We may take it, then, that Propaganda was, in order of time, the first motive of the Free Press and the first cause of its production.
Now from this fact arises a consideration of great importance to our subject. This Propagandist origin of the Free Press stamped it from its outset with a character it still bears, and will continue to bear, until it has had that effect in correcting, and, perhaps, destroying, the Official Press, to which I shall later turn.
I mean that the Free Press has had stamped upon it the character of _disparate particularism_.
Wherever I go, my first object, if I wish to find out the truth, is to get hold of the Free Press in France as in England, and even in America. But I know that wherever I get hold of such an organ it will be very strongly coloured with the opinion, or even fanaticism, of some minority. The Free Press, as a whole, if you add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated statement against another, does give you a true view of the state of society in which you live. The Official Press to-day gives you an absurdly false one everywhere. What a caricature--and what a base, empty caricature--of England or France or Italy you get in the "Times," or the "Manchester Guardian," the "Matin," or the "Tribune"! No one of them is in any sense general--or really national.
The Free Press gives you the truth; but only in disjointed sections, for it is _disparate_ and it is _particularist_: it is marked with isolation--and it is so marked because its origin lay in various and most diverse _propaganda_: because it came later than the official Press of Capitalism, and was, in its origins, but a reaction against it.
The second motive, that of indignation against _falsehood_, came to work much later than the motive of propaganda.
Men gradually came to notice that one thing after another of great public interest, sometimes of vital public interest, was deliberately suppressed in the principal great official papers, and that positive falsehoods were increasingly suggested, or stated.
There was more than this. For long the _owner_ of a newspaper had for the most part been content to regard it as a revenue-producing thing. The _editor_ was supreme in matters of culture and opinion. True, the editor, being revocable and poor, could not pretend to full political power. But it was a sort of dual arrangement which yet modified the power of the vulgar owner.