Francis Foster

So did they need to be professionalized and reined in a bit?

Yes.

But what they wanted to design was far more than that.

They wanted to design a German-French model in which what the media reported and what the governing class wanted was the same.

So what they wanted was to reverse the decision that embarrassed the royal governor of New York in 1735.

200 years later, they wanted a do-over.

And we, the great and the good, should be safe from your ridicule, from your jokes.

And they were going to construct a system to do exactly that.

So at first, they tried a frontal assault.

And they made friends with a very interesting character called S.S.

McClure.

And he starts publishing these long-form magazines.

And they would publish literally 10,000-word articles on very weak production and things of this nature.

And no one read those, or very few people read those.

And so as a commercial venture, McClure wasn't doing... McClure's magazine is the famous progressive magazine at this time, but there are others, right?

So we're in 1906, 1908 here, and they start going after... They start doing what FDR would call trust-busting.

They go after Rockefeller and the other robber barons and...

they start to realize that these long, dense articles aren't going to work.

But they still want to change society.

They still want to change the media.