It is because opinion is so vitally dependent upon the truthfulness of facts that observers have come more and more to insist on the connexion between liberty and the news.[41] For a judging public is unfree if it has to judge not between competing theories of what an agreed set of facts mean, but between competing distortions of what is, at the outset, unedifying and invented mythology. Things like the incident of the _Maine_, the Pekin Massacre which never occurred, the Zenoviev letter, make an enormous difference to what Mr Lippmann has happily termed my “stereotype” of the environment about which I have to make up my mind. I bring already to its interpretation a mass of preconceptions which tend to distort it. If there is prepared for me “evidence” which has been distilled through the filter of a special interest the distortion may become so complete as to make a rational judgment impossible. The English journalist who invented the word “dole” has built into the minds of innumerable people of the comfortable classes a picture of the unemployed in England as a mass of work-shy persons, comfortably lazy and anxious at all costs to live parasitically upon the taxpayer; the proven fact that less than a fraction of one per cent really avoids the effort to work is unable to penetrate the miasma of that stereotype. The newspapers which belong to the Power Trust in America, the subsidized press in Paris, the journals which must satisfy Mussolini or suffer suppression, the government newspapers of Communist Russia, these are all efforts to dictate an environment to the citizen in order that the stereotype he forms may serve some interest their owners, or controllers, are anxious to promote. Men may actually go out to die for purposes in which they profoundly believe, though the cause which, as they judge, embodies those purposes has not, in fact, the remotest connexion with it.