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It is common knowledge among school-teachers that a high percentage of
examination failures results from “not reading the question.”
The candidate presumably applies his eyes to the paper, but his answer
shows that he is incapable of discovering by that process what the question
is. This means that he is not only slovenly-minded but, in all except
the most superficial sense, illiterate. Teachers further complain that
they have to spend a great deal of time and energy in teaching University
students what questions to ask. This indicates that the young mind experiences
great difficulty in disentangling the essence of a subject from its accidents;
and it is disconcertingly evident, in discussions on the platform and
in the press, that the majority of people never learn to overcome this
difficulty.
[Another] distressing phenomenon is the extreme unwillingness of the
average questioner to listen to the answer — a phenomenon exhibited
in exaggerated form by professional interviewers on the staffs of popular
journals. It is a plain fact that ninety-nine interviews out of a hundred
contain more or less subtle distortions of the answers given to questions,
the questions being, moreover, in many cases, wrongly conceived for the
purpose of eliciting the truth. The distortions are not confined to distortions
of opinion but are frequently also distortions of fact, and not merely
stupid misunderstandings at that, but deliberate falsifications.
The journalist is, indeed, not interested in the facts. For this he is
to some extent excusable, seeing that, even if he published the facts,
his public would inevitably distort them in the reading. What is quite
inexcusable is that when the victim of misrepresentation writes to protest
and correct the statements attributed to him, his protest is often ignored
and his correction suppressed. Nor has he any redress, since to misrepresent
a man’s statements is no offense, unless the misrepresentation happens
to fall within the narrow limits of the law of libel. The Press and the
Law are in this condition because the public do not care whether they
are being told truth or not.
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Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957)
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The Mind of the Maker (1941)
“Preface” pp. x-xi
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