Page:Public Opinion (Lippmann).djvu/76

62, and recompute the percentages. For the advertisements occupied only an infinitesimal part of the conscious preference of the Chicago group or the college group. I think this is justifiable for our purposes because the press prints what advertisements it can get, whereas the rest of the paper is designed to the taste of its readers. The table would then read:

In this revised table if you add up the items which may be supposed to deal with public affairs, that is to say war, foreign, political, miscellaneous, business news, and opinion, you find a total of 76.5% of the edited space devoted in 1900 to the 70.6% of reasons given by Chicago business men in 1916 for preferring a particular newspaper, and to the five features which most interested 67.5% of the New York College students in 1920.

This would seem to show that the tastes of business men and college students in big cities to-day still correspond more or less to the averaged judgments of newspaper editors in big cities twenty