John Dewey

Hence even if we discount the influence of private interests in procuring suppression, secrecy and misrepresentation, we have here an explanation of the triviality and “sensational” quality of so much of what passes as news.

Without coördination and consecutiveness, events are not events, but mere occurrences, intrusions; an event implies that out of which a happening proceeds.

This import cannot be determined unless the new is placed in relation to the old, to what has happened and been integrated into the course of events.

But its meaning depends upon relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are.

But when we ask what sort of material is recorded and how it is organized, when we ask about the intellectual form in which the material is presented, the tale to be told is very different.

A glance at the situation shows that the physical and external means of collecting information in regard to what is happening in the world have far outrun the intellectual phase of inquiry and organization of its results.

But history which is not brought down close to the actual scene of events leaves a gap and exercises influence upon the formation of judgments about the public interest only by guess-work about intervening events.

Moreover, inquiry must be as nearly contemporaneous as possible; otherwise it is only of antiquarian interest.

But genuinely public policy cannot be generated unless it be informed by knowledge, and this knowledge does not exist except when there is systematic, thorough, and well-equipped search and record.

There may well be honest divergence as to policies to be pursued, even when plans spring from knowledge of the same facts.

What is still to be done involves a forecast of a future still contingent, and cannot escape the liability to error in judgment involved in all anticipation of probabilities.

For in its strict sense, knowledge can refer only to what has happened and been done.