The very fact that newspapers must sell to the public is an evidence that they must please the public and in a measure obey it. In the press there is a very human tendency to compromise between giving the public what it wants and giving the public what it should want. This is equally true in music, where artists like McCormack or Rachmaninoff popularize their programs. It is true in the drama, where managers, producers and authors combine to adjust plots, situations and endings to what the public will be willing to pay to see. It is true in art, in architecture, in motion pictures. It is true of the lecture platform and of the pulpit.
So-called radical preachers, for example, usually succeed in broadcasting their radical ideas only when their following is prepared to accept their views. The Rev. Percy Stickney Grant was a great problem to the upholders of the accepted order, only because there was so large a body of parishioners eager to hear and accept his dicta. The Rev. Billy Sunday, evangelist, derived his following from among people who were awaiting a faith-stirring appeal.
Another evidence of the fact that a powerful outside influence helps make the forces that mould public opinion is shown by the newspapers in the actual selection of news. The public actually demands that certain types of facts be omitted. The standing problem of every newspaper office—the winnowing of the day’s news from the mass of material that reaches the editorial desks—illustrates pointedly the need there is to examine the reasons which prompt the editors in selection.
In an exceedingly interesting advertisement published by the New York Tribune, on April 19, 1922, the Tribune’s editors state the problem most graphically. The advertisement is headed, “What Else Happened That Day?” and it reads as follows: