Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 129.djvu/50

 is a significant fact that public interest in newspaper ethics and the conduct of the press was never so widespread in this country as it is to-day. Before the war, people who discussed the subject concerned themselves primarily with the question whether the newspapers degraded public morals by their exploitation of divorce scandals and their general preoccupation with men’s misdeeds, and the quest ion whether large advertisers, and especially department stores, could bring about the suppression or distortion of news affecting their financial interests. The war, however, with its censorship, its development of the art of propaganda, and the improvement which it brought about in methods of swaying masses of men by controlling or doctoring the news, has made us realize that the problem of newspaper conduct is larger and more fundamental than we had supposed it to be. We now see that it is immensely important that the press shall give us the facts straight; and not merely the facts relating to department stores and other large business concerns, but the entire mass of facts about the world in which we live — political, economic, religious, scientific, social, and industrial. It is beginning to be understood that, as Mr, Walter Lippmann ably argued in his recent book on Liberty and the News, access to accurate accounts of what is going on about us is one of the indispensable conditions of freedom. We talk a great deal about the right of the individual to express his opinions, and