A McLuhan sourcebook 281 It is a paradoxical situation, but the press in literate America has an intensely oral character, while in oral Russia and Europe the press has a strongly literary character and function.—1964 It was Poe who invented both the detective story and the symbolist poem as his response to the electric challenge… Poe saw that the principle [of working backward for serialization] extended all the way to the daily news report. For, if news came in so fast that no single editorial eye could process the entire contents of the paper, then it was necessary to package the news in a style that made the reader the editor.—1958 In pictorial papers and magazines even words take on the character of landscape.—1952 What has happened since the old muck-raking days of the 1920s is that espionage, whether political or commercial, has become the largest business in the world, and we take it for granted that the modern newspaper depends on “bugging” the whole community. In fact, we expect the press to “bug” the world and to challenge and penetrate all privacy and identity, whether private or corporate. —1974 Quite independently of good or bad editorial policies, the ordinary man is now accustomed to human-interest stories from every part of the globe. The sheer technique of world-wide news gathering has created a new state of mind which has little to do with local or national political opinion. So that even the frequent sensational absurdity and unreliability of the news cannot annul the total effect, which is to enforce a deep sense of human solidarity.—1951 It is the daily communal exposure of multiple items in juxtaposition that gives the press its complex dimension of human interest.—1964 The classified ads (and stock-marketed quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press would fold. —1964 News, far more than art, is artifact. —1969 The proud motto “All the news that’s fit to print” advertises the fact that news is actually a fiction. From the initial selection of experiences to be written up, to the arbitrary selection of items to be read by the reader as scanner, there is a large factor of choice in looking at the world itself as something to fit print.—1971 “He made the news” is a strangely ambiguous phrase, since to be in the newspaper is both to be news and to make news. Thus “making the news,” like “making good,” implies a world of actions and fictions alike.—1964 RADIO Radio was inseparable from the rise of jazz culture as TV has been inseparable from the rise of rock culture.