OWNING THE PRESS
The methods by which the “Empire of Business” maintains its control over
Journalism are four: First, ownership of the papers; second, ownership
of the owners; third, advertising subsidies; and fourth, direct bribery.
By these methods there exists in America a control of news and of
current comment more absolute than any monopoly in any other industry.
This statement may sound extreme, but if you will think about it you
will realize that in the very nature of the case it must be true. It
does not destroy the steel trust if there are a few independent
steel-makers, it does not destroy the money trust if there are a few
independent men of wealth, but it does destroy the news trust if there
is a single independent newspaper to let the cat out of the bag.
The extent to which outright ownership of newspapers and magazines has
been acquired by our financial autocracy would cause astonishment if it
were set forth in figures. One could take a map of America and a
paint-brush, and make large smudges of color, representing journalistic
ownership of whole districts, sometimes of whole states, by special
interests. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan would be swept with a yellow
smudge—that is copper. The whole state of Montana would be the same, and
the greater part of Arizona. A black smudge for Southern Colorado, and
another in the Northern part—that is coal. A gray smudge in Western
Pennsylvania, and another in Illinois—that is steel. A green smudge in
Wisconsin, and another in Oregon and Washington—that is lumber. A white
smudge in North Dakota and Minnesota—that is the milling trust, backed
by the railroads and the banks. A dirty smudge in central California,
representing “Southern Pacific” and “United Railways,” now reinforced by
“M. and M.”
Ten years ago there was a terrific reform campaign in San Francisco, and
the reformers started a little weekly called the “Liberator.” I quote
from one issue:
Many San Francisco weekly papers were bought up with cash payments,
coming principally from the offices of the “United Railroads.” But
this did not seem to satisfy the plans of the defense, and suddenly
the Calkins Syndicate developed into a concern of astonishing
magnitude. From the publisher of obscure weeklies and dailies, it
established a modern publishing plant, and took over much of the
printing of the “Sunset Magazine,” which contract alone brought the
Calkins outfit several thousand dollars a month. The “Sacramento
Union” and the “Fresno Herald” were purchased, and a bid made for the
“San Francisco Post.” The syndicate failed to get the “Post.” The “San
Francisco Globe” was started instead. Whatever money could do in the
newspaper line, Calkins for a few months did. Newspaper men knew, of
course, that the losses were enormous. The questions were, “Who is
filling the sack? How long will the sack last?”
And wherever in America there has been an honest investigation, the same
conditions have been revealed. The Calkins syndicate had its exact
counterpart in Montana; or rather two counterparts, for Senator Clark
and Marcus Daly, copper kings, were carrying on a feud, and each
purchased or established a string of newspapers to slander the other.
Now the gigantic “Anaconda” has swallowed them both, and there are only
two newspapers in Montana which are not owned or controlled by “copper.”
One of these is owned by a politician who, I am assured, serves the
“interests” without hire; and the other is the “Butte Daily Bulletin,”
Socialist, whose editor goes in hourly peril of his life. In Oklahoma
nearly everything is “Standard Oil”; and at the other end of the
continent is the New York “Outlook,” one of whose important stockholders
was discovered to be James Stillman, of the National City Bank of New
York—Standard Oil!
I have given elsewhere a picture of conditions in Los Angeles. In San
Diego are two papers owned by the sugar-king, and one paper of the
Scripps group. In San Francisco are two Hearst papers, the “Examiner”
and the “Call”; the “Chronicle,” owned by “Mike” de Young, whom I have
portrayed; and the “Bulletin” whose assorted knaveries will soon be set
forth in detail. Also there is a monthly, the “Sunset,” formerly owned
by the Southern Pacific, and now serving the anti-union campaign of the
“M. and M.”—the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association which has
raised a million dollar slush fund; also a weekly, popularly known as
“the Rich Man’s Door-mat,” and a number of gossip-weeklies and “kept”
political sheets. The “Labor Digest” has recently gone over with
startling suddenness to the cause of capital, reversing itself
absolutely on the Mooney case. The publisher, a veteran labor union
official, recently informed an applicant for the job of editor that he
was “running the paper to make money.” The applicant said that he
favored the Plumb plan; so there was “nothing doing.”
Moving on up the coast, there is the “Portland Oregonian,” owned by the
estate of a huge-scale lumber operator, one of the richest men in the
Northwest. An employee of this paper writes to me:
He was so public-spirited and free-handed that the appraisal of the
estate showed that he had invested to the extent of five dollars in
war savings stamps and in only five thousand dollars worth of war
bonds, and that under direct compulsion, so it was revealed, of his
fellow-citizens. The “Oregonian” is born of corporate power, conceived
for corporate purposes, and exists to do the corporate bidding,
avowedly so.
Also there is the “Portland Telegram,” owned by the two sons of a timber
magnate, who obtained most of his lands by the popular “dummy entry”
system. The same informant, who once worked for this paper, writes me of
these owners:
Neither has ever had to do a stroke of work in his life, and the
attitude of both toward the man on the payroll is the most typically
snobbish I have ever encountered. The younger brother directs the
paper, although he could not earn fifteen dollars a week salary in any
department if he were put on his own. The paper consequently is so
wobbly in its policies and practices that it rapidly is becoming a
joke.
In this vicinity is a third paper, owned by a politician of whom friends
tell me that he has in past times taken the popular side, but now is
old, and has got himself a business manager. A friend who knows this
young man describes him:
“Energetic, cold as steel, a typical corporation, business, money man,
who is wiping the paper clean of every trace of democracy.”
And then, moving farther North to Seattle, there is the “Times,” an
enormously valuable property, built up with the financial assistance of
the Hill interests and the Great Northern Railroad—which, I believe,
made more money out of a small investment than any other enterprise in
America. The “Times” is paying five per cent dividends on six million
dollars, and so naturally believes in the profit system. Also there is
the “Star,” a Scripps paper—the “Shooting Star,” which was willing to
lose thirty-five thousand readers in order to smash the Seattle strike.
And finally there is the “Post-Intelligencer,” which was purchased in
the interest of James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railroad, and
placed one hundred and seventy thousand dollars worth of its bonds in
the hands of these interests. The paper was taken over, says my
informant, by “the notorious Jacob Furth interests of Seattle. Furth was
head of the Seattle transportation lines and the Seattle National Bank,
and was the village pawnbroker. The paper had gradually gotten more and
more into debt to the banks, and its present ownership arose out of that
fact.”
Such is the newspaper plight of the Pacific coast! And now come to the
Atlantic coast, and take one of our great centers of culture; take the
Hub of the Universe, take Boston. The newspaper plight of Boston is
beyond telling. There is the “Evening Transcript,” owned by an extremely
wealthy and reactionary family, serving every wealthy and reactionary
interest, and incidentally taking advertising bribes, as I shall
presently show. There is the “Boston American,” owned by Hearst, and the
“Boston Daily Advertiser,” also owned by Hearst. The latter is the
oldest newspaper in Boston, and a year ago its circulation was cut down
to a thousand copies, its publication being continued merely in order
that Hearst may retain its Associated Press franchise. There is the
“Boston Globe,” and its evening edition, controlled, I am informed, by
Standard Oil. There is the “Boston Herald,” and its evening edition, the
“Traveler,” owned by the Plant and United Shoe Machinery interests, with
ex-Senator Crane holding the balance of power. There is the “Post,” also
heavily in debt to Crane—who is one of the leading reactionaries of New
England. The owner of the “Post” is described to me by one who knows him
as “a sick man, who like all men who have accumulated a great deal of
wealth, is inclined to be conservative and fearful of change.”
Finally, there is the “Christian Science Monitor,” owned and run by a
group of wealthy metaphysicians, who teach that Poverty is a Delusion of
Mortal Mind, and that Hunger can be relieved by Thinking. I make it a
practice when a public emergency arises, and I have something to say
which I think is important, to send it to leading newspapers by
telegraph collect. Sometimes the newspapers publish it, nearly always
they accept it and pay for it—because they judge there is a possibility
of their getting something important by this method. The “Christian
Science Monitor” stands alone among American newspapers in that it wrote
me not to send it telegrams, because there was no chance of its caring
to print what I might have to say!
Or take Cincinnati, where I happen to have friends on the “inside.”
There is the “Cincinnati Inquirer” and “Post,” owned by the estate of
McLean, who made thirty million dollars out of street railway and gas
franchises, obtained by bribery. This estate also owns the “Washington
Post,” whose knaveries I shall tell about later on. And there is the
“Times-Star,” owned by Charles P. Taft, brother of our ex-president.
“Charlie” Taft married twenty million dollars, and bought a newspaper,
and started out as a valiant reformer, and everybody in Cincinnati
thought how lovely that a fine, clean, young millionaire was going in
for civic reform. But at the very outset he trod on the toes of Boss
Cox, and Boss Cox showed how he could injure the Taft fortune; whereupon
“Charlie” made a deal with the boss, and since then his paper has been
the leading champion of civic corruption.
In most big cities you find papers owned by big local “trusts,” and one
or two others belonging to a “trust” of newspapers, a publishing-system
like that of Calkins or Capper or Munsey or Scripps or Hearst. For the
rule that the big fish swallow the little ones applies in the newspaper
world as elsewhere. The publisher of a big newspaper comes upon a chance
to buy a small newspaper in a neighboring city, and presently he finds
himself with a chain of newspapers. Then he learns of a magazine that is
“on the rocks,” and it occurs to him that a magazine can help his
newspapers, or vice versa. So you find Munsey, a self-confessed
stock-gambler, with three magazines and several newspapers; the Hearst
machine with a dozen newspapers, also “Hearst’s Magazine,” the
“Cosmopolitan,” and four other periodicals. Every month in the Hearst
newspapers you read editorials which are disguised advertisements of
these magazines.
Also it has been discovered that magazines can combine to their
financial advantage. The agents who come to your home and pester the
life out of you for subscriptions find that they can get more of your
money by offering clubbing-rates for a group of magazines: a farm paper,
another paper with “slush for the women,” a third paper with slush for
the whole family—such as I have quoted from the “American” and
“McClure’s.” So you see a vast commercial machine building itself up.
There is Street and Smith, with no less than eight magazines, all of
them having enormous circulations, and devoted exclusively to trash.
There is the Butterick Company, with seven; “Vanity Fair” and the
Crowell Company, with four each; the Curtis Company, “Munsey’s,” the
“Atlantic,” the “World’s Work,” the “Smart Set,” the “Red Book”—each
with three. In England we have seen great chains of publications built
up in connection with the selling of cocoa and soap; in America we see
them built up in connection with the selling of dress-patterns, as with
the Buttericks; with the boosting of moving pictures, as formerly done
by “McClure’s”; with grocery-stores and stock-manipulation, as
“Munsey’s”; with the selling of subscription-books, as “Collier’s,” or
dictionaries, as the “Literary Digest.” Or perhaps it will be a magazine
run by a book-publisher, as a means of advertising and reviewing his own
books; and if you investigate, you find that the book-publisher in turn
is owned by some great financial interest, which sees that he publishes
commercial stuff and rejects all new ideas. This process of
centralization has continued in England until now Lord Northcliffe owns
fifty or sixty magazines and newspapers of all varieties.
Northcliffe had a personal quarrel with Lloyd George, and that part of
British “Big Business” which makes its profits out of the Lloyd George
policies felt the need of more publicity, and went into the market and
bought the “Chronicle” for several million dollars. When the masters of
industry pay such sums for a newspaper, they buy not merely the building
and the presses and the name; they buy what they call the
“good-will”—that is, they buy _you_. And they proceed to change your
whole psychology—everything that you believe about life. You might
object to it, if you knew; but they do their work so subtly that you
never guess what is happening to you!
By way of illustration, let me tell you the amusing story of one
American newspaper which was thus bought in the open market. Some years
ago there was a Standard Oil magnate, H. M. Flagler, who took a fancy to
the state of Florida, and entertained himself by developing it into a
leisure-class resort. He owned all the railroads, and a great chain of
hotels, and also, as a matter of course, the State legislature. He had
the misfortune to have an insane wife, and the laws of Florida did not
permit him to divorce this wife, so he caused to be introduced and
passed a bill permitting divorce on grounds of insanity. But, being a
moral citizen, who believed in the sanctity of marriage for everybody
but himself, Mr. Flagler allowed this law to stand only long enough for
him to get his divorce. He then had his legislature repeal the law, so
that no one might be corrupted by his evil example.
He married another woman, and shortly afterwards left her a widow with a
hundred million dollars. Needless to say, such widows are not left very
long to mourn; Mrs. Flagler espoused a certain Judge Bingham, a leading
citizen of Kentucky. A pre-nuptial contract barred him from inheriting
her estate; nevertheless she managed, eight months after their wedding,
and six weeks before her death, to present to him a trifling matter of
five million dollars. Then she died, and he, being lonely, and in
possession of spare cash, looked around for something to play with. He
decided to play with you—that is, with a newspaper!
There was an old newspaper in Louisville, the “Courier-Journal,” which
had been made by the genius of Col. Henry Watterson, a picturesque
old-style Democrat, a radical of the Jeffersonian type, who stormed with
vivid and diverting ferocity at the “robber barons” of Wall Street. The
paper had got into financial difficulties, owing to family quarrels of
the owners, and Judge Bingham bought it, with its evening edition, the
“Louisville Times,” for something over a million dollars. Col. Watterson
was to stay as “Editor Emeritus”; that is, he was to be a figurehead, to
blind the public to the sinister realities of modern capitalism. But
modern capitalism is too greedy and too ruthless a force for the
old-style gentleman of the South; Col. Watterson could not stand the
editorial policy of his new owner, so he quit, and today the
“Courier-Journal” challenges the “Los Angeles Times” as an organ of
venomous reaction. I quote one sample of its editorials—the subject
being that especially infamous variety of pervert known as the
“Christian Socialist clergyman.” Behold him!—
Some person who has never worked in his life—except his tongue—and yet
talks to his “congregation” about problems of workingmen. This rogue
is sometimes an elocutionary shyster who rambles about the
downtrodden—meaning his prosperous followers and, of course,
himself—the expected revolution, the rights of the pee-pul, and so on.
What he desires to do is to heroize himself, to appear to his pee-pul
as a courageous leader against oppression; which is to say, against
the law and the Government which protect this people in the possession
of their homes, automobiles and liberties.
Col. Watterson resigned. But as a rule the professional journalist
pockets his Brass Check, and delivers the goods to his master in the
silence and secrecy of the journalistic brothel. A professional
journalist may be defined as a man who holds himself ready at a day’s
notice to adjust his opinions to the pocket-book of a new owner. I have
heard Arthur Brisbane remark that the “New York Times” was sold on
several occasions, and on each occasion its “editor” was sold with it.
Yet when you read this “editor’s” preachments, they are all so solemn
and dignified, high-sounding and moral—you would never dream but that
you were reading actual opinions of a man!
Quite recently we saw the “New York Evening Post” put up on the
journalistic bargain-counter. I have told how the “Evening Post” treated
me at various times, so you will see that the paper was hardly to be
classified as “radical.” But during the war it became treasonable to the
gigantic trading corporation which calls itself the British Government;
it persisted in this stubborn course, even when it knew that J. P.
Morgan & Company were selling billions of British bonds, and handling
all the purchases of the British Government in America. When the
Bolsheviki gave out the secret treaties of the Allies, the “Evening
Post” was the one non-Socialist newspaper in America which published
them in full. So it was evident that something must be done, and done
quickly, about the “Evening Post.”
The paper was in financial difficulties, because of the constantly
increasing cost of material and wages. Its owner gave an option to his
associates, with the pledge on their part that they would not take the
paper to “Wall Street”; then, three weeks later, the paper was sold to
Thomas W. Lamont, of the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company; the owner being
kept in ignorance of the name of the purchaser. So now the “New York
Evening Post” looks upon the peace treaty, and finds it “a voice from
heaven.” “A voice from heaven” commanding the French to grab the Saar
Valley, and the Japs to seize Shantung! “A voice from heaven” commanding
the workers of Russia to pay the bad debts of the Tsar—and to pay them
through the banking-house of J. P. Morgan & Company!
And if you do not care to get your opinions from the gigantic
trading-corporation which calls itself the British government, you may
read the “New York Evening Mail,” which was bought with the money of the
German government! Or you may read the “New York Evening Sun,” which was
bought by Frank A. Munsey, with part of the million dollars which he
boasted of having made out of your troubles in the 1907 panic. If you do
not like papers which are bought and sold, you may read the “New York
Evening Telegram,” which has remained the property of the Bennett
estate, and is working for the pocket-book of the Bennett estate,
forty-one editions every week. In the morning, you may read the
“Herald,” which is working for the same estate. If you get tired of the
point of view of that estate, you may try the estate of Whitelaw Reid,
capitalist, or of Joseph Pulitzer, invested in railroads and telegraphs,
or of Searles, of the Sugar Trust. Or, if you prefer living men, you may
give up your mind to the keeping of Adolph Ochs, of the Traction gang,
or of William Rockefeller of Standard Oil, or of William Randolph Hearst
of Eternal Infamy. This concludes the list of choices that are open to
you in New York—unless you are willing to read a Socialist paper, the
“New York Call”; and of course you cannot get the “Call” all the time,
because sometimes the police bar it from the stands, and sometimes the
soldier-boys raid its offices and throw the editors out of the windows,
and sometimes the Postmaster-General bars it from the mails, and at all
times he refuses it second class entry. So if I wish to get it out here
in California, I have to pay two and one half times as much as I pay for
the papers of the Searles estate and the Pulitzer estate and the Hearst
estate and the Bennett estate and the Reid estate.