Chesterton on The Press

Kevin, an old reporter/commenter/Pubbie/church usher, notes that The Press--at least the print variety--is near its end.

Chesterton would simply shoot it to put us out of its misery.  (Yes, I typed that exactly as you see it.)

.....misrepresentations of speeches is only a part of a vast journalistic misrepresentation of all life as it is.  Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction.  Life is one world, and life as seen in the newspapers another; the public enjoys both, but it is more or less conscious of the difference......But the people know in their hearts that journalism is a conventional art like any other, that it selects, heightens, and falsifies.

That's the kindest thing he had to say.

For my part I do feel very strongly about the frivolity and irresponsibility of the press.  It seems impossible to exaggerate the evil that can be done by a corrupt and unscrupulous press.......bad journalism does directly ruin the nation, considered as a nation; it acts on the corporate national will and sways the common national decision.  It may force a decision in a few hours that will be an incurable calamity for hundreds of years.

He's not done yet!

.......the whole modern world, or at any rate the whole modern Press, has a perpetual and consuming terror of plain morals.  Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon merely moral grounds.  If I beat my grandmother to death tomorrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say anything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong........But of this simple moral explanation modern journalism has, as I say, a standing fear.  It will call the action anything else--mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful.

The first and second excerpts surely address today's Press just as certainly as the one of Chesterton's time, and Chesterton's warning about 'ruining the nation' depicts the drama unfolding before our eyes.  As to the third:  the Press' reluctance to use terms like "sin" and "immoral" points to the Press' faulty morality.  They would prefer to hold themselves as paragons of virtue--thus, introducing morality with all the dangers of being called out for their own foibles is never going to happen.

Sad.  The Kettle refuses to call the Pot a blaggard.