What does Hartley mean by this and how does he draw his conclusion?

"Given that the public, elusive at the best of time, has a historic tendency not to stand still and take impressions that are deemed good for it, but simply to walk away. "

Julie,
Hartley is arguing that media audiences have been subject to strategies designed to turn them into a responsive, or biddable audience.

He starts from 17th century political philosophy that talks in terms of the common people as blank sheets of paper on which the government would prints its own authorized opinions. He means Hobbes and Locke.

Hartley says:

"This print metaphor presumes, or course, that the common people will stand still long enough to receive clearly enough the impressions designed for their edification. How to persuade them to stand still? What media to use? Who or what institution would be trusted with the job?"

Hartley then argues that the institutions of government education and media have been organized around the public as blank sheets of paper on which moral, political, religious, commercial and other knowledges are to be impressed. He adds;

" The old, mutually sustaining, classical civic virtues of democracy, didactics and drama have been dis-integrated; education gets the didactics, the media take the drama, government gets the democracy, and the public gets taught, entertained, governed, apparently independently, and often without much consultation."

What has happened, says Hartley, is that the public has slipped from the disciplinary grasp of the educaitonal and governmental authorities into the gentler hands of the smiling professions that make images of the public and so call it into being.