The press and the public. (excerpts from article published by International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation)

In last month's "Archives" column we reprinted the pessimistic views expressed by the Colombian writer Baldomero Sanin Cano in his contribution to a study on the educational role of the press carried out by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation in 1993. Published below are excerpts from the contribution to the same study made by the American journalist Paul Scott Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News.

A newspaper may at times be literary and educative; it may reproduce a lecture or print admirable articles of an instructive or entertaining nature; it may publish a story or even, bit by bit, an entire novel. But it does not exist primarily for any of these purposes. A newspaper is not a speech or a radio talk, for it deals in the written, not the spoken word, and there is a vast distinction. A newspaper is not a magazine. It does not consist primarily of stories and articles slowly prepared far in advance and selected carefully at leisure. A newspaper is not a book. In no circumstances can it be thought of as the logical elaborate statement and development, through from beginning to end, of a plot or a thesis. Those who want to attend courses of study, or to enjoy literature, or to hear eloquence, or to go thoroughly into some subject, must attend a school or an assembly hall, must consult a book or a magazine.

A newspaper is something quite different. It exists for the purpose of giving its readers the news of the day every day. Everything else is secondary.

What then is news? It is a more or less skillful, more or less arbitrary selection of events snatched hastily from current life to be reported and spread before the reader with a minimum of delay.

What governs the selection? Why must some things be told hut not others? Why are columns devoted to certain events but only a line or so to others?

In free countries, the selection of news is usually a compromise between what the proprietors of the paper think should be printed, and what the editors of the paper think their readers would be most interested in. Some papers are subsidized by special political or economic interests. The purpose of such subsidies is to influence the selection and presentation of news. But most great newspapers today avoid subsidies because they wish to remain independent. They seek to make profits by selling copies of the paper and by selling advertising space in the paper. For both these purposes, the more readers they have the more prosperous and free they will be. The determining factor in the selection of news is therefore usually, in the long run, the editors' idea of what will attract the largest number of readers.

Let us not deceive ourselves. Many experiments have been made, and it is now well established that newspapers devoted mainly to the fair and serious presentation of political, economic, scientific and artistic, events must be content to sell few copies. The big circulations go to the papers which give only a minimum of space to such news, and devote their pages primarily to photographs and brief articles having to do with crime, sex, sports and cinema actors, with, by way of international interest, frequent chauvinistic attacks on foreign nations.