Crystallizing Public Opinion

by Edward L. Bernays

As disseminator of news the newspaper holds an important position in American life. This has not always been the case, for the emphasis upon the news side is a development of recent years. Originally, the name newspaper was scarcely an accurate or appropriate designation for the units of the American press. So-called newspapers were, in fact, vehicles for the expression of opinion of their editors. They contained little or no news, as that word is understood to-day—largely because difficulties of communication made it impossible to obtain any but the most local items of interest. The public was accustomed to look to its press for the opinion of its favorite editor upon subjects of current interest rather than for the recital of mere facts.

To-day, on the other hand, the expression of editorial opinion is only secondarily the function of a newspaper; and thousands of persons read newspapers with whose editorial policy they do not in the slightest agree. Such a situation would have been nearly impossible in the days of Horace Greeley.

The need which the American press is to-day engaged in satisfying is the need for news. “A paper,” says Mr. Given,[32] “may succeed without printing editorials worth reading and without having any aim other than the making of money, but it cannot possibly thrive unless it gets the news and prints it in a pleasing and attractive form.”

Writing from a long experience with the profession of journalism, Will Irwin reaches the conclusion that[33] “news is the main thing, the vital consideration of the American newspaper; it is both an intellectual craving and a commercial need to the modern world. In popular psychology it has come to be a crying primal want of the mind, like hunger of the body. Tramp windjammers, taking on the pilot after a long cruise, ask for the papers before they ask, as formerly, for fresh fruit and vegetables. Whenever, in our later Western advance, we Americans set up a new mining camp, an editor, his type slung on burro-back, comes in with the missionaries, evangel himself of civilization. Most dramatically the San Francisco disaster illuminated this point. On the morning of April 20, 1906, the city’s population huddled in parks and squares, their houses gone, death of famine or thirst a rumor and a possibility. The editors of the three morning newspapers, expressing the true soldier spirit which inspires this most devoted profession, had moved their staffs to the suburb of Oakland, and there, on the presses of the Tribune, they had issued a combined Call-Chronicle-Examiner. When, at dawn, the paper was printed, an editor and a reporter loaded the edition into an automobile and drove it through the parks of the disordered city, giving copies away. They were fairly mobbed, they had to drive at top speed, casting out the sheets as they went, to make any progress at all. No bread wagon, no supply of blankets, caused half so much stir as did the arrival of the news.

“We need it, we crave it; this nerve of the modern world transmits thought and impulse from the brain of humanity to its muscles; the complex organism of modern society could no more move without it than a man could move without filaments and ganglia. On the commercial and practical side, the man of even small affairs must read news in the newspapers every day to keep informed on the thousand and one activities in the social structure which affect his business. On the intellectual and spiritual side, it is—save for the Church alone—our principal outlook on the higher intelligence. The thought of legislature, university, study, and pulpit comes to the common man first—and usually last—in the form of news. The tedious business of teaching reading in public schools has become chiefly a training to consume newspapers. We must go far up in the scale of culture before we find an intellectual equipment more a debtor to the formal education of school and college than to the haphazard education of news.”

The extent to which the editorial aspect of the newspaper has given way to an increased importance of the news columns is vividly illustrated in the anecdote about the Philadelphia North American, which Mr. Irwin relates. “The North American,” says Mr. Irwin, “had declared for local option. A committee of brewers waited on the editor; they represented one of the biggest groups in their business. ‘This is an ultimatum,’ they said. ‘You must change your policy or lose our advertising. We’ll be easy on you. We don’t ask you to alter your editorial policy, but you must stop printing news of local-option victories.’[34] So the deepest and shrewdest enemies of the body politic give practical testimony to the ‘power of the press’ in its modern form.”

In the case of the brewers of Philadelphia it is my own opinion that if they had been well advised, instead of attempting to interfere with the policy of the North American, they would have made it a point to bring to the attention of the North American every instance of the defeat of local option. The newspaper would undoubtedly have published both sides of the story, as far as both sides consisted of news.

It is because he acts as the purveyor of truthful, accurate and verifiable news to the press that the conscientious and successful counsel on public relations is looked upon with favor by the journalist. And in the Code of Ethics recently adopted in Washington by a national editors’ conference, his function is given acknowledgment. Just as in the case of the other mediums for the dissemination of information, mediums which range from the lecture platform to the radio, the press, too, looks to the public relations counsel for information about the causes he represents.

Since news is the newspaper’s backbone, it is obvious that an understanding of what news actually is must be an integral part of the equipment of the public relations counsel. For the public relations counsel must not only supply news—he must create news. This function as the creator of news is even more important than his others.

It has always been interesting to me that a concise, comprehensive definition of news has never been written. What news is, every newspaper man instinctively knows, particularly as it concerns the needs of his own paper. But it is almost as difficult to define news as it is to describe a circular staircase without making corkscrew gestures with one’s hand, or as to define some of the abstruse concepts of the metaphysician, like space or time or reality.