breakfast food, my newspaper containing such news and such an opinion
would obviously not touch the general thought and will at all. No
one, outside the small catholic minority, wants to hear about the
Pope; and no one, Catholic or Muslim, will believe that he has become
a Methodist. No one alive will consent to eat tin-tacks. A paper
printing stuff like that is free to do so, the proprietor could
certainly get his employees, or most of them, to write as he told
them. But his paper would stop selling.

It is perfectly clear that the Press in itself simply represents the
news which its owners desire to print and the opinions which they
desire to propagate; and this argument against the Press has always
been used by those who are opposed to its influence at any moment.

But there is no smoke without fire, and the element of truth in the
legend that the Press "represents" opinion lies in this, that there is
a _limit_ of outrageous contradiction to known truths beyond which it
cannot go without heavy financial loss through failure of circulation,
which is synonymous with failure of power. When people talked of the
newspaper owners as "representing public opinion" there was a shadow
of reality in such talk, absurd as it seems to us to-day. Though the
doctrine that newspapers are "organs of public opinion" was (like
most nineteenth century so-called "Liberal" doctrines) falsely stated
and hypocritical, it had that element of truth about it--at least, in
the earlier phase of newspaper development. There is even a certain
savour of truth hanging about it to this day.

Newspapers are only offered for sale; the purchase of them is not (as
yet) compulsorily enforced. A newspaper can, therefore, never succeed
unless it prints news in which people are interested and on the nature