinion and in putting power into ignoble
hands; its correction by the formation of small independent
organs, and the probably increasing effect of these last.
I
About two hundred years ago a number of things began to appear in
Europe which were the fruit of the Renaissance and of the Reformation
combined: Two warring twins.
These things appeared first of all in England, because England was the
only province of Europe wherein the old Latin tradition ran side by
side with the novel effects of protestantism. But for England the
great schism and heresy of the sixteenth century, already dissolving
to-day, would long ago have died. It would have been confined for
some few generations to those outer Northern parts of the Continent
which had never really digested but had only received in some
mechanical fashion the strong meat of Rome. It would have ceased with,
or shortly after, the Thirty Years War.
It was the defection of the English Crown, the immense booty rapidly
obtained by a few adventurers, like the Cecils and Russells, and a
still smaller number of old families, like the Howards, which put
England, with all its profound traditions and with all its organic
inheritance of the great European thing, upon the side of the Northern
Germanies. It was inevitable, therefore, that in England the fruits
should first appear, for here only was there deep soil.
That fruit upon which our modern observation has been most fixed was
_Capitalism_.
Capitalism proceeded from England and from the English Reformation;
but it was not fully alive until the early eighteenth century. In the
nineteenth it matured.
Another cognate fruit was what to-day we call _Finance_, that is, the
domination of the State by private Capitalists who, taking advantage
of the necessities of the State, fix an increasing mortgage upon the
State and work perpetually for fluidity, anonymity, and
irresponsibility in their arrangements. It was in England, again, that
this began and vigorously began with what I think was the first true
"National Debt"; a product contemporary in its origins with industrial
Capitalism.
Another was that curious and certainly ephemeral vagary of the human
mind which has appeared before now in human history, which is called
"Sophistry," and which consists in making up "systems" to explain the
world; in contrast with Philosophy which aims at the answering of
questions, the solution of problems and the final establishment of the
truth.
But most interesting of all just now, though but a minor fruit, is the
thing called "The Press." It also began to arise contemporaneously
with Capitalism and Finance: it has grown with them and served them.
It came to the height of its power at the same modern moment as did
they.
Let us consider what exactly it means: then we shall the better
understand what its development has been.
II
"The Press" means (for the purpose of such an examination) the
dissemination by frequently and regularly printed sheets (commonly
daily sheets) of (1) news and (2) suggested ideas.
These two things are quite distinct in character and should be
regarded separately, though they merge in this: that false ideas are
suggested by false news and especially by news which is false through
suppression.
First, of News:--
News, that is, information with regard to those things which affect us
but which are not within our own immediate view, is necessary to the
life of the State.
The obvious, the extremely cheap, the _universal_ means of propagating
it, is by word of mouth.
A man has seen a thing; many men have seen a thing. They testify to
that thing, and others who have heard them repeat their testimony. The
Press thrust into the midst of this natural system (which is still
that upon which all reasonable men act, whenever they can, in matters
most nearly concerning them) two novel features, both of them
exceedingly corrupting. In the first place, it gave to the printed
words a _rapidity of extension_ with which repeated spoken words could
not compete. In the second place, it gave them a _mechanical
similarity_ which was the very opposite to the marks of healthy human
news.
I would particularly insist upon this last point. It is little
understood and it is vital.
If we want to know what to think of a fire which has taken place many
miles away, but which affects property of our own, we listen to the
accounts of dozens of men. We rapidly and instinctively differentiate
between these accounts according to the characters of the witnesses.
Equally instinctively, we counter-test these accounts by the inherent
probabilities of the situation.
An honest and sober man tells us that the roof of the house fell in.
An imaginative fool, who is also a swindler, assures us that he later
saw the roof standing. We remember that the roof was of iron girders
covered with wood, and draw this conclusion: That the framework still
stands, but that the healing fell through in a mass of blazing
rubbish. 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. These would take too long to collect, and would be too
expensive to collect. Still less is it able to deliver the weight of
each. It, therefore, presents us, even at its best when the testimony
is not tainted, no more than one crude affirmation. This one relation
is, as I have said, further propagated unanimously and with extreme
rapidity. Instead of an organic impression formed at leisure in the
comparison of many human sources, the reader obtains a mechanical one.
At the same moment myriads of other men receive this same impression.
Their adherence to it corroborates his own. Even therefore when the
disseminator of the news, that is, the owner of the newspaper, has no
special motive for lying, the message is conveyed in a vitiated and
inhuman form. Where he has a motive for lying (as he usually has) his
lie can outdo any merely spoken or written truth.
If this be true of news and of its vitiation through the Press, it is
still truer of opinions and suggested ideas.
Opinions, above all, we judge by the personalities of those who
deliver them: by voice, tone, expression, and known character. The
Press eliminates three-quarters of all by which opinion may be judged.
And yet it presents the opinion with the more force. The idea is
presented in a sort of impersonal manner that impresses with peculiar
power because it bears a sort of detachment, as though it came from
some authority too secure and superior to be questioned. It is
suddenly communicated to thousands. It goes unchallenged, unless by
some accident another controller of such machines will contradict it
and can get his contradiction read by the same men as have read the
first statement.
These general characters were present in the Press even in its
infancy, when each news-sheet still covered but a comparatively small
circle; when distribution was difficult, and when the audience
addressed was also select and in some measure able to criticize
whatever was presented to it. But though present they had no great
force; for the adventure of a newspaper was limited. The older method
of obtaining news was still remembered and used. The regular readers
of anything, paper or book, were few, and those few cared much more
for the quality of what they read than for its amount. Moreover, they
had some means of judging its truth and value.
In this early phase, moreover, the Press was necessarily highly
diverse. One man could print and sell profitably a thousand copies of
his version of a piece of news, of his opinions, or those of his
clique. There were hundreds of other men who, if they took the pains,
had the means to set out a rival account and a rival opinion. We shall
see how, as Capitalism grew, these safeguards decayed and the bad
characters described were increased to their present enormity.
III
Side by side with the development of Capitalism went a change in the
Press from its primitive condition to a worse. The development of
Capitalism meant that a smaller and a yet smaller number of men
commanded the means of production and of distribution whereby could be
printed and set before a large circle a news-sheet fuller than the old
model. When distribution first changed with the advent of the railways
the difference from the old condition was accentuated, and there arose
perhaps one hundred, perhaps two hundred "organs," as they were
called, which, in this country and the Lowlands of Scotland, told men
what their proprietors chose to tell them, both as to news and as to
opinion. The population was still fairly well spread; there were a
number of local capitals; distribution was not yet so organized as to
permit a paper printed as near as Birmingham, even, to feel the
competition of a paper printed in London only 100 miles away. Papers
printed as far from London, as York, Liverpool or Exeter were the
more independent.
Further the mass of men, though there was more intelligent reading
(and writing, for that matter) than there is to-day, had not acquired
the habit of daily reading.
It may be doubted whether even to-day the mass of men (in the sense of
the actual majority of adult citizens) have done so. But what I mean
is that in the time of which I speak (the earlier part, and a portion
of the middle, of the nineteenth century), there was no reading of
papers as a regular habit by those who work with their hands. The
papers were still in the main written for those who had leisure; those
who for the most part had some travel, and those who had a smattering,
at least, of the Humanities.
The matter appearing in the newspapers was often _written by_ men of
less facilities. But the people who wrote them, wrote them under the
knowledge that their audience was of the sort I describe. To this day
in the healthy remnant of our old State, in the country villages, much
of this tradition survives. The country folk in my own neighbourhood
can read as well as I can; but they prefer to talk among themselves
when they are at leisure, or, at the most, to seize in a few moments
the main items of news about the war; they prefer this, I say, as a
habit of mind, to the poring over square yards of printed matter which
(especially in the Sunday papers) are now food for their fellows in
the town. That is because in the country a man has true neighbours,
whereas the towns are a dust of isolated beings, mentally (and often
physically) starved.
IV
Meanwhile, there had appeared in connection with this new institution,
"The Press," a certain factor of the utmost importance: Capitalist
also in origin, and, therefore, inevitably exhibiting all the
poisonous vices of Capitalism as its effect flourished from more to
more. This factor was _subsidy through advertisement_.
At first the advertisement was not a subsidy. A man desiring to let a
thing be known could let it be known much more widely and immediately
through a newspaper than in any other fashion. He paid the newspaper
to publish the thing that he wanted known, as that he had a house to
let, or wine to sell.
But it was clear that this was bound to lead to the paradoxical state
of affairs from which we began to suffer in the later nineteenth
century. A paper had for its revenue not only what people paid in
order to obtain it, but also what people paid in order to get their
wares or needs known through it. It, therefore, could be profitably
produced at a cost greater than its selling price. Advertisement
revenue made it possible for a man to print a paper at a cost of 2d.
and sell it at 1d.
In the simple and earlier form of advertisement the extent and nature
of the circulation was the only thing considered by the advertiser,
and the man who printed the newspaper got more and more profit as he
extended that circulation by giving more reading matter for a
better-looking paper and still selling it further and further below
cost price.
When it was discovered how powerful the effect of suggestion upon the
readers of advertisements could be, especially over such an audience
as our modern great towns provide (a chaos, I repeat, of isolated
minds with a lessening personal experience and with a lessening
community of tradition), the value of advertising space rapidly rose.
It became a more and more tempting venture to "start a newspaper," but
at the same time, the development of capitalism made that venture more
and more hazardous. It was more and more of a risky venture to start a
new great paper even of a local sort, for the expense got greater and
greater, and the loss, if you failed, more and more rapid and serious.
Advertisement became more and more the basis of profit, and the giving
in one way and another of more and more for the 1d. or the 1/2d.
became the chief concern of the now wealthy and wholly capitalistic
newspaper proprietor.
Long before the last third of the nineteenth century a newspaper, if
it was of large circulation, was everywhere a venture or a property
dependent wholly upon its advertisers. It had ceased to consider its
public save as a bait for the advertiser. It lived (_in this phase_)
entirely on its advertisement columns.
V
Let us halt at this phase in the development of the thing to consider
certain other changes which were on the point of appearance, and why
they were on the point of appearance.
In the first place, if advertisement had come to be the stand-by of a
newspaper, the Capitalist owning the sheet would necessarily consider
his revenue from advertisement before anything else. He was indeed
_compelled_ to do so unless he had enormous revenues from other
sources, and ran his paper as a luxury costing a vast fortune a year.
For in this industry the rule is either very great profits or very
great and rapid losses--losses at the rate of L100,000 at least in a
year where a great daily paper is concerned.
He was compelled then to respect his advertisers as his paymasters. To
that extent, therefore, his power of giving true news and of printing
sound opinion was limited, even though his own inclinations should
lean towards such news and such opinion.
An individual newspaper owner might, for instance, have the greatest
possible dislike for the trade in patent medicines. He might object to
the swindling of the poor which is the soul of that trade. He might
himself have suffered acute physical pain through the imprudent
absorption of one of those quack drugs. But he certainly could not
print an article against them, nor even an article describing how they
were made, without losing a great part of his income, directly; and,
perhaps, indirectly, the whole of it, from the annoyance caused to
other advertisers, who would note his independence and fear friction
in their own case. He would prefer to retain his income, persuade his
readers to buy poison, and remain free (personally) from touching the
stuff he recommended for pay.
As with patent medicines so with any other matter whatsoever that was
advertised. However bad, shoddy, harmful, or even treasonable the
matter might be, the proprietor was always at the choice of publishing
matter which did not affect _him_, and saving his fortune, or refusing
it and jeopardizing his fortune. He chose the former course.
In the second place, there was an even more serious development.
Advertisement having become the stand-by of the newspaper the large
advertiser (as Capitalism developed and the controls became fewer and
more in touch one with the other) could not but regard his "giving" of
an advertisement as something of a favour.
There is always this psychological, or, if you will, artistic element
in exchange.
In pure Economics exchange is exactly balanced by the respective
advantages of the exchangers; just as in pure dynamics you have the
parallelogram of forces. In the immense complexity of the real world
material, friction, and a million other things affect the ideal
parallelogram of forces; and in economics other conscious passions
besides those of mere avarice affect exchange: there are a million
half-conscious and sub-conscious motives at work as well.
The large advertiser still _mainly_ paid for advertisement according
to circulation, but he also began to be influenced by less direct
intentions. He would not advertise in papers which he thought might by
their publication of opinion ultimately hurt Capitalism as a whole;
still less in those whose opinions might affect his own private
fortune adversely. Stupid (like all people given up to gain), he was
muddle-headed about the distinction between a large circulation and a
circulation small, but appealing to the rich. He would refuse
advertisements of luxuries to a paper read by half the wealthier class
if he had heard in the National Liberal Club, or some such place, that
the paper was "in bad taste."
Not only was there this negative power in the hands of the advertiser,
that of refusing the favour or patronage of his advertisements, there
was also a positive one, though that only grew up later.
The advertiser came to see that he could actually dictate policy and
opinion; and that he had also another most powerful and novel weapon
in his hand, which was the _suppression_ of news.
We must not exaggerate this element. For one thing the power
represented by the great Capitalist Press was a power equal with that
of the great advertisers. For another, there was no clear-cut
distinction between the Capitalism that owned newspapers and the
Capitalism that advertised. The same man who owned "The Daily Times"
was a shareholder in Jones's Soap or Smith's Pills. The man who
gambled and lost on "The Howl" was at the same time gambling and
winning on a bucket-shop advertised in "The Howl." There was no
antagonism of class interest one against the other, and what was more
they were of the same kind and breed. The fellow that got rich quick
in a newspaper speculation--or ended in jail over it--was exactly the
same kind of man as he who bought a peerage out of a "combine" in
music halls or cut his throat when his bluff in Indian silver was
called. The type is the common modern type. Parliament is full of it,
and it runs newspapers only as one of its activities--all of which
need the suggestion of advertisement.
The newspaper owner and the advertiser, then, were intermixed. But on
the balance the advertising interest being wider spread was the
stronger, and what you got was a sort of imposition, often quite
conscious and direct, of advertising power over the Press; and this
was, as I have said, not only negative (that was long obvious) but, at
last, positive.
Sometimes there is an open battle between the advertiser and the
proprietor, especially when, as is the case with framers of artificial
monopolies, both combatants are of a low, cunning, and unintelligent
type. Minor friction due to the same cause is constantly taking place.
Sometimes the victory falls to the newspaper proprietor, more often to
the advertiser--never to the public.
So far, we see the growth of the Press marked by these
characteristics. (1) It falls into the hands of a very few rich men,
and nearly always of men of base origin and capacities. (2) It is, in
their hands, a mere commercial enterprise. (3) It is economically
supported by advertisers who can in part control it, but these are of
the same Capitalist kind, in motive and manner, with the owners of the
papers. Their power does not, therefore, clash in the main with that
of the owners, but the fact that advertisement makes a paper, has
created a standard of printing and paper such that no one--save at a
disastrous loss--can issue regularly to large numbers news and opinion
which the large Capitalist advertisers disapprove.
There would seem to be for any independent Press no possible economic
basis, because the public has been taught to expect for 1d. what it
costs 3d. to make--the difference being paid by the advertisement
subsidy.
But there is now a graver corruption at work even than this always
negative and sometimes positive power of the advertiser.