In his review of Radicals for Capitalism, Jeff Riggenbach makes good use of

a point H. L. Mencken first made in the Atlantic Monthly back in 1914. “One of the principal marks of an educated man,” Mencken wrote, “is the fact that he does not take his opinions from newspapers.” Why? “He knows that they are constantly falling into false reasoning about the things within his personal knowledge, — that is, within the narrow circle of his special education, — and so he assumes that they make the same, or even worse errors about other things. … This assumption, it may be said at once, is quite justified by the facts.” (Gang 45-46) More than forty years later, when he was putting together his last book, Mencken returned to this thought, formulating it a little differently. When it comes to newspapers, he mused, “[t]he more reflective reader … reads next to nothing, and believes the same amount precisely. Why should he read or believe more? Every time he alights on anything that impinges upon his own field of knowledge he discovers at once that it is inaccurate and puerile.” (Minority 74)

References

Mencken, H. L. “Newspaper Morals” [1914] in A Gang of Pecksniffs: And Other Comments on Newspaper Publishers, Editors and Reporters. Ed. Theo Lippman, Jr. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975

——. Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.