it as a painter does his palette and tubes of pigment; from the endless resources of available events, an endless variety of man- aged mosaic effects can be attained. Any private client can be ensconced in a wide range of different patterns and tones of public affairs or human interest and depth items. If we pay careful attention to the fact that the press is a mosaic, participant kind or organization and a do-it-yourself kind of world, we can see why it is so necessary to democratic government. Throughout his study of the press in The Fourth Branch of Government, Douglas Cater is baffled by the fact that amidst the extreme fragmentation of government departments and branches, the press somehow manages to keep them in relation to each other and to the nation. He emphasizes the paradox that the press is dedicated to the process of cleansing by publicity, and yet that, in the electronic world of the seamless web of events, most affairs must be kept secret. Top secrecy is translated into public participation and responsibility by the magic flexibility of the controlled news leak. It is by this kind of ingenious adaptation from day to day that Western man is beginning to accommodate himself to the electric world of total interdependence. Nowhere is this transforming process of adaptation more visible than in the press. The press, in itself, presents the contradiction of an individualistic technology dedicated to shaping and revealing group attitudes. It might be well now to observe how the press has been modified by the recent developments of telephone, radio, and TV. We have seen already that the telegraph is the factor that has done most to create the mosaic image of the modern press, with its mass of discontinuous and unconnected features. It is this group-image of the communal life, rather than any editorial outlook or slanting, that constitutes the participant of this medium. To the book-man of detached private culture, this is the scandal of the press: its shameless involvement in the depths of human interest and sentiment. By eliminating time and space in