, Fifty
The newspaper, therefore , abnormal as it in itself may seem with its flaring headlines, its blurred and smudgy pages of splashy cartoons and illustrated advertisements, its lack of a sense of proportion when one paper may give twelve columns of one issue to a murder trial and another paper of the same date in the same
city give twelve lines to the same case, - the newspaper in all of these stages of its development is but recording the spirit of the times as it has been disclosed in other and corresponding activi ties. Like them also it gives evidence of the changes in purpose
and in method that are already on the way. These illustrations have been suggested to indicate that the
task of the historian is often not to ascertain what the press says, but to go behind the face of the returns and to determine why it
says what it says,when it says it, and what is the effect of what it has said . Back of the newspaper are the conditions that have made it what it is , - the sources from which its news has been
derived ; the reporters who have gathered from the four quarters
of the globe the material for its columns; the men who have written its editorials, its special articles , and its correspondence ; Bohemia and the school of journalism ; the personal and pro fessional relations of members of the press. All of the conditions affecting the press have produced an infinitely complex result
that have made the work of the historian in dealing with it as historical material one of enormous difficulty. The press itself records in a measure the influences that have made it what it is, - yet only in part. It does not fully record its relation to governmental authority that by censorship , regula
tion , and control of news service has from time to time laid a heavy hand on the periodical press; it can not always record the
existence of a public opinion that has made it what it is, or the absence of a public opinion that has prevented it from becoming what it might otherwise have been .99 To understand the value of the press as historical material it is necessary to know the
records the press gives of itself; the legislation that has modified it and the degree to which in some countries it has controlled it; the lives of those who have so largely made it what it is. And 09 F . V . Keys, “ The Great Illusion about Germany,” North American
Review , March, 1918, 207: 345- 353.
