A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an OptimistRussell, T. Baron
Philosophy
A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist
Russell, T. Baron
Forecasting; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
Although the old newspaper was really a much more intelligent affair
than the popular dailies of the present decade--and it is chiefly
of daily papers that I am now speaking--it is not very likely that a
reversion will take place. It is a curious feature of all progress,
that however much an existing institution may be perceived to be
retrograde in comparison with older institutions, reversion hardly ever
occurs. We adapt and modify what we have. We do not revive what we have
lost. And the regeneration of the newspaper will be forced upon the
newspaper-office by the development of public intelligence. Comment
will probably during the next few decades be eliminated from daily
journalism altogether, and confined to serious weekly publications,
somewhat on the lines of our monthly reviews, and to other publications
summarising the latter, like the present Review of Reviews, perhaps
the most useful periodical now being issued, with the single exception
of The Times. Thus the daily newspaper will be entirely a vehicle
for the propagation of news, correctly so called: and very likely
it will become almost entirely colourless, politically, because a
well-informed public will resent obvious garbling or clearly unfair
selection. The newspaper reader will no longer (as now) want only to
hear what is said on a side more or less emotionally and hardly at
all reflectively embraced. He will want to know what is said on all
sides, and will make up his own mind, instead of swallowing whole the
printed opinions, real or momentarily assumed, of other people. Thus,
though the frantic popular paper of to-day will no doubt increase
and multiply, and replenish its circulation books, as long as the
present system of blind half-education survives, the newspaper which
satisfies the new age will be a very different affair. It will no
doubt discard many of the trivialities now reported as news, when a
black woman of Timbuctoo could hardly bring forth four piccaninnies
at a birth without the fact getting into the halfpenny London papers;
but it will record the really important news in ways far more graphic,
and with a far more complete appeal to the imagination, than we have
as yet any but the vaguest notion of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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