Note 5 — Chapter IV · THE NEWSPAPER AS AN ORGAN OF OPINION

Although this criticism in the text sounds rather harsh, it by no means equals many things said in the Socialist papers against the “Steel Press.” German papers have never recovered from the combination of bullying and corruption exercised by Bismarck, and still to some extent continued, and since his time great commercial concerns like the Stahl-Verband have had an almost equally baneful influence. I was unfortunately in Berlin at the time of the “Titanic” disaster, and looking at the records of that catastrophic incident even in the best papers, I was not impressed either by their critical power in assessing the value of news, or by their judgment in commenting on it.