Word: spiriting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...OVERRIDING CAUSE of both the commercial explosion of books and the constriction of a vigorous press (and indeed, the force which is slowly sapping us of many of our liberties) is the much-cliched, yet truly invidious spirit of big business. In the past, the average newspaper or magazine did not share the considerations foremost in the thinking of a large corporation. A publication was obliged to consider sales and profits for purposes of economic viability, so that it might continue to publish and prosper in more than financial aims. The desire to increase profit for profit's sake...
...same consideration of sales has come to predominate in publishing, with more books than ever printed with an eye to large and quick profits, and not content. What Alexis De Tocqueville called "the trading spirit in literature" has long existed in American democracy, but it now seems rampant. The special distinction and social value the author had claimed since the times when books were more precious has disappeared, in this surfeit of profitable words. Writing has become still more a trade and less an art. But these changes are only the obvious consequences of subordinating the editorial room, or literary...
...intend, or even believe, that the press should be objective. They saw the health, the honesty, even the justice of society in the process of the system, in the diverse, opinionated contention of viewpoints--radical, reactionary, moderate--not in some fictive principle of objectivity. But the corporate spirit runs counter to broad freedom of thought and individual creativity; in its organization and marketing, its urge is to standardize, to cheapen, to impersonalize. And to the extent the principles of big business enter the press, this commercial spirit will prevail, as it has with all mass products...
...liberal, mildly progressive press which treats them implicitly as variations from some "truthful" consensus. And though the profusion of books is democratic in the extreme, and there is no lack of diverse and freely expressed opinions, this abundance is infected with the same corrupting and mediocre commercial spirit that has sapped the vigor and spiritual freedom of the press...
...spirit of unbridled profit which needlessly spoils the quality of our natural environment--wastes the countryside, fouls the waters, blights the cities--affects no less the quality of our spiritual life, in all that is written. The illness of the land speaks everyday in the illness of its words. America is no better than what it writes. And at least one famous American meant this when he said, "All I know is what I see in the papers...