3658925934

a lost individual swept up in a crowd. He can think about what he reads, in silence, and despite his
ordinary passivity he may change newspapers until he finds the one that suits him or that he thinks
will suit him. On the other hand, the journalist seeks to please him and to keep him. Statistics of
circulation and subscriptions are excellent thermometers, which are often consulted and which warn
the editors of the lines of behavior and thought to follow. An indication of this nature motivated the
sudden about-face of a well-known paper in a famous affair, and such a recantation is not unusual.
The public, then, sometimes reacts on the journalist, but he is continually acting on his public. After a
few trial runs, the reader has chosen his paper, the paper has selected its readers, there has been
mutual selection, hence mutual adaptation. The one has a paper which pleases him and flatters his
prejudices and passions; the other has hold of a reader to his liking, docile and credulous, whom he
can easily direct with a few concessions to his positions, analogous to the oratorical precautions of
the ancient orators. The man of one book is to be feared, it has been said; but what is he beside the
man of one newspaper! This man is each one of us at heart, or nearly so, and therein lies the danger of
modern times. Therefore, far from preventing the action of the publicist from being finally decisive on
his public, the double selection, the double adaptation, which makes the public a homogeneous group,
pliable and well-known to the writer, enables him to act with more force and certainty. A crowd is, in
general, much less homogeneous than a public; it always swells with many bystanders—simply
curious or semi-involved—who are momentarily caught up and assimilated but succeed in making it
difficult for the incoherent elements to achieve a common direction. . . .
As every supplier has two sorts of clientele, one fixed and the other floating, there are also two
sorts of publics for newspapers and journals: a consolidated stable public and a floating, unstable
public. The proportion of these two is very unequal from one newspaper to the next; for the older
newspapers, organs of old parties, the second group does not count, or scarcely so, and I agree that
here the action of the publicist is singularly hindered by the intolerance of the organization he has
entered and from which he will be driven by a manifest dissidence. On the other hand, when it does
occur in such a situation, his action is extremely durable and penetrating. Note, finally, that faithful
publics traditionally loyal to a paper tend to disappear, being increasingly replaced by more mobile
publics on which the talented journalist often has a more effective, if not more lasting, hold. This
evolution of journalism can rightly be lamented, because firm publics make for honest and convinced
publicists, just as capricious publics make for light, versatile, unsettling publicists; but this evolution
certainly seems irresistible at present and not easily reversible, and one can see the growing
resources of social power it opens up for writers. It may be that this evolution results in increasing
subservience of mediocre publicists to the whims of their public, but it certainly subjugates the public
more and more to the despotism of important publicists. Far more than statesmen, even the most
elevated, these men make opinion and lead the world. And when they have become indispensable,
what a solid throne is theirs! . . .
Indeed, one has only to open one’s eyes to see that the division of a society into publics, an entirely
psychological division which corresponds to differences in states of mind, tends not to substitute
itself for, but to superimpose itself more and more visibly and effectively on, divisions along
economic, religious, aesthetic, political lines, and divisions into corporations, sects, professions,
schools or parties. It is not uniquely the crowds of old, the audiences of orators and preachers, that
are dominated or enlarged by their corresponding publics—the parliamentary and religious publics;
there is not one sect that does not wish to have its own newspaper in order to surround itself with a
public extending far beyond it, causing a sort of mobile atmosphere in which it will be bathed, a
collective awareness by which it will be illuminated. And we cannot say of this awareness that it is a