14. Only those who have been made or marred by it can fully realize the power that publicity wields in modern life. If it never happens to have blown your way you take it for granted. But the popular favourite and the ex-popular favourite know how its winds can nourish and destroy. Individuals nearly always affect to despise what they read in the newspapers but men in the mass are fatally swayed by it. The newspapers rule us. They would be as good as any other rulers if they had a corresponding sense of their responsibility, but this, with two or three shining exceptions, they sadly lack. With the run of the popular press the guiding principle is merely to climb on the band wagon; in other words, to out-praise when praise is in order and to out-decry the moment the wind changes. Our rulers
