Explore "The Free Press" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The first thing to note is that the Free Press is not read perfunctorily, but with close attention. The audience it has, if small, is an audience which never misses its pronouncements whether it agrees or disagrees with them, and which is absorbed in its opinions, its statement of fact and its arguments. Look narrowly at History and you will find that all great _reforms_ have started thus: not through a widespread control acting downwards, but through spontaneous energy, local and intensive, acting upwards.
You cannot say this of the Official Press, for the simple reason that the Official Press is only of real political interest on rare and brief occasions. It is read of course, by a thousand times more people than those who read the Free Press. But its readers are not gripped by it. They are not, save upon the rare occasions of a particular "scoop" or "boom," _informed_ by it, in the old sense of that pregnant word, _informed_: -- they are not possessed, filled, changed, moulded to new action.