Wit & Attitude Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken isn’t describing the newspaper so much as prosecuting it. The line lands like a one-sentence editorial: a “device” suggests machinery, not enlightenment - an industrial tool that takes raw human weakness and outputs a more concentrated product. He’s allergic to the civic pieties of journalism, the idea that information automatically refines the public. Instead, he frames the press as an accelerant: ignorance doesn’t get corrected; it gets fortified. Eccentricity doesn’t get tempered; it gets weaponized.

The subtext is classic Mencken: contempt for mass taste, and distrust of institutions that flatter it. Newspapers, in his view, don’t merely report reality; they manufacture a version of it calibrated for attention, resentment, and easy certainties. “Ignorant” and “crazy” aren’t clinical categories here - they’re rhetorical cudgels aimed at the complacent reader who thinks himself informed because he consumes headlines. Mencken’s joke is that the act of reading can become a kind of self-satisfied stupor.

Context matters: Mencken wrote in the age of yellow journalism, moral panics, boosterism, and the churn of city papers competing for eyeballs long before “engagement” was a tech metric. His cynicism is sharpened by witnessing how media could sell wars, inflate scandals, and reduce politics to theater. The quote still stings because it captures a grim media law: attention rewards distortion, and audiences don’t just absorb narratives - they seek ones that justify the version of themselves they already prefer.