Many years ago I read of an instance of secret information being conveyed to a privileged few through a public medium. In his autobiography, the American mathematician Norbert Wiener told how Bertrand Russell, in spite of World War I censorship, knew that the British ship Audacious had been sunk. He showed Wiener a newspaper with a photo of a ship captioned "An Audacious picture!" that had, Wiener noted, "no explanation of the audacity"(1). To him it was a lesson in how the British intellectual elite could stay informed, even if they were politically out of favor (Russell was reviled for his pacifist views).
Could this happen in the news media today? Would journalists, in effect, maintain a sort of channel to pass messages to a select few of their audience? It would seem that as long as news fulfills its economic function -- to deliver the public to advertisers, it can be anything else its editors want it to be. In other words, as long as news is entertaining and trustworthy enough to deliver the mass audience that advertisers need, editors would seem to have complete freedom to embed anything else that would be recognized by a much smaller elite audience as speaking to them exclusively.
So it wouldn't be impossible for this to happen. But would it be likely, especially in the U.S.? After all, we don't have either official censorship or the legacy of a class system. But we did have the Cold War, and later Vietnam, and with them came greatly increased efforts by the government to shape public opinion. In the face of attempts by government officials to apply spin in ways that would allow them plausibly to deny having such intentions, one can imagine journalists wanting to speak out against the situation but not being able to do so explicitly. Might they not turn to allusiveness to reach a sophisticated subset of their audience, not for the purpose of disclosing government secrets, as in Wiener's anecdote, but rather for warning that something the government wants everyone to believe is, on the contrary, so much baloney?
Eventually a subculture within journalism might have emerged, ready to salt a wide range of news with sly references for amusement as well as for serious purposes. Indeed, maybe the propensity has always been a part of journalism and didn't arise from any particular historical forces.
The above is a conservative theory. Other, more radical hypotheses are possible, which I shall consider here in the future as time allows.
Notes
1. Wiener, Norbert; "Ex-prodigy," p. 219.
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