The business may be put in many ways. But
one way of putting it is simply to say that a monopoly of bad journalism
is resisting the possibility of good journalism. Journalism is not the
same thing as literature; but there is good and bad journalism, as there
is good and bad literature, as there is good and bad football. For the
last twenty years or so the plutocrats who govern England have allowed the
English nothing but bad journalism. Very bad journalism, simply
considered as journalism.
It always takes a considerable time to see the simple and central fact
about anything. All sorts of things have been said about the modern Press,
especially the Yellow Press; that it is Jingo or Philistine or
sensational or wrongly inquisitive or vulgar or indecent or trivial; but
none of these have anything really to do with the point.
The point about the Press is that it is not what it is called. It is not
the "popular Press." It is not the public Press. It is not an organ of
public opinion. It is a conspiracy of a very few millionaires, all
sufficiently similar in type to agree on the limits of what this great
nation (to which we belong) may know about itself and its friends and
enemies. The ring is not quite complete; there are old-fashioned and
honest papers: but it is sufficiently near to completion to produce on the
ordinary purchaser of news the practical effects of a corner and a
monopoly.
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