Very many busy men confine their morning newspaper reading to the breakfast table, others “get through” their newspaper while on their way to business. Very little newspaper reading has their attention after reaching the office. Evening newspapers are read more thoroughly. There is more time after dinner. The comfortable chair, the shaded lamp, the family near to join in the comment—all help to make the reading more enjoyable. But even then the average reader does not read with intent attention.
It is incontestably true that the great mass of the people who read the newspapers in this hasty glancing fashion do not think deeply. This mental attitude has had the attention of observers for many years. Hawthorne speaks of “the wild babble of the town—indicating a low tone of feeling and shallow thought.” Macaulay said of Tillotson: “His reasoning was just sufficiently profound and sufficiently refined to be followed by a popular audience with that slight degree of intellectual exertion which is a pleasure.” Lafcadio Hearn speaks of the masses as people of uncultured taste to whom the higher zones of emotion are out of reach. Dr. Samuel Johnson remarked: “The greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinions than that they are in fashion.” And one of the conspicuous British essayists commented: “It serves to show in what a slovenly way most people are content to think.”
Henry Ward Beecher ever was impressed with the influence of newspapers. He said:
Do you ever stop to think that millions have no literature, no school and almost no pulpit but the press? Not one man in ten reads books, but every one of us, except the very helpless poor, satiates himself every day with the newspaper. It is the parent, school, college, theatre, pulpit, example, counsellor, all in one. Every drop in our blood is colored by it.
Some one has said of newspaper influence: “Let me write the headlines and you may write the rest,” which was another way of saying: “Let me handle the news and you may write the editorial articles, the criticisms and the other things, and I will have the greater influence.” It always has been a debatable question.
Northcliffe, the conspicuous figure in journalism during the great war, has said:
It is true that an intelligently conducted newspaper can inform and guide public opinion but this is done more through publishing the news than by the dictum of the editorial. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” must be the underlying principle of journalism in a democracy.
In an appeal to editors to help spread the war spirit, a writer in the Columbia University War Papers wrote:
Editorials, repeated editorials, are both desirable and necessary. But to one reader who is influenced by a given editorial many hundreds are influenced day by day by the headlines of the paper and by the wording and form of presentation of the news. It is therefore to a considered and continuous policy of news presentation that we must look primarily for help.