The Press: “The Government’s Filth Machine”
The collision withThe Corsairleft Kierkegaard with a terrific loathing for
the daily press and its practitioners, “those who rent out opinions,” as he
called them, using an expression he found in Schopenhauer and became
infatuated with .Schopenhauer had noted quite correctly that although most
people avoid walking around in a borrowed hat or coat, they are only too
happy to go around with borrowed opinions, which have been served up
to them by journalists: “The great mass of people naturally have no opinion
but—here it comes!—this deficiency is remedied by the journalists who
make their living by renting out opinions.” This bizarre situation also has a
logic of its own: “Gradually, as more and more people are wrenched free
of the condition of innocence in which they were by no means obliged to
have an opinion and are forced into the ‘condition of guilt’.. .in which
they must have an opinion, what can the unfortunate people do? An opin-
ion becomes a necessary item for every member of the enormous public,
so the journalist offers his assistance by renting out opinions.” In so doing
the journalists make people laughable in two respects: first by convincing
them of the necessity of having an opinion, then by renting out an “opinion
which despite its insubstantial quality is nonetheless put on and worn as—
a necessary item.”
Thus Kierkegaard came surprisingly early to the realization that the press
lives by creating its own stories—“it acts as if it were reporting on an actual
situation, and it intends to produce that situation”—with the result that
reality itself becomes pale and imaginary .“There is something the journalist
wants to publicize, and perhaps absolutely no one thinks or cares about it.
So what does the journalist do? He writes an article in the most exalted
manner in which he states that this is a need profoundly felt by everyone,
et cetera .Perhaps his journal has a large circulation, and now we have set
things in motion .The article is in fact read, it is talked about .Perhaps an-
other newspaper writes in opposition .There ensues a polemical controversy
that causes a sensation.”
With all this business the journalists have merely transformed themselves
into “nonsense mushrooms”—an expression Kierkegaard used for them as
early as 1838, employing a term he had in fact unearthed inMiss Nielsen’s
Cookbook .The journalists also incur a moral responsibility because they are
capable of completely altering a person’s fate overnight: “Take a young girl.
Someone names her, using her full name, and then relates that she had got
a new dress last Sunday .This of course is not the most unsavory sort of
evil—and nonetheless she is made ridiculous .Everything private, the condi-