We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
PUBLICITY ARTIFICES 87
they will be doing a serious disservice to the Fourth Estate, and journalism is in a sorry plight.
The critics who write for the ' popular ' press are more widely known than those who belong to ' class ' newspapers and at present they undoubtedly carry more weight with cinema-goers, for the film is not yet accepted in May fair as on a level with the stage. Most famous of all ' popular ' press critics is Hannan SwafTer, who has himself announced many times that he is ' the best known journalist in England.' Incidentally, he also happens to be one of the leading film critics of the day, wielder of a brilliant and vitriolic pen. He has urged the necessity for a clean-up of the cinema. If he is anxious to live up to the name he has justly earned, Hannan SwafTer will not hesitate to tell the truth about the cinema, tell it every day and at every opportunity — that it is reaping the bulk of its profits by pandering to the lowest instincts of cinema-goers — and join Mr. Atkinson in denouncing this menace to civilization. One article cannot do it. It will be the longest and fiercest campaign of his life. He will make more enemies than even he would have thought possible, and he will have millions of money ranged against him, but with The Daily Herald, The People, John Bull, and The Picturegoer, as his platform, he commands an audience of nearly six million people and his is the greatest opportunity. Has he the courage to accept this challenge, and earn the gratitude of the millions of people vitally interested in the future of the British Empire and the world?
Other critics, of course, have similar opportunities. W. A. Mutch, for example, whose criticisms in The Daily Mail, Sunday Dispatch, and Sunday Pictorial, reach over four million people every week. We are glad to find that he has given one or two serious warnings lately, but where is the legendary power of the Daily Mail, the paper with the largest daily sale in the world? If the founder of these papers, Lord Northcliffe, were still alive, he would long since have seen the danger signal, and thrown his papers into the battle. Does Northcliffe House hold no one to follow in