Posted by
Arrow on Sunday, August 27, 2006 2:30:09 PM
Apropos of 130 Years Later
"[The press] has defended official criminals, on party pretexts, until it has created a United States Senate whose members are incapable of determining what crime against law and the dignity of their own body is, they are so morally blind, and has made light of dishonesty till we have as a result a Congress which contracts to work for a certain sum and then deliberately steals additional wages out of the public pocket and is pained and surprised that anybody would worry about a little thing like that. . .
That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditchdigging and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
The trouble is that the stupid people-- who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations-- do believe and are molded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper and there is where the harm lies."
Mark Twain, License of the Press, A Talk Before the Monday Evening Club, Hartford, 1873.