An incisive critique of the conventional (bought and paid for) press. Originally published in 1918 but as pertinent today as it was in wartime Great Britain.

My preconception of Belloc, derived from the negative comments of his adversaries, was that he was a nasty intellectual thug sent out by the Vatican to argue its critics into silence. So, I was pretty surprised to find myself enjoying this book quite a bit, and agreeing with most of it.

In fact, at least on the basis of this one book, Belloc comes across as a pretty prescient guy. Here he is, writing in 1918, and, a handful of topical comments aside, he might as well be writing about the present age of disinformation. Some of the points he argues include the following:

The public has surrendered its democratic power to a ruling elite in exchange for a small measure of security and material comfort.

Lawyers, doctors, and professional politicians form closed, interlocked fraternities that sustain each other's power.

The mainstream press is wholly corrupted by Capitalism, and tells the truth only insofar as is necessary to maintain credibility with the uncritical.

If you want to find out what is really happening, the mainstream press must be balanced with extensive reading of the alternative press, regardless of viewpoint or ideology.

Even so, no one source can provide consistently reliable information, and ideological bias must always be taken into account.

What to do about it all? Prospects for short term reform are very poor; but it's necessary for activists to keep on writing, because the only hope for long term change is that ordinary people will occasionally come into contact with non-mainstream opinions, and find that these resonate with their personal experiences better than mainstream propaganda.

Belloc doesn't actually employ the term 'activist'; I'm not sure it was in use at the time. But he mentions some of these literary guerillas by name: Chesterton, Shaw, H.G. Wells. . . Where are their equivalents today? I have an unhappy feeling that a century from now, only historians will want to read Chomsky and his ilk.

Today, a resurrected Belloc would find his pessimism largely confirmed (and I can imagine his horror at his Church's embrace of Capitalism under JP2), but he might be encouraged by the abundance of alternative viewpoints available on the internet. As for that nasty Belloc I was anticipating, the only sour note I recall was a dismissive comment about women's suffrage, although even there he went on to express praise and admiration for its exponents.

Leftists should not get too excited about a book which seems, from a distance of over 100 years, to criticize capitalism. By "Free Press" Belloc does not refer at all to the "freedom of the press" in America. He refers only to Britain and Europe. And by "Free Press" he means a certain then relatively recent movement to publish "papers" which were distributed without cost.

What he had in mind by establishing a "free press" was perhaps something like the Internet. And what he meant by the "Capitalist" press was something different than what it would mean today. Something more like "mainstream media".

The author was talking about pre-WWI Britain, but he could just as easily have been talking about the US in 2013. Good book.

It is hard for me to give this book a fair reading because the warnings Hillaire Belloc gave for the future of the fourth estate are now widely acknowledged to have occurred, so it is old hat in a way. Nowadays though, everyone knows that very few people own the mainstream outlets, indeed maybe two men. So while there is still merit to a Free Press, an alternative press of all political points of view, in this book Belloc is not addressing the problems of the Wild West cacophony that is the alternative press today. (Marshall McLuhan is probably closer to this moment in time but even then we are talking about a target that moves too fast....)