_Chapter I_
IT’S FREE--FOR MILLIONAIRES!
Brooks Atkinson filed a peevish dispatch to the _New York Times_
from his Moscow post not long ago. Atkinson, ex-dramatic critic, is
a highly-civilized, able and honest correspondent whose reports from
China and the Soviet Union have shown a certain respect for people
as people. His cablegrams are often touched with humor. All the more
striking was the humorless dispatch in which he complained:
The Soviet Union goes on coldly repeating Marxian myths about
America--that we have no freedom of the press, that our democracy
is formal but not real. Only the other day the Moscow _Bolshevik_
was saying:
In the conditions of bourgeois democracy the workers do not have
the minimum material requirements for actual use of the rights that
are proclaimed. They do not have at their disposal printing presses
and paper. Newspapers, clubs, theatres--all are the property of
private individuals or groups.
Atkinson sneered: “If these old myths are not deliberately false then
they are products of the lack of a basic understanding.”
There is no doubt that the Constitution of the United States formally
guarantees to anyone the right to publish a newspaper in our country.
The law is just and equal, forbidding unemployed worker and millionaire
alike to sleep on park benches, guaranteeing either the freedom to buy
or establish the huge enterprise called a newspaper. But where does
Mr. Atkinson think a working man can obtain the _means_ to publish and
widely circulate a daily newspaper?
The entire labor movement has been unable to maintain a single daily
newspaper comparable in physical facilities and size of circulation to
the average privately-owned newspaper. Publication of a daily requires
a starting sum beyond the present reach of working people. Oswald
Garrison Villard, proud of his family’s 125 years in the publishing
field, says that “no one would dream of starting a metropolitan
newspaper with less than ten or even fifteen millions in the bank.”
The newest modern presses alone run into the millions. The physical
plant of the _New York Daily News_, occupied in 1930, was then worth
$10,000,000. A few bad years while a paper is getting on its feet may
cost millions more.
Ask Marshall Field
Enough capital to start a paper is only the beginning. Marshall Field,
who inherited $164,000,000, found that all his millions could buy him
only a curiously limited area of press freedom. His _Chicago Sun_, set
up to combat the ultra-reactionary _Chicago Tribune_, had to fight
for its very life--all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Field’s
conclusion as the result of his own experience is that it is easier to
buy an established daily newspaper than to launch a new one.
Do you want to buy a newspaper? There is probably not a daily in
America that can be bought for less than $2,000,000! The _Philadelphia
Inquirer_ was sold in 1930 for a reported $18,000,000. The _New York
Times_ has no price. It boasted a gross annual business of $20,000,000
as much as twenty-five years ago. Since then, the bulk of its
constantly mounting profits has been ploughed back into the business
year after year until the paper, considered purely as a business,
represents a fabulous investment. Naturally, money will not buy it.
Very well, you can’t buy a paper. Try to establish a new one. Field
found out what that meant. The local news-gathering service, in
Chicago, was barred to him. He had to set up his own reportorial staff
on a scale to overcome this handicap. But for national and worldwide
news, no such solution was possible. Not even _his_ fortune could
finance an adequate global news service.
There are only three such American news agencies, Associated Press,
United Press and International News Service. Associated Press is a
professedly “cooperative” membership association embracing some 1,300
of America’s 1,744 English-language dailies. United Press, controlled
by Roy Howard, is based on his newspaper chain. I.N.S. rests on the
Hearst chain. Major newspapers try to have as many of these services as
they can get. The Howard-owned papers, for instance, are by no means
content with their own U.P. service, but seek also the A.P. “report.”
The Hearst papers never operate with I.N.S. alone; almost all have
A.P. franchises and several boast that they alone, in their respective
areas, have all three services. For a variety of reasons, however, A.P.
is the decisive agency. It is rather hopeless to try to compete with a
major paper on the basis of U.P. or I.N.S. service.
Field could not get A.P. The by-laws of the “cooperative” permitted
the _Chicago Tribune_ to blackball his application for membership. He
could not get I.N.S. because it is available only to the Hearst paper
in Chicago, the _Herald-American_. He had no choice but to publish on
the basis of United Press service only. That cost him $110,000 in 1942
against an estimated $50,000 he would have paid for the superior A.P.
report.
Regimentation
News agency coverage was only the beginning of the problem. Look at
your daily newspaper, wherever you live. It is the same paper as
the one I read. There is, in effect, only one American newspaper,
or let us say three or four papers which are parts of one pattern.
Your paper and mine print exactly the same news, the same pictures,
the same columnists, the same features ranging from comics through
recipes, and often the same canned editorials supplied by the Newspaper
Enterprise Association. Moreover, these canned features, together
with new mechanical inventions, make for standardized typography and
appearance. Even grammatical style, width of column, size of type, must
be uniform. The standardization reaches its ridiculous peak in the
Hearst papers where “The Chief,” octogenarian William Randolph Hearst,
dictates by teletype the manner and form in which his “publishers” must
display many important items.
There is no escaping this regimentation. If you want readers, you must
meet the competition. Field had to have features, pictures and so on.
He struggled to create his own comics and after three years felt he had
achieved some readable ones, though by no means as successful as those
controlled by the rival press. But news pictures can’t be invented.
Without photographs, successful newspaper publication is impossible.
Pictures, however, are as tightly controlled as news services. Even the
Communist _Daily Worker_, the outstanding labor daily newspaper in the
country, has to buy from the syndicates as they are. Field couldn’t buy
any!
Associated Press owns A.P. Wirephotos and the Wideworld newsphoto
service. The _Tribune_ barred sale of these pictures to Field. Acme,
the Howard-dominated picture service, was likewise denied him through
an “exclusive contract” between Acme and the _Tribune_. Hearst’s
International News Photos were not available in Chicago because they
went to the _Herald-American_.
In 1942 Field spent $63,000 on pictures and $425,000 to maintain
news bureaus and other items, an outlay due chiefly to the monopoly
conditions he faced--which anyone who wants to publish must face. A
smaller capitalist would have been licked at that point, but Field had
sufficient power to launch anti-trust proceedings against Associated
Press as a means of breaking out of the encirclement.
The United States Supreme Court sustained Field. The _Tribune_-A.P.
were forced to let him purchase the A.P. news report. But the court
decision has not made a general break in the monopoly structure. If
one of the major trade union bodies, for instance, wants to publish a
daily newspaper in New York, Chicago, Detroit or Los Angeles, there is
nothing to prevent A.P. and all the other services from declining to
sell their indispensable goods.
There is no use dreaming about building--on however broad a
liberal-labor cooperative plane--an independent apparatus to escape
the news, picture and feature service squeeze. It would cost not
millions but billions. Though the services have acquired an independent
existence and structure, they are basically the American press itself.
The newspapers are not only their market but their major source of
supply. They provide most of the local news and pictures used by the
agencies.
This Is Monopoly
Some idea of the concentration and integration of the American
newspaper industry may be obtained by a glance at Associated Press,
the typical expression of the industry. A.P. has bureaus in 250
world cities, 94 within the U.S. Seven of these have fifty or more
full-time staff members and the whole A.P. domestic payroll covers
7,200 employees, 1,940 on a full-time basis. A.P. also has 2,500
correspondents abroad using a leased transatlantic cable. It has
290,000 miles of leased wires linking 727 American cities. Its daily
general news report alone exceeds 1,000,000 words, single metropolitan
papers taking from 250,000 to 300,000 words a day. There are endless
additional reports. A.P.’s 1942 expenditures totalled $12,986,000.
(United Press spent $8,628,000; I.N.S., $9,434,000.) A.P.’s material
reserves exceed $100,000,000.
But all this describes only the independent structure of Associated
Press. The bulk of the personnel of the American press is also a
part of the A.P. apparatus. Member papers--which means most of the
country’s newspapers and _all the important ones_--must make all their
news available to A.P. and are expected to withhold it from anyone
outside of A.P. Even employees of the papers are similarly bound. Any
news they “spontaneously” acquire belongs to A.P. Thus, instead of a
mere 5,000 to 10,000 employees, A.P. really has some 100,000 persons
working for it every hour of the day and night. It coordinates the
whole news-gathering apparatus of the American press. It does this on
an exclusive basis. It is not only a monopoly but the expression of the
monopolistic organization of the American press.
Pikers Barred
The monopoly structure of the industry plus the size and complexity
of newspaper operation from a business point of view, have made it
impossible for any but multimillionaires to enter the field. As a
logical result, there has been a steady shrinkage of the field--a drop
in the number of dailies from 2,600 in 1909 to 1,744 at the beginning
of 1945.
This shrinkage has been accompanied by a virtual disappearance of
competition in most cities. In 1899, 353 cities were dominated by
a single newspaper. In 1920 there were 720 such cities. In 1945
there were 1,103. In many of the remaining cities, the “competing”
papers were under a single ownership so that the actual number of
cities without competition in 1945 was 1,277. Conversely, there were
549 cities with local competition in 1920 but only 117 in 1945. In
percentages it is still worse. Of all cities having newspapers, only
8.4 per cent had competition in 1945.
Even these figures are flattering to the myth of free and competitive
enterprise. Veiled joint ownership and “gentlemen’s agreements” plus
the spread of the chains and the general standardization process still
further reduce the area of competition and restrict the diversity of
views. Only the half-dozen largest cities in the United States have
dailies with competing views in even the narrowest sense. The 25
largest cities average but three ownerships. _Editor and Publisher_,
organ of the owners, admits the phenomenon and apologizes for it.
The condition has arisen not by the will of any individual or
group, but from a gradual growth of custom, both in newspaper
operation and in the purchase of advertising space.
This refers to the preference of advertisers for fewer papers with
larger circulations. The net effect is that the local monopolies are
barricaded against competition and the price of admission is several
million dollars.
_Chapter II_
FOR WHOM THE PRESS TOILS
If ownership of the press is closed to all but an estimated 1,300
multimillionaire owners, whose opinions appear in it? The obvious
answer is: the opinions of the owners. They make no bones about it.
Canons of ethics sometimes pay lip service to “public interest,” but in
making legal commitments the publishers insist on written guarantees
that their views and nobody else’s shall go into “their” newspapers.
The American Newspaper Guild, for instance, is forced to reacknowledge,
from time to time, its formal acceptance of the publishers’ opinion
monopoly. Newspaper workers claim no right to speak through the pages
of their employers’ papers. From copyboy to top editor, newspapermen
are hired hands, engaged for the sole purpose of putting their
employer’s opinions in print.
Newspapers being a Big Business, the views of newspaper owners are the
views of Big Business. Thousands of specific instances of unmitigated
partisanship have been assembled and documented by George Seldes in his
several books and in his weekly newsletter, _In Fact_. Former Secretary
of the Interior Harold Ickes and others have also written books and
articles primarily devoted to this theme. One has only to observe the
handling of the recent wage crisis by the press. It stacked the cards
against labor, playing up the strikes and playing down capital’s bold
blackmail drive for higher prices and weaker unions.
The press is, in fact, an important part of the State apparatus. It
plays a key role in maintaining the rule of the Sixty Families over the
140,000,000 people of the United States. It is a tool in the hands of
the few finance capitalists who remain all-powerful so long as they are
able to keep the masses divided and confused.
It is true that the press lords are forever wailing about an alleged
government menace to press freedom. The conflict of press and
government does not contradict, however, the charge that the press
is an instrument of the State. The common notion that State and
government are two names for one thing, makes a few words on theory
advisable at this point. A hundred or a hundred and fifty years
ago, there would have been less likelihood of similar confusion. In
the great political strife that attended and immediately followed
the adoption of the United States Constitution, political theory
was treated with more respect than it is today. Federalists and
Jeffersonians agreed that the State was an instrument of class rule.
Jeffersonian John Taylor saw revolution and “order” as “two modes of
invading private property; the first, by which the poor plunder the
rich ... sudden and violent; the second, by which the rich plunder the
poor, slow and legal.” Summarizing Taylor’s views, historian Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr. says: “The succession of privileged orders through
history--the priesthood, the nobility, now the banking system--showed
how every age had known its own form of institutionalized robbery
by a minority operating through the State.” Lenin later put it
scientifically: “The State is an organ of class domination, an organ of
oppression of one class by another; its aim is the creation of ‘order’
which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression.”
The American State
Classes do not march in a straight line to their goals. Sometimes
the executive arm of government is completely responsive to the
views of the most reactionary section of capitalism, as when Hoover,
Harding, Coolidge were President. Sometimes the President is not fully
“manageable,” as in the case of President Roosevelt. But he then finds
himself pretty well invested by “trustworthy” men; he must accept a
John Garner for Vice-President; he must put men like Jesse Jones in his
Cabinet. In the same way, Congress may be an easy tool of reactionary
interests one term, curbed by public pressure the next. Note the speed
with which the last few Congresses have enacted drastic anti-labor
legislation and tax bills pouring billions into the coffers of Big
Business. If an active public conscience restricts the freedom of
executive departments and legislative departments otherwise favorable
to Big Business, there are always the courts. When the democrats,
Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, held the presidency, Martin Van Buren noted
that the party of rich-man’s-rule fled to “the judicial department of
the government, as to an ark of future safety which the Constitution
placed beyond the reach of public opinion.” So today the courts readily
grant anti-picketing injunctions to employers despite laws expressly
designed to halt such use of the injunction. Below the Federal level,
government is even more easily dominated by big capital. The local
police are always at hand for strike duty. Governors and mayors dance
to Big Business tunes.
Beyond all these departments of government are other tools at the
service of the ruling class to help it maintain political dominance,
regiment public opinion, terrorize and repress dissenters, employ and
reward servants and agents of all kinds, to the end of constantly
increasing its profits, intensifying its exploitation of the population
and extending its enormous powers. Schools, churches, theaters are
manipulated by boards directly selected by leading capitalists.
The Morgans and Rockefellers personally oversee, as trustees, the
largest universities, public libraries and museums. Radio, moving
pictures, and the press--frankly described by their private owners as
“opinion-forming industries”--are even more elaborately controlled
devices for class rule.
Of all these, the press is the most powerful single force in our
time. The United States maintains a public-opinion-forming apparatus
unparalleled in history and unequalled in any other land for the sheer
weight of “information” hurled at a defenseless public. There is no
chance for the public to make up its own mind.
Private Power
The newspaper owners have virtually unlimited control of this apparatus
despite their elaborate pretense of suffering government constraint.
The outcry against the government is a complete fraud. The owners are
simply demanding a monopoly power over public opinion. They go so far
as to impose a virtual censorship on an Administration with which they
are not in complete sympathy. They got Congress to pass an act frankly
designed to suppress Marshall Field’s pro-Roosevelt newspapers. If you
so much as criticize the opinion-monopoly, you are accused of attacking
freedom of the press. The monopolists have bulldozed the politicians
until no less bold a critic than Mr. Ickes has gone on record as
opposing publication of even a single government newspaper.
_Yet the very idea of government as the chief enemy of press freedom
is a fraud on history._ Long before the rise of modern industry, when
printing was invented, the feudal ruling classes were indeed opposed
to the spread of information among the dark masses. They objected not
only to newspapers but even to the printing and distribution of the
Bible. Not the content of the printed matter but the general increase
of knowledge and understanding was the point at issue. The greater the
ignorance of the people, the less danger to their rule.
Modern industry, however, requires millions of literate workers.
The general level of education and information must rise. The new
ruling classes, the merchant princes, the industrialists, the finance
capitalists, are forced to accede to this trend. Their attitude toward
the press changes. Instead of seeking to limit the volume of newspaper
information, they seek to control the content and use the papers as
a tool. The deliberate spread of misinformation and class propaganda
replaces the tactic of suppression. Neither government, nor the ruling
classes who dominate the government, try to restrict this outpouring.
That was a problem in the age of feudalism; the true problem today is
that the press is monopolized by a wealthy and powerful clique. It has
become one of the most powerful instruments of the capitalist State, on
a par with the government itself!
“The use as well as the misuse of information has made the power of
suggestion the decisive force in world affairs,” says Dean Ackerman of
the Columbia School of Journalism, a pillar of the news industry. “It
can cause or prevent war. It can strengthen or destroy a democracy. It
can build or wreck a nation.”
_Chapter III_
WORDS FOR SALE
Class control of the press does not mean simple operation in the
interests of capitalist newspaper owners. The owners are kept in line
by the class as a whole so that they protect the interests of Big
Business, and express the views of capital in general, rather than
merely personal views.
The pressure of advertisers, the family connections of the publisher
and so on, do not fully explain the capitalist owner’s loyalty to his
class. There is a deeper reason. The class function is so thoroughly
built into the structure of the American newspaper industry that even
millionaire mavericks, Marshall Fields, can stray but slightly from the
class corral. The publishers themselves are powerless to change the
over-all character of the press as the voice of finance capital.
The “built-in” class control of the press did not come about through a
convention or secret meeting of machiavellian bankers, nor even through
the constant pressure of the National Association of Manufacturers.
It came about in a way no one could have planned. It was a historical
process of a complicated kind. The best thing we can do is to
study the process and the resulting structure of the press without
oversimplifying.
Subsidies
Even before the War of Independence, the American press lived on
subsidies. Our holier-than-thou “free” publishers love to point
scornfully at the subsidies paid their “un-free” European rivals.
These they call “bribes” to spread national propaganda. The American
publisher can see the mote in his brother’s eye but not the beam in
his own. For political parties, the government and private interests
have at various times subsidized our papers--and still do. There is
no secret about it. Any competent study of the business--_The Daily
Newspaper in America_, by A. M. Lee, for instance--has the detailed
story.
The United States government subsidizes the press by means of special
mailing privileges. Postal rates for newspapers at newspapers. What
price subsidy? In 1908, 64 per cent of all mail (by weight) was
newspapers; it brought the Post Office but 4 per cent of its revenues.
The press, for all its cries of rage at “government extravagance,”
insists on continuance of this patronage. The welcomed “handout” costs
taxpayers from $25,000,000 to $10,000,000 a year, it is estimated.
Second-class mailing privileges and the like are only a minor factor in
the subsidy system. Preferential wire rates for news is the big thing.
Billions of news-words transmitted each year ordinarily get their low
rates from private companies owning the telephone, telegraph, wireless,
radio, cable and other facilities. But all communications are matters
of public franchise and the preferential rates were the result of State
intervention.
The recently published _Report From the Commission on Freedom of the
Press_ further reveals how government directly intervenes by creating
communications. During World War II the armed services tripled
telecommunications mileage and fabulously multiplied capacity. Against
a pre-war private cable-wireless capacity of 12,500,000 words a day,
“the service networks have done as much as 50,000,000 words per day.”
The new State-created communications include marvelous technological
advances such as multiple-address newscasting, simultaneous
broadcasting of several messages through the same microphone, and
facsimile newscasting.
Where the State creates and controls communications, subsidizing them,
is it not nonsense to speak of the press--the communications-based news
industry--as independent of the State?
What Is News?
Still more deeply hidden is a curious twist in the character of news
itself. What is news? A well-worn “gag” accurately describes the
publishing industry’s concept. “If a man bites a dog, that’s news.”
There is nothing unexpected, nothing unusual, nothing _sensational_
about a dog biting a man; hence, that isn’t news. In short, an accurate
picture of what is happening is not news. News is a name for unrelated,
torn-from-context events or incidents of a sensational character.
Man-bites-dog may be a gag but it is no joke. It contains the link
between the obvious faults of our press and their hidden disease. The
techniques by which American newspapers turn events into profit are
all an expression of the man-bites-dog idea. The compulsory use of the
“lead” and headline (with the consequent development of the “headline
mentality” decried by the late President Roosevelt), is merely the
final expression of the technical process. The whole process consists
in finding or creating sensations to exploit. The object being to
sell papers, not to maintain just values, “news” is not that which
informs but that which sells another newspaper to a badgered reader.
Not only complicated international affairs but even “local” stories
are distorted beyond recognition of the facts by these techniques. The
“crime waves” cooked up out of quite average statistics from time to
time are a sample (whatever further reactionary ends they may serve).
The preoccupation with selling papers against fierce competition
leads to the American practice of an edition every thirty seconds.
This mania for speed, plus the man-bites-dog news formula, works to
corrupt and discourage the men who handle news. At length, even the
boasted accuracy of the press about elementary facts becomes a myth
and a fraud. “The reliability of news accounts is far below what it
was years ago ... the reporter is trained to look for the bizarre as
all-important ...” writes Oswald Garrison Villard in _The Disappearing
Daily_. Anyone who has ever figured in a news story knows that the
printed “facts” have little to do with reality!
True and Unbiased News
News was not always limited to this formula of sensation. The telegraph
changed the whole basis of newspaper production and sale. It compelled
papers to carry a picture of the whole country and ultimately the whole
world whereas they used to be little more than local bulletins. Costs
greatly increased, and to defray them publishers formed pools. Thus the
modern news agency was born and with the agency came a standardized
manner of treating news.
When the first agencies began operating, newspapers were very violent
in their opinions and intemperate in expressing them. If a news agency
wanted to serve all, it would have to find a way of reporting what
would offend none. At first, transmission of a limited kind of news was
undertaken: deaths, fires, market prices, textual matter. To cover the
whole range of news, however, the agency had to learn how to report
controversial matters that all the papers wanted, in a way acceptable
to all. For instance, it must report a political contest in a form
printable by papers backing either major party. The news agencies
learned to do that just 100 years ago.
This reporting formula is what the American news industry calls “true
and unbiased news.” It is regarded as something holy. A more than
religious fervor marks the industry’s references to it. Kent Cooper,
executive director of A.P., admits that it was not “the result of
philosophic study or prayer,” but he is proud that A.P. puts “into
forceful and lasting effect the moral concept that necessity had
invented.” He further calls it the “greatest moral concept ever
developed in America and given to the world.”
A second’s thought is enough to reveal that there is nothing “moral”
about the concept at all. The successful agency formula does not
require “truth.” It requires only the transmission of views or “facts”
acceptable and useful to _all capitalist newspaper owners_. It does not
eliminate bias. _It merely eliminates differences between individual
publishers and reduces reporting to the common bias of owners as a
group._ This formula for standardized treatment of events and opinions
is completely devoid of moral content. It has melted all varieties of
information, all events and interrelations, down to one kind of easily
sold and exchanged piece of goods: the commodity, news.
Though United Press is today as pompous as A.P. about the supposed
“objectivity” of American agency “news,” Roy Howard was franker when
he was fighting an uphill battle for U.P.’s life. He then complained
bitterly of A.P.’s monopolistic practices in “collecting and selling
a basic journalistic commodity--news--in a highly competitive field.”
He also said: “I do not subscribe to the general idea that news and
opinion are two different and easily separated elements.” Consider
news about Negroes, for instance, as handled by the agencies. Most of
it emanates from Southern newspapers with avowed lily-white views; it
is for distribution to all subscribers but must not “offend” the large
bloc of Southern papers. So it is all bias and a continent wide.
Oddly enough, labor journalism had to solve the same problem that led
the capitalist agencies to their news formula. The American Federation
of Labor established Federated Press in 1919 to serve the labor press,
chiefly weekly and monthly membership journals. The labor movement was
and is rent by factions; jurisdictional feuds are topped by the present
division of labor into the A. F. of L. and C.I.O. camps. Yet Federated
Press has always been able to supply news acceptable to warring
factions and rival unions. The agency never pretended, however, that it
was non-partisan in a larger sense. F.P. Chief Carl Haessler said:
The management of the Federated Press has never subscribed to the
hypocritical assertion of the capitalist newspapers that news can
be without bias. The Federated Press is very careful about facts
but they are presented with a decidedly pro-labor interpretation
just as we believe the capitalist press interprets news so that it
becomes pro-capitalist.
Remote Control
Incidentally, a comparison of the Federated Press budget with that of
the capitalist agencies casts some light on the difference between real
and formal equality. Federated Press spent $18,000 in 1936. The three
employer-minded agencies spent $31,048,000 in a similar 12-month period
(1942)!
Linked to sensationalism, the commodity form of news destroyed the
old profession of journalism and replaced it with pure business. The
individual honest reporter or correspondent, however pure his intent,
is sunk from the start. The _form_ of news he is taught to seek and
permitted to send is hostile to the nature of truth. Not only the
reporter, but the newspaper owner himself is alienated from the process
of gathering reliable information and printing it. He is a merchant
bound up with the problems of purchase and sale of goods, circulation,
advertising and the like.
The _Report on Freedom of the Press_ takes for granted the
merchandising realities. It speaks constantly of “marketable words
and images” rather than “news.” No wonder! The contents of newspapers
are standard goods manufactured in distant news agencies, syndicates,
canned-editorial factories. Development of 4-color facsimile processes
by 800-word-per-minute wireless transmission, plus air-express of
films, mats and plates, accentuates a trend. Simultaneous publication
on five continents of a whole magazine, forty-eight hours after the
material is written in a central editorial office anywhere, is now
possible. But newspapers are already, in effect, edited at the central
headquarters of banking and industry. And thus the boasted “free press”
of America has become a simon-pure example of Big Business, absolute,
brutal monopoly.
The Fascist “Fringe”
The increasingly monopolistic character of the press has made its
control by Big Business an automatic process. But it has had still
another result: to put the press under the influence of the most
reactionary, least responsible wing of Big Business. The direct agency
of this influence is the more openly pro-fascist section of the
press. Unfortunately, progressives cling to the illusion that this
section of the press is a sort of fanatical “fringe,” ill-regarded
in the trade. That is an illusion, a dangerous one. This so-called
“fringe” section comprises the chains owned by Hearst, Roy Howard and
Patterson-McCormick. Their combined direct circulation, according to
the Editor and Publisher Yearbook for 1944, was 9,649,108 daily and
13,578,687 Sunday, roughly a quarter of all newspaper circulation.
Moreover, the readers of newspapers subscribing to the Hearst
International News Service, which carries the Hearst political line in
full, should be added to the direct circulation figures. A tabulation
from the 1944 Yearbook shows I.N.S. was sold to 290 daily and 104
Sunday papers in 220 cities and towns of 38 states. Total circulation
of I.N.S.-subscribing papers was 15,827,856. This figure, plus the
circulation of the papers in the three chains (after eliminating
duplications) gives 22,043,146 as the actual audience of the three
chainsters--half the national circulation!
It is only the beginning. They also own all the important feature
syndicates and the two private news agencies, U.P. and I.N.S. They
control most of the columnists, more powerful than the editorial pages.
(Westbrook Pegler alone is said to have 10,000,000 circulation.) Their
competition and methods exert a direct influence on rival papers and on
Associated Press, aside from their many memberships in A.P. (one for
each member paper). Their papers dominate circulation in such key areas
as New York, Chicago and Washington.
But there is still more. Decisive is this fact: they form, in effect, a
single political bloc. The power of the bloc begins with its material
foundation, as described above. Here the new factor enters. The
three chains are not just important units in the highly profitable
merchandising enterprise called the newspaper industry. They are active
and conscious political forces. They have a program. They utilize
their papers and personnel for active organization of reactionary
movements and drives. They are not only available to such characters
as Representative Rankin and Senator Bilbo; they not only feature the
hate-speeches of such men: they write the speeches and inspire their
delivery. They instigate fascist activities. Goering and Rosenberg did
not have to seek Hearst out and bribe him to print their Nazi ravings
under their own by-lines: _he sought them out!_
It was war-long support by this bloc that prepared MacArthur’s
dictatorship of the Pacific today. It was their persistent slandering
of the Soviet Union throughout the war that prepared the general
hysteria of the press immediately the war had ended. The mere fact of
their operation as a bloc, would assure their dominance over the press
as a whole unless there were an equally powerful counterbloc. But
there is as yet no effective counterbloc--this is one of the primary
tasks still to be tackled by labor and the people. For the reactionary
program of the pro-fascist bloc is but the unrestrained expression
of Big Business’ inner drives. It is but the crude utterance of the
prejudices hidden by more cultured newspaper owners. It is the open
sore that betrays the hidden disease of our unfree-press: complete
subservience to the private interests of the biggest monopolies.