Chapter 13

NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY

Let it be granted that, as the loud-voiced herald hired by the Eolithic
tribe to cry the news of the coming day along the caves, preceded the
chosen Tribal Bard who sang the more picturesque history of the tribe,
so is Journalism senior to Literature, in that Journalism meets the
first tribal need after warmth, food, and women.

In new countries it shows clear trace of its descent from the Tribal
Herald. A tribe thinly occupying large spaces feels lonely. It desires
to hear the roll-call of its members cried often and loudly; to comfort
itself with the knowledge that there are companions just below the
horizon. It employs, therefore, heralds to name and describe all who
pass. That is why newspapers of new countries seem often so outrageously
personal. The tribe, moreover, needs quick and sure knowledge of
everything that touches on its daily life in the big spaces--earth, air,
and water news which the Older Peoples have put behind them. That is why
its newspapers so often seem so laboriously trivial.

For example, a red-nosed member of the tribe, Pete O'Halloran, comes in
thirty miles to have his horse shod, and incidentally smashes the
king-bolt of his buckboard at a bad place in the road. The Tribal
Herald--a thin weekly, with a patent inside--connects the red nose and
the breakdown with an innuendo which, to the outsider, is clumsy libel.
But the Tribal Herald understands that two-and-seventy families of the
tribe may use that road weekly. It concerns them to discover whether the
accident was due to Pete being drunk or, as Pete protests, to the
neglected state of the road. Fifteen men happen to know that Pete's nose
is an affliction, not an indication. One of them loafs across and
explains to the Tribal Herald, who, next week, cries aloud that the road
ought to be mended. Meantime Pete, warmed to the marrow at having
focussed the attention of his tribe for a few moments, retires thirty
miles up-stage, pursued by advertisements of buckboards guaranteed not
to break their king-bolts, and later (which is what the tribe were after
all the time) some tribal authority or other mends the road.

This is only a big-scale diagram, but with a little attention you can
see the tribal instinct of self-preservation quite logically
underrunning all sorts of queer modern developments.

As the tribe grows, and men do not behold the horizon from edge to
unbroken edge, their desire to know all about the next man weakens a
little--but not much. Outside the cities are still the long distances,
the 'vast, unoccupied areas' of the advertisements; and the men who come
and go yearn to keep touch with and report themselves as of old to
their lodges. A man stepping out of the dark into the