Vladimir Lenin's view on Journalism

    Media "is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer."

    Precise facts, indisputable facts—they are especially abhorrent to this type of author, but are especially necessary if we want to form a proper understanding of this complicated, difficult and often deliberately confused question. But how to gather the facts? How to establish their connection and interdependence.

     The most widely used, and most fallacious, method in the realm of social phenomena is to tear out individual minor facts and juggle with examples. Selecting chance examples presents no difficulty at all, but is of no value, or of purely negative value, for in each individual case everything hinges on the historically concrete situation. Facts, if we take them in their entirety, in their interconnection, are not only stub born things, but undoubtedly proof-bearing things. Minor facts, if taken out of their entirety, out of their interconnection, if they are arbitrarily selected and torn out of context, are merely things for juggling, or even worse.


    The inference is clear: we must seek to build a reliable foundation of precise and indisputable facts that can be confronted to any of the “general” or “example-based” arguments now so grossly misused in certain countries. And if it is to be a real foundation, we must take not individual facts, but the sum total of facts, without a single exception, relating to the question under discussion. Otherwise there will be the inevitable, and fully justified, suspicion that the facts were selected or compiled arbitrarily, that instead of historical phenomena being presented in objective interconnection and interdependence and treated as a whole, we are presenting a “subjective” concoction to justify what might prove to be a dirty business. This does happen ... and more often than one might think.

    V.I. Lenin: Statistics and Sociology from "Lenin Collected Works" (vol 23) published in 1964 in Moscow, Page 271-277. The original was published in the magazine Bolshevik No. 2, 1935.