THE INTERACTION OF PUBLIC OPINION WITH THE FORCES THAT HELP TO MAKE IT
The public and the press, or for that matter, the public and any force that modifies public opinion, interact. Action and interaction are continually going on between the forces projected out to the public and the public itself. The public relations counsel must understand this fact in its broadest and most detailed implications. He must understand not only what these various forces are, but he must be able to evaluate their relative powers with fair accuracy. Let us consider again the case of a newspaper, as representative of other mediums of communication.
“We print,” says the New York Times, “all the news that’s fit to print.” Immediately the question arises (as Elmer Davis, the historian of the Times tells us that it did when the motto was first adopted) what news is fit to print? By what standard is the editorial decision reached which includes one kind of news and excludes another kind? The Times itself has not been, in its long
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 and conspicuously successful career, entirely free from difficulties on this point.
Thus in “The History of The New York Times,” Mr. Davis feels the need for justifying the extent to which that paper featured Theodore Tilton’s action against the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher for alienation of Mrs. Tilton’s affections and his conduct with her. Mr. Davis says (pages 124-125): “No doubt a good many readers of the Times thought that the paper was giving an undue amount of space to this chronicle of sin and suffering. Those complaints come in often enough even in these days from readers who appreciate the paper’s general reluctance to display news of this sort, and wonder why a good general rule should occasionally be violated. But there was a reason in the Beecher case, as there has usually been a reason in similar affairs since. Dr. Beecher was one of the most prominent clergymen in the country; there was a natural curiosity as to whether he was practicing what he preached. One of the counsel at the trial declared that ‘all Christendom was hanging on its outcome.’ Full reporting of its course was not a mere pandering to vulgar curiosity, but a recognition of the value of the case as news.”
The simple fact that such a slogan can exist and be accepted is for our purpose an important point. Somewhere there must be a standard to
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 which the editors of the Times can conform, as well as a large clientele of constant readers to whom that standard is satisfactory. “Fit” must be defined by the editors of the Times in a way which meets with the approval of enough persons to enable the paper to maintain its reading public. As soon, however, as the definition is attempted, difficulties arise.
Professor W. G. Bleyer, in an article in his book on journalism, first stresses the importance of completeness in the news columns of a paper, then goes on to say that “the only important limitations to completeness are those imposed by the commonly accepted ideas of decency embodied in the words, ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ and by the rights of privacy. Carefully edited newspapers discriminate between what the public is entitled to know and what an individual has a right to keep private.”
On the other hand, when Professor Bleyer attempts to define what news is fit to print and what the public is entitled to know, he discusses generalizations capable of wide and frequently inconsistent interpretation. “News,” says he, “is anything timely which is significant to newspaper readers in their relations to the community, the state and the nation.”
Who is to determine what is significant and what is not? Who is to decide which of the individual’s
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 relations to the community are safeguarded by his right of privacy and which are not? Such a definition tells us nothing more definite than does the slogan which it attempts to define. We must look further for a standard by which these definitions are applied. There must be a consensus of public opinion on which the newspaper falls back for its standards.
The truth is that while it appears to be forming the public opinion on fundamental matters, the press is often conforming to it.
It is the office of the public relations counsel to determine the interaction between the public, and the press and the other mediums affecting public opinion. It is as important to conform to the standards of the organ which projects ideas as it is to present to this organ such ideas as will conform to the fundamental understanding and appreciation of the public to which they are ultimately to appeal. There is as much truth in the proposition that the public leads institutions as in the contrary proposition that the institutions lead the public.
As an illustration of the manner in which newspapers are inclined to accept the judgments of their readers in presenting material to them, we have this anecdote which Rollo Ogden tells in the Atlantic Monthly for July, 1906, about a
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 letter which Wendell Phillips wished to have published in a Boston paper.
“The editor read it over, and said, ‘Mr. Phillips, that is a very good and interesting letter, and I shall be glad to publish it; but I wish you would consent to strike out the last paragraph.’
“‘Why,’ said Phillips, ‘that paragraph is the precise thing for which I wrote the whole letter. Without that it would be pointless.’
“‘Oh, I see that,’ replied the editor; ‘and what you say is perfectly true! I fully agree with it all myself. Yet it is one of those things which it will not do to say publicly. However, if you insist upon it, I will publish it as it stands.’
“It was published the next morning, and along with it a short editorial reference to it, saying that a letter from Mr. Phillips would be found in another column, and that it was extraordinary that so keen a mind as his should have............