is public opinion stubborn or malleable?
there is a divergence of opinion as to whether the public mind is malleable or stubborn—whether it is a passive or an active element. on the one hand is the profound belief that “you can’t change human nature.” on the other hand is the equally firm assurance that certain well-defined institutions modify and alter public opinion.
there is a uniformity of opinion in this country upon many issues. when this uniformity accords with our own beliefs we call it an expression of the public conscience. when, however, it runs contrary to our beliefs we call it the regimentation of the public mind and are inclined to ascribe it to insidious propaganda.
uniformity is, in fact, largely natural and only partly artificial. public opinion may be as much the producer of “insidious propaganda” as its product. naturally enough, where broad ideas are involved, criticisms of the state of the public’s mind and of its origin come most frequently from groups that are out of sympathy with the accepted
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point of view. they find the public unreceptive to their point of view, and justly or unjustly they attribute this to the influence of antagonistic interests upon the public mind.
these groups see the press, the lecture platform, the schools, the advertisements, the churches, the radio, the motion picture screen, the magazines daily reaching millions. they see that the preponderant point of view in most, if not all, these institutions conforms to the preponderant state of mind of the public.
they argue from the one to the other and reach their conclusions without much difficulty. they do not stop to think that agreement in point of view between the public and these institutions may often be the result of the control exercised by the public mind over these institutions.
many outside forces, however, do go to influence public opinion. the most obvious of these forces are parental influence, the school room, the press, motion pictures, advertising, magazines, lectures, the church, the radio.
to answer the question as to the stubbornness or malleability of the public, let us analyze the press in its relation to public opinion, since the press stands preëminent among the various institutions which are commonly designated as leaders or moulders of the public mind. by the press, in this instance, i mean the daily
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press. americans are a newspaper-reading public. they have become accustomed to look to their morning and evening papers for the news of the world and for the opinions of their leaders. and while the individual newspaper reader does not give a very considerable portion of his day to this occupation, many persons find time to read more than one newspaper every day.
it is not surprising that the man who is outside the current of prevailing public opinion should regard the daily press as a coercive force.
discussions of the public’s reaction to the press are two-sided, just as are discussions of the influence of the pulpit or other forces. some authorities hold that the public mind is stubborn in regard to the press and that the press has little influence upon it. there are graphic instances of the stubbornness of the public point of view. a most interesting example is the reëlection of mayor hylan of new york by an overwhelming majority in the face of the opposition of all but two of the metropolitan dailies. it is also noteworthy that in 1909, gaynor was elected mayor of new york with every paper except one opposing his candidacy. likewise, mayor mitchel of new york was defeated for reëlection in 1917, although all the new york papers except two hearst papers and the new york call supported him. in boston, in a recent election, a man was
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elected as mayor who had been convicted of a penal offense, and elected in the face of the practically united opposition of all the newspapers of that city. how would such authors as everett dean martin, walter lippmann and upton sinclair explain these incidents? how, on the theory of the regimentation of the public mind by the daily press, can such thinkers explain the sharpness with which the public sometimes rejects the advocacies of a united press? these instances are not frequent; but they show that other influences beside the press enter into the making of a public opinion and that these forces must never be disregarded in the estimate of the quality and stability of a prevalent public opinion.
francis e. leupp, writing in the atlantic monthly for february, 1910, on “the waning power of the press,” remarks that mayor gaynor’s comments shortly after his election in 1909 “led up to the conclusion that in our common sense generation nobody cares what the newspapers say.” mr. leupp continues: “unflattering as such a verdict may be, probably the majority of a community if polled as a jury would concur in it. the airy dismissal of some proposition as ‘mere newspaper talk’ is heard at every social gathering until one who is brought up to regard the press as a mighty factor in modern civilization
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is tempted to wonder whether it has actually lost the power it used to wield among us.”
and h. l. mencken, writing in the same magazine for march, 1914, declares that “one of the principal marks of an educated man, indeed, is the fact that he does not take his opinions from newspapers—not, at any rate, from the militant, crusading newspapers. on the contrary, his attitude toward them is almost always one of frank cynicism, with indifference as its mildest form and contempt as its commonest. he knows that they are constantly falling into false reasoning about the things within his personal knowledge,—that is, within the narrow circle of his special education,—and so he assumes that they make the same, or even worse, errors about other things, whether intellectual or moral. this assumption, it may be said at once, is quite justified by the facts.”
the second point of view holds that the daily press and the other leading forces merely accept, reflect and intensify established public opinion and are, therefore, responsible for the uniformity of public reaction. a vivid statement of the point of view of the man who typifies this group is found in everett dean martin’s volume on “the behavior of crowds.” he says:6 “the modern man has in the printing press a wonderfully
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effective means for perpetuating crowd-movements and keeping great masses of people constantly under the sway of certain crowd-ideas. every crowd-group has its magazines, press agents, and special ‘literature’ with which it continually harangues its members and possible converts. many books, and especially certain works of fiction of the ‘best seller’ type, are clearly reading mob phenomena.”
there is a third group which perhaps comes nearer the truth, which holds that the press, just as other mediums of education or dissemination, brings about a very definite change in public opinion. a most graphic illustration of what such mediums can do to change opinions upon fundamental and important matters is the woman suffrage question and its victory over established points of view. the press, the pulpit, the lecture platform, the motion pictures and the other mediums for reaching the public brought about a complete popular conversion. other examples of the change that may be brought about in public opinion in this way, by such institutions of authority, is the present attitude towards birth control and towards health education.
naturally the press, like other institutions which present facts or opinions, is restricted, often unconsciously, sometimes consciously, by various controlling conditions. certain people
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talk of the censorship enacted by the prejudices and predispositions of the public itself. some, such as upton sinclair, ascribe to the advertisers a conscious and powerful control of publications. others, like walter lippmann, find that an effective barrier between the public and the event exists in the powerful influence which, he says, is exerted in certain cases on the press by the so-called quality public which the newspapers’ advertisers wish to reach and among whom the newspapers must circulate if the advertising is to be successful. mr. lippmann observes that although such a restriction may exist, much of what may be attributed to censorship in the newspaper, often is actually inadequate presentation of the events it seeks to describe.
on this point he says:7 “it follows that in the reporting of strikes, the easiest way is to let the news be uncovered by the overt act, and to describe the event as the story of interference with the reader’s life. this is where his attention is first aroused and his interest most easily enlisted. a great deal, i think myself, of the crucial part of what looks to the worker and the reformer as deliberate misrepresentation on the part of newspapers, is the direct outcome of a practical difficulty in uncovering the news, and the emotional difficulty of making distinct facts interesting
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unless, as emerson says, we can ‘perceive’ (them) and can ‘set about translating (them) at once into parallel facts.’”
in view then of the possibility of a malleable public opinion the counsel on public relations, desiring to obtain a hearing for any given cause, simply utilizes existent channels to obtain expression for the point of view he represents. how this is done will be considered later.
because of the importance of channels of thought communication, it is vital for the public relations counsel to study carefully the relationship between public opinion and the organs that maintain it or that influence it to change. we shall look into this interaction and its effect in the next chapter.
