PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

Chicago business men in 1916 for preferring a particular newspaper,
and to the five features which most interested 67.5% of the New York
College students in 1920.
This would seem to show that the tastes of business men and college
students in big cities to-day still correspond more or less to the
averaged judgments of newspaper editors in big cities twenty years
ago. Since that time the proportion of features to news has
undoubtedly increased, and so has the circulation and the size of
newspapers. Therefore, if to-day you could secure accurate replies
from more typical groups than college students or business and
professional men, you would expect to find a smaller percentage of
time devoted to public affairs, as well as a smaller percentage of
space. On the other hand you would expect to find that the average man
spends more than the quarter of an hour on his newspaper, and that
while the percentage of space given to public affairs is less than
twenty years ago the net amount is greater.
No elaborate deductions are to be drawn from these figures. They help
merely to make somewhat more concrete our notions of the effort that
goes day by day into acquiring the data of our opinions. The
newspapers are, of course, not the only means, but they are certainly
the principal ones. Magazines, the public forum, the chautauqua, the
church, political gatherings, trade union meetings, women's clubs, and
news serials in the moving picture houses supplement the press. But
taking it all at the most favorable estimate, the time each day is
small when any of us is directly exposed to information from our
unseen environment.
CHAPTER V
SPEED, WORDS, AND CLEARNESS
1
The unseen environment is reported to us chiefly by words. These words
are transmitted by wire or radio from the reporters to the editors who
fit them into print. Telegraphy is expensive, and the facilities are
often limited. Press service news is, therefore, usually coded. Thus a
dispatch which reads,--
"Washington, D. C. June I.--The United States regards the question of
German shipping seized in this country at the outbreak of hostilities
as a closed incident,"