editorials are an outcome of an editorial conference. Suggestions are
made from all sides and a policy is arrived at, which one or often more
members of the staff is then asked to write up.

In the totalitarian papers the party line takes the role of the editorial
conference in suppressing individuality. Only in the French papers is the
mode of editorial writing individual enough that one might suspect a con-
tent-analysis result of showing characteristics of the writer rather than
of an institution or social stratum. Our results, however, do not support
such a supposition. Throughout the study we find that when one editor in
chief replaces another there will be a change in the frequencies of, at
most, one or two symbols. A particular editor may have a hobby. One
American editor, for example, made a fetish of the tariff and was inter-
ested in Greek affairs, while a certain British editor was even more
strongly imperialist than typical for his government and party. But ex-
cept for the riding of one or two such hobbies, the symbol structures of
the papers seem to be little affected by the changes in the individuals who
fill the top editorial chairs. Nevertheless, we list below the regimes on
each of the papers during the years of our sample, in order that the
reader may check this fact for himself:

We find, then, that despite local and individual variations, the prestige
paper has come to be an important and respected institution. Governments,
politicians, and businessmen depend upon it. One might ask what would hap-
pen in Washington if the New York Times stopped publication and no other
paper took its place. There would certainly be a deterioration in American
political intelligence. The owners of the London Times have given concrete
expression to their realization of the importance of the institution of which
they are the current guardians. They have written into their statutes a

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