The Safety First movement, by its use of every form of appeal, from poster to circular, from lecture to law enforcement, from motion pictures to “safety weeks,” is bringing about a gradual change in the attitude of a safety-deserving public towards the taking of unnecessary risks.
The Rockefeller Foundation, confronted with the serious problem of the hookworm in the South and in other localities, has brought about a change in the habits of large sections of rural populations by analysis, investigation, applied medical principles, and public education.
The moulder of public opinion must enlist the established point of view. This is true of the press as well as of other forces. Mr. Mencken mixes cynicism and truth when he declares that the chief difficulty confronting a newspaper which tries to carry out independent and thoughtful policies “does not lie in the direction of the board of directors, but in the direction of the public which buys the paper.”2
The New York Tribune, as an example of editorial bravery, points out in an advertisement published May 23, 1922, that though “news knows no order in the making” and though “a newspaper must carry the news, both pleasant and unpleasant,” nevertheless, it is the duty of any newspaper to realize that there is a possibility of selective action, and that “in times of stress and bleak despair a newspaper has a hard and fast duty to perform in keeping up the morale of the community.”
Indeed, the instances are frequent and accessible to the recollection of any reader in which newspapers have consciously maintained a point of view toward which the public is either hostile or cold.
Occasionally, of course, even the established point of view is alterable. The two Baltimore Suns do brave their public and have been braving their public for some time, not entirely without success. As severe a critic as Oswald Garrison Villard points out that though modern Baltimore is