awareness, a principal function of the newspaper was to correct rumors and oral reports, as a dictionary might provide "correct" spellings and meanings for words that had long existed without the benefit of dictionaries. Fairly soon the press began to sense that news was not only to be reported but also gathered, and, indeed, to be made. What went into the press was news. The rest was not news. "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. But the press is a daily action and fiction or thing made, and it is made out of just about everything in the community. By the mosaic means, it is made into a communal image or cross-section. When a conventional critic like Daniel Boorstin complains that modern ghost-writing, teletype, and wire services create an insubstantial world of "pseudo-events," he declares, in effect, that he has never examined the nature of any medium prior to those of the electric age. For the pseudo or fictitious character has always permeated the media, not just those of recent origin. Long before big business and corporations became aware of the image of their operation as a fiction to be carefully tattooed upon the public sensorium, the press had created the image of the community as a series of on-going actions unified by datelines. Apart from the vernacular used, the dateline is the only organizing principle of the newspaper image of the community. Take off the dateline, and one day's paper is the same as the next. Yet to read a week-old newspaper without noticing that it is not today s is a disconcerting experience. As soon as the press recognized that news presentation was not a repetition of occurrences and reports but a direct cause of events, many things began to happen. Advertising and promotion, until then restricted, broke onto the front page, with the aid of Barnum, as sensational stories. Today's press agent regards the newspaper as a ventriloquist does his dummy. He can make it say what he wants. He looks on