GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK - NEWS AND GOVERNMENT - CHAPTER XIV
NEWS-MACHINES
We want to be good and the one thing
we need to do is to tell each other. Then we
will be good. Our conveniences for being good
in crowds are not finished yet.
We have invented machines for crowds
to see one another with and to use in getting about
in the dark. One engine whirls round and round
all night so that half a million people can be going
about anywhere after sunset without running into each
other.
Crowds have vast machines for being
somewhere else-run in somewhat the same
way all from one unpretentious building they put up
called a Power House.
A great many of our machines for allowing
crowds of people to move their bodies around with
have been attended to, but our Intelligence-Machine,
our machine for knowing what other people really think,
and what they are like in their hearts so that we
can know enough to be good to them, and have brains
enough to get them to be good to us, is not finished
and set up yet.
The industrial problem instead of
being primarily an economic problem is a news problem.
If a President were to appoint a Secretary
of Labour and were to give him as one of his conveniences,
a news engineer-an expert at attracting
and holding the attention of labour unions and driving
through news to them about themselves that they do
not know yet, who would be practically at the head
of the department in two years? The Secretary
or the Secretary’s news engineer? News
is all there is to such a department, finding out
what it is and distributing it. Any one can think
of scores of labour-union fallacies, news they do not
know about themselves that they will want to know
at once when their attention is called to it.
If nine members of the President’s
Cabinet were national news agents, experts in nationalizing
news, one member could do with his subordinates all
the other things that Cabinet members do.
The real problem before each Cabinet
member is a problem of news. If the Secretary
of Commerce, for instance, could get people to know
certain things, he would not need to do at all most
of the things that he is doing now. Neither would
the Attorney General.
If everything in a Cabinet position
turns on getting people to know things, why not get
them to know them? Why not take that job instead?
Why not take the job of throwing one’s self out
of a job? Every powerful man has done it-thrown
himself out of what he was doing, by making up something
bigger to do from the beginning of the world.
In every business it is the man who
can recognize, focus, organize, and apply news, and
who can get news through to people, who soon becomes
the head of the business.
The man who can get news through to
directors and to employees and make them see themselves
and see one another and the facts as they are, soon
gets to be Head of the factory.
The man who can get news through to
the public, the salesman of news to people about what
they want to buy and about how they are to spend their
money-very personal, intimate news to every
man-soon rises to be Head of the Head of
the factory and of the entire business.
It will probably be the same in a
cabinet or in a government. If the Secretary
of the Department of Commerce has a news engineer as
a subordinate in his department and begins to study
and observe how to do his work best, how to solve
his problem in the nation, we will soon see the head
of the department, if he really is the head of the
department, quietly taking over his news engineer’s
job and letting his news engineer have his.
It is a news engineering job, being
a Secretary of Commerce.
Every member of the Cabinet has a news engineering
job.
And the fact seems to be that the
moment the news is attended to in each member’s
department-applied news, special and private
news, turned on and set to work where it is called
for-most members of cabinets, secretaries
of making people do things, and for that matter, the
Presidents of making people do things will be thrown
out of employment. The Secretaries of What People
Think, and the President of What People Think-the
engineers of the news in this nation-will
be the men who govern it.