THE NEWSPAPER AND PUBLIC OPINION.

This article focuses on the direct influence of newspapers on public opinion on certain specific public issues. The aim is to discover to what extent a person's attitude on public questions, on which the press is assumed to be so influential, correlates with the attitude on these questions of the newspaper to which he is most frequently exposed. For this purpose 940 of the residents of the city of Seattle were selected at random. 590 men and 350 women were interviewed and schedules filled out with their answers. For the purpose of this inquiry, four public questions which had been prominently before the electorate within the last eight months preceding the investigation were selected and each person asked his position on these questions. In a different connection the person was asked what newspaper he read most frequently. The results of this part of the inquiry indicates the degree of relationship, or lack of relationship, between the readers' attitude on a public question and the attitude of the newspaper which each group read most frequently.