The Free Press
to consider certain other changes which were on the point
efore 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 i
, therefore, his power of giving true news and of printing sound opinion was limit
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
or even treasonable the matter might be, the proprietor was always at the choice of publishing matter which did
of the newspaper the large advertiser (as Capitalism developed and the controls became fewer and more in
logical, or, if you will, a
rces. In the immense complexity of the real world material, friction, and a million other things affect the ideal parallelogram of forces; and in econom
imately 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
iser, that of refusing the favour or patronage of his advertiseme
icy and opinion; and that he had also another most powerful a
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
r spread was the stronger, and what you got was a sort of imposition, often quite conscious and direct, of advertisin
tificial monopolies, both combatants are of a low, cunning, and unintelligent type. Minor friction due to the same cause is con
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 owner
basis, because the public has been taught to expect for 1d. what it co
ork even than this always negative and so
y of the State, superior to the officials in the State, nominating ministers and dismissing them, i
n us by surprise in the midst of a terrible war. It was undreamt of but a few years ago. It is already to-day the capital fact of our whole politi
y ordered by him. We are, if we talk in terms of real things (as men do in their private councils at Westminster) mainly governed to-day, not even by the professio
what we must inquire into before going further