Now a censorship that is sufficiently minute and utterly remorseless can do amazing things in the way of hiding ... what it wants to hide. Before the war, one would have thought otherwise; one would have said that, censor or no censor, the fact of the murder at X or the fact of the bank robbery at Y would certainly become known; if not through the Press, at all events through rumor and the passage of the news from mouth to mouth. And this would be true—of England three hundred years ago, and of savage tribelands of to-day. But we have grown of late to such a reverence for the printed word and such a reliance on it, that the old faculty of disseminating news by word of mouth has become atrophied. Forbid the Press to mention the fact that Jones has been murdered, and it is marvelous how few people will hear of it, and of those who hear how few will credit the story that they have heard. You meet a man in the train who remarks that he has been told something about a murder in Southwark; there is all the difference in the world between the impression you receive from such a chance communication and that given by half a dozen lines of print with name, and street and date and all the facts of the case. People in trains repeat all sorts of tales, many of them false; newspapers do not print accounts of murders that have not been committed.
I can easily name people who put great trust in the newspaper and their in favorite TV news (violently disparaging the competition!). If the story wasn't hinted at in these organs, these people presume it to be fake. Rumors don't seem to take much hold on them--unless, of course, their sources report them as fact.
But rumors abound, and sometimes seem to be trusted more than any news media. You've probably heard tales of toxic jet contrails, or the anti-vac claims, or the some of the stories that circulate among poorer black communities. Suspicion of the authorities, right?
Or am I and Machen wrong? Are wild rumors and conspiracy theories just as popular among those who trust the media? And by "wild" I mean not sanctioned by hints in their favorite sources; not even mentioned. I'm generally not a very encouraging audience to that sort of thing, so I probably don't hear as much as I could.
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