Jeff Jarvis"Modern journalism, which is supposed to instruct and direct public opinion by reporting and discussing events, usually turns out to be simply a mechanism for controlling collective attention." - Robert E. Park, "The Crowd and the Public," 1904.
"So-called public opinion is generally nothing more than a naive collective impulse which can be manipulated by catchwords." - Robert E. Park.
guenther@jeffjarvis yes, and writers are the engineers of the human soul, but we must not become too cynical