The "free press"
Date: 2023-02-22T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Press -- United States

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Title: The "free press"

portrait of a monopoly

Author: George Marion

Release date: February 22, 2023 [eBook #70107]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: New Century Publishers, 1946

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70107

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THE “FREE PRESS”
PORTRAIT OF A MONOPOLY

By GEORGE MARION

NEW CENTURY PUBLISHERS: New York

Published by New Century Publishers, 832 Broadway, New York 3, N. Y.
June, 1946 209 PRINTED IN U.S.A.

CONTENTS

PART I: PORTRAIT OF A MONOPOLY
I. | It’s Free—For Millionaires! | 5
II. | For Whom The Press Toils | 11
III. | Words For Sale | 15
PART II: NEWS—ARM OF EMPIRE
IV. | The Rover Newsboys Abroad | 22
V. | Secret History of a Cartel | 28
VI. | Responsibility—A Challenge To the Press | 42

About the Author

George Marion, the author of this pamphlet, was born and raised in the Middle West. A member of the Newspaper Guild (C.I.O.), he got his education in “free” journalism at first hand. His experience covers work in every department of news manufacturing, the modern process by which “marketable words and images” are produced. He is a veteran war correspondent and roving reporter, and his news background includes a period with the defunct semi-official French news agency, Havas; free-lancing in Europe, North Africa, and India; and front-line reporting of the historic conflict in Spain of the 1935–37 years, Hitler’s “dress rehearsal” for World War II. When this pamphlet went to press, he was on the staff of the New York Mirror.

THE “FREE PRESS”
By GEORGE MARION

Part I: Portrait of a Monopoly

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.

Part II: News—Arm of Empire

Chapter IV
THE ROVER NEWSBOYS ABROAD

“I want the people of every land to be as fully informed as we are, through a press of varied inclinations toward the philosophies of the day.”—Kent Cooper.

What the American press is at home—an arm of the State—it is abroad. The press, and the forces behind it, have formulated an aggressive program for pushing American commodity news into every corner of the earth. The program is put in the form of a demand for adoption of “freedom of the press as we know it” by all nations. The President, the State Department, the Congress have formally adopted the news industry’s program as a basic unit in American foreign policy.

The first major action of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights was to set up a subcommittee on the “free press,” to consider a resolution along American lines. There was strong pressure to adopt the American view in its entirety. The U.S. has also insisted that many foreign countries accept American correspondents and adopt American news concepts if they want diplomatic recognition.

Speaking for the American newspaper industry, Kent Cooper has further proposed that no country should obtain aid of any kind from the U.S. without acceptance of these views. Official backing of Cooper has gone so far that Congress even delayed a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency appropriation in an attempt to impose a “free press” condition for U.N.R.R.A. aid.

As a matter of fact, the wedding of press and State has carried the “free press” demand far beyond the limits of news policy, no matter how you define the latter. A privileged status is being demanded for the news industry, as witness Cooper’s suggestion that correspondents be given diplomatic immunity! But the matter is far from stopping there.

It is not generally known that the American news industry has now attained virtual domination of the world news market—which means every country except the Soviet Union and its immediate neighbors. The story of the battle for world opinion control will be told in later pages. Here it is enough to point out that official pressure for world news “freedom” has a double purpose. First, it is aimed to break down Soviet resistance, especially in respect to reported plans of Tass, official Soviet news agency, to serve Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary and Rumania. Second, it is designed to further expand and consolidate the powerful world position of the American news monopoly against future challenges by its now feeble rivals.

In such a program, news is a naked arm of Empire. It cannot be separated from the territorial, military-strategic, economic and political aspects of American foreign policy. The increasingly imperialistic tone of that policy, the spread-eagle drive for absolute world power, is more and more reflected in the demands of the news industry. Thus, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the banker-minded New York Times, frankly states the connection between the two. In a speech containing the crude threat of atomic bombs and the flavor of political blackmail, he declared:

I do not believe that free peoples can afford to trust dictatorships. We should not share our military secrets, or make any financial agreements, calculated to build the Soviet Union until we in this country have more knowledge of her and her ways.... I think we should put definite limits upon our cooperation ... until we have the same freedom of access to the news of Russia as they have to the news over here....

Access to the news is, therefore, my condition for full cooperation and I should hold to that position uncompromisingly. The elimination of censorship would be but a small part of compliance with this condition. Access to the news means freedom to travel at will—to talk with whomsoever one wishes—it means finding communications systems available—it means the right of a business man to see how his product is used or whether a market for it exists.... I say this as a newspaper man, it is true, but in this all-important freedom we in the newspaper profession act as your agents.

What Sulzberger and the news industry are demanding, is acceptance by the Soviet Union of the system of special privileges for private enterprise that prevails here. At the very least, they would require the Russians to agree that information is a commodity to be peddled exclusively by morally irresponsible private organizations. If the Soviet Union could be forced to bow to American private enterprise in this instance, a capitalist wedge would have been inserted in the Socialist system.

Lawful Spies

Any newspaperman who has worked abroad, or among foreign correspondents here, knows that there is the closest connection between the work of a correspondent and the interests of the State. Walter Lippmann, in criticizing Congress for the attempted U.N.R.R.A. holdup, pointed out that virtually all of a correspondent’s news comes from officials and business men of his own country, plus some friendly foreign diplomatic sources. There is no clear line separating the correspondent from the Embassy officials of his country. There is even less sharp a distinction between the information exchanged by the correspondent with Embassy officials and the “intelligence” supplied by agents and outright spies.

The recent Pearl Harbor inquiry dented the old shallow idea of “intelligence” which centered on beautiful Mata Haris and stolen plans, though the recent Canadian spy-scare exploited this popular misconception. The United States has just created a new national intelligence agency on a more realistic basis. Gathering of every kind of public and secret information, plus the over-all evaluation of the total information, is the job of the new agency. Evaluation of information at every stage is essential. Poor evaluation led General Marshall to believe—and to tell a press conference—that the Nazis would go through the Red Army like a hot knife through butter; later that Japan was militarily a joke.

For the function of gathering information and evaluating it as it is gathered, the correspondent is ideally equipped. Since his work is conditioned to the objectives of the dominant interests in his own country, and even of his own government to varying degrees, he cannot be regarded as an innocent man from Mars, dispassionately reporting history as it unfolds. As a matter of fact, news values are determined, for the correspondent, with relation to state policy. Events are not “news” unless they have some bearing on the progress or lack of progress of specific American policies. The current American coverage of the Balkans is typical. Correspondence from that area is almost exclusively concerned with the Anglo-American effort to get “reliable” governments installed. The correspondent makes no pretense of drawing a positive picture of life in those lands.

But over and beyond what the correspondent reports, or does not report, is his value as a contact man. It is not for nothing that Sulzberger stresses complete freedom of motion and contact for the business man and correspondent alike. In the Socialist sphere, and in rival imperialist territory, the American newspaperman is part of a network of capitalist contacts within the country to which he is assigned. He is a war correspondent and intelligence agent in peacetime!

This question of contacts is as decisive for the newspaper business as it is for intelligence work. And it provides an interesting link with the secret history of the world news cartel. For just such contacts were the foundation of the global news monopoly. And the cartel was, from the start, unmistakably at the service of commercial and state interests!

News Since Feudal Days

Near the middle of the past century, governments, bankers, rich merchants, kept private couriers who travelled to all important European capitals. By carrier pigeon—and in America also by pony express—they sent specific information on prices and market conditions, plus general political information required for their long-range business planning. The couriers built up extremely valuable contacts that would have made them very valuable to newspapers. But newspapers couldn’t afford their costly services and the couriers couldn’t afford to lose their rich clients by publishing their information. Newspapers had the right to print news but no way to get it.

The telegraph broke that situation wide open. It made the relative isolation of the newspapers impossible; it spelled the doom of the private news systems.A It ended feudalism in the information field. But not everyone saw that immediately. Paul Julius Reuter, Prussian government courier with many business clients and topnotch European contacts, understood it at once. He determined to switch to newspapers, offering a telegraphic news service to several papers at once. Germany was no place for a progressive idea in 1851, and Britain was the nation with the most extensive world interests, so Reuter set up shop in London. His idea was a smashing success. Reuters soon was the all-powerful government-backed British Empire news monopoly.

Charles Havas, a Hungarian, established a similar monopoly for the French Empire and France’s sphere of interest, and Dr. Bernhard Wolff did as much for Germany. In the United States, Associated Press grew out of the same conditions, except that the agency, like the nation itself, was almost wholly absorbed in internal development, almost entirely disinterested in the rest of the world. Toward the close of the century, however, there were signs that the tremendous productive forces developed under American capitalism would ultimately seek an empire if not world empire. The country began to show more interest in world news. Associated Press, to improve its monopoly position and bar the possibility of successful competition at home, sought exclusive rights to a supply of world news. It made a deal with the European agencies.

That deal and the world news relationships of which it was a part, were well hidden from the world prior to World War II, but the war completed a change in the former secret relationships. Marking this change, A.P. chief Kent Cooper published the story of the news cartel in 1942. His book was called Barriers Down. Cooper published it only to mobilize support for his “crusade.”

Cooper’s “crusade” is nothing more than a drive for world news monopoly. Barriers Down is designed to justify American imperialist news domination by coating it with high moral purpose. The London Economist, organ of battered British imperialism, notes in its issue of December 2, 1944:

Mr. Cooper, like most big business executives, experiences a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage. In his ode to Liberty there is no suggestion than when all barriers are down the huge financial resources of the American agencies might enable them to dominate the world. His desire to prevent another Goebbels from poisoning the wells will be universally applauded, but democracy does not necessarily mean making the whole world safe for A.P. In this, as in other post-war issues—such as civil aviation—commercial practices are habitually confused with such big words as “liberty and the Rights of Man.”

Cooper’s book nevertheless lends the strongest authority to what would otherwise be an almost incredible story of news imperialism. We shall lean on it heavily.

Chapter V
SECRET HISTORY OF A CARTEL

The story begins in the 1840’s with the formation of the great modern news agencies in obedience to the click of the telegraph key. At that time, Great Britain dominated the world. France, a powerful state, was nevertheless a link in the British system. Germany had not yet fully emerged as a modern industrial power. Russia, ruling a sprawling empire, was herself, in a sense, something of a political and economic “colony” of the more advanced European states. The Far East was one huge, thinly-disguised sphere for European exploitation, too, with Britain hogging the lion’s share. The United States, in addition to exercising little influence in world affairs, lacked the immediate facilities for world news competition: Great Britain controlled almost all cable and other communications.

Under these conditions, there arose what Kent Cooper justly terms “the greatest and most powerful international monopoly of the 19th Century,” the world news cartel. Considering that A.P. voluntarily participated in it, Cooper’s highly moral tone is strange. It is true, nevertheless, that the agencies “brought under their control the power to decide what the people of each nation would be allowed to know of the people of other nations and in what shade of meaning the news was to be presented.”

* * * * *

Summarizing the situation, the A.P. boss continues:

For long years Reuters, acceptably to Havas and Wolff, had divided the globe among the three according to Reuters’ idea of proper spheres of influence for each.... Reuters received English-speaking North America, in which since 1893 the A.P. had bought exclusive territorial rights.

For long years Reuters, acceptably to Havas and Wolff, was granted a free hand in Canada. Later this free hand was extended to include Mexico, Central America and the West Indies where Reuters and Havas held the sovereign rights. The two, however, admitted no control whatever to Wolff, the German Agency, in the Western Hemisphere. Reuters had Great Britain, including all the colonies and dominions, Egypt, Turkey, Japan, China and what might be called the suzerain states, or those in which England had exerted a sphere of influence.

Havas [since succeeded by France-Presse] controlled the French Empire, Switzerland and all the Latin countries, including Italy, Spain, Portugal and those in South America. [Also the Balkans.]

To Wolff [later D.N.B. or the Deutsches Nachtrichten Buro] fell the Scandinavian states, with Russia and all the Slav nations. Austria also came under the jurisdiction of the German agency.

A Conflict Is Born

Reuters used its control frankly in the interest of the British Empire and of British business interests. Havas and Reuters combined to carry stories that would tend to ridicule American manufactures and America, but they refrained from such handling of Britain and France respectively. All over the world, news from America was top-heavy with Indians on the warpath, lynchings in the South, bizarre crimes in the North. Havas headed off American business competition with France in South America—a Havas exclusive territory—by stories belittling U.S. automobiles and other products. (Very reminiscent, one may note, of the American news industry’s deliberate belittling of Soviet industrial products and skills and planning, propaganda that misled even our highest authorities prior to Stalingrad.)

Anglo-French ridicule was gall and wormwood to American Big Business as it moved more and more into competition for world markets, world influence and world power. It was more immediately vexing to Associated Press but A.P. never went outside the gentlemanly bounds of the conspiracy. It used the cartel as a club to beat back United Press and other would-be rivals at home.

Nevertheless, an ultimate conflict between A.P. and Reuters was inevitable. The United States was building up industrial might and developing resources to overtake and pass Great Britain in the race for world power. This was somewhat obscured, for the general observer, by the rather more aggressive challenge of Germany. Germany, too, had built up a modern industrial productive apparatus far greater than that of Britain. It found the world already divided. Markets, raw materials, the slave labor of colonies and their investment opportunities, had been “parcelled out” among Britain, France and their satellites: Holland, Belgium, Portugal. British and French guns were levelled against any suggestion of sharing the plunder with the newcomers. So German imperialism levelled its guns, too, and World War I was on.

Peak of Reuter’s Power

With Britain and France and Germany engaged in worldwide warfare while the United States (until 1917) stood on the sidelines, Reuters, Havas and Wolff were severely handicapped. Even under peacetime conditions they could not compete with the American agencies on a commodity-news basis. Their official or semi-official character restricted their freedom of action and of judgment. The moment something really important happened in Europe, they would hesitate, under official pressure. For example, when the Nazis murdered Austrian Premier Dollfuss, Havas sent nothing for hours while the Quai d’Orsay debated how French-controlled areas should be informed of this event, how it should be interpreted. The “officialese” in which such events were reported sometimes achieved peaks of silliness. A dispatch to New York from Havas bureau in Beirut, Syria, in 1934, said:

French governor visited hinterland first time since elections. On every hand he was greeted with enthusiasm by populace which thanked him for all France had done to relieve food crisis. Extremists threw a few bombs but vigorous police measures reassured people.

Reuters was no less one-sided in its devotion to British interests, and the national agencies of the smaller States were doubly handicapped. On the one hand they were mere creatures of Reuters-Havas; on the other, they were bound out to the service of their own State. The mere listing of the national agencies dancing to the Reuters-Havas tune establishes the political significance of the cartel. They were: Amtliche Nachrichtenstelle, Austria; Agence Telegraphique Belge, Belgium; Agence Telegraphique Bulgars, Bulgaria; Bureau de Presse, Czechoslovakia; Ritzaus Bureau, Denmark; Agence Telegraphique Esthonienne, Esthonia; Finska Notisbyran, Finland; Athena, Greece; Nederlandsch Telegraaf Agentschap, Holland; Agence Telegraphique Lettone, Latvia; Agence Telegraphique Hongroise, Hungary; Stefani, Italy; Kokusai, Japan; Avola, Yugoslavia; Agence Telegraphique Lithuanienne, Lithuania; Norsk Telegram-Bureau, Norway; Agence Telegraphique Polonaise, Poland; Rador, Rumania; Rosta, Russia; Fabra, Spain; Tidningarnas Telegrambyra, Sweden; Agence Telegraphique Suisse, Switzerland; Anatolie, Turkey.

These agencies were financially controlled by Reuters-Havas-Wolff, but they could not have been independent even if there were no financial control. In the first place, the cables were British and aside from direct restrictions imposed by Great Britain on users of the cable, manipulation of rates could determine the profit or bankruptcy of a stubborn agency. On top of that, Havas and the smaller agencies were not only news but also advertising agencies, monopolistic ones. Newspapers, in Europe and Asia alike, got Reuters-Havas news service free—in effect, and they had to use it if they wanted the advertising by which they lived.

This dominating position gave the European agencies a haughty and clumsy attitude toward transmission of news. They could delay or garble the most important events. It also gave them no incentive to technical advance. Havas was still using the stylus instead of the typewriter in the 1920’s. So long as and wherever Britain and France remained the ruling powers, the agencies could get away with it. But wherever and whenever some other power could challenge Anglo-French rule, a challenge to the news agencies would follow. South America was the “where” and World War I was the “when.”

Conquest of South America

Havas was boss of South America according to the cartel contract. As soon as World War I started, therefore, Havas decided exactly what South Americans could be permitted to learn about the war. It goes without saying that only the Allied side was to be reported. But such was the inflexibility of the official agencies, that Havas was unwilling to transmit even the German war communique when asked to do so by leading South American papers. It could not unbend that much to head off the obvious danger of losing South America to some American rival agency.

This was A.P.’s great opportunity, but the agency was fearful of losing the advantages of cartel membership if it made a bid for South America. Manager Melville Stone considered that the cartel might oust A.P. and admit the newer United Press to membership. Accordingly, he left unanswered a request by La Nacion of Buenos Aires, one of the world’s leading newspapers, for A.P. service.

New pressures, however, were at work. Within A.P., Kent Cooper, then only Traffic Manager, learned for the first time of the cartel and of A.P.’s humiliatingly inferior position in it. He began what he likes to call his “great crusade,” by which he means a thirty-year fight to substitute American for British news domination of the world. From outside the agency came insistent demands by the government for aid in advancing national policy. The State Department made a crude subsidy offer with the aim of bribing the South American press. Stone later wrote:

The State Department asked me to employ the editors of almost every leading paper in South America on handsome salaries as correspondents of A.P. ... whether they sent us news or not ... and the government would recoup us for anything we paid.... They want something more than a mere news report.... They want some sort of illuminating service from the United States to indicate that this country is not money-grabbing or territory-grabbing.

Incidentally, a similar proposal was made for the Far East. A.P. rejected the proposals. Moreover, “government propaganda” was one important reason. Moreover, “government propaganda” organizations were regarded as inadequate and unstable instruments for conquering news control. A.P. felt the government interest, for one thing, was not likely to survive the war. Even more important was the fact that the American news industry has always heavily exploited its alleged “independence of direct government ties” as proof of its non-partisan character.

But far from refusing all forms of subsidy, the news industry fought for and obtained aid in the form of “practical rates for news transmission; rates attractive enough to encourage the export of news from the U.S.” The government had for some years encouraged the laying of new American-owned cables. Now, at the “behest of the State Department,” the American-owned cable company gave lower rates to American clients than to Havas, for news to South America. American news went to South America after all, therefore, on behalf of the State Department.

A.P.’s conservatism might well have cost it the chance to seize South America. But United Press, unhampered by cartel obligations, started operations there. That shook A.P.’s complacency. Cooper insisted that the cartel give A.P. full freedom to operate in South America. Stone said: “Go ahead and advocate as much liberty as possible, but don’t do anything to bring a break between the A.P. and our European news agency allies.” There was, however, no serious resistance. Reuters told Havas to agree or else. Havas yielded.

Redividing the World

World War I was fought for the redivision of the world among the existing imperialist powers. Germany lost her colonies and the German Republic was reduced to the role of a vassal state serving the American-Anglo-French victors. This situation was duly reflected within the news cartel where Wolff lost territory and was permitted to serve only Germany itself.

A.P. scrambled clumsily for a share in the spoils. Cooper hurried to Versailles to ask the U.S. treaty delegation to fight for A.P. parity with Reuters and Havas. This was to be expressed in the form of a “free press” clause in the peace treaty. President Wilson’s right-hand man, Colonel House, very sympathetic to the American news monopoly’s desires, agreed to sound out the possibilities. He reported, in a few days, that the question had been “taken care of privately” and he could do nothing.

How it was “taken care of,” Cooper reports with great indignation. His account, coming as it does from a member of the gang—a disgruntled member but still one of the boys—is of great authority. It is necessary only to warn that, writing in 1942, he showed no great anti-Nazi fervor and discreetly dodged the ticklish problem of the Soviet Union. He does not mention the great cordon sanitaire—the strangling “safety belt”—set up around the new Socialist State after World War I, but is full of pity for Germany.

Cooper says he learned that a cartel meeting had been held in which the heads of Havas and Reuters had conferred alone while Dr. Heinrich Mantler, head of the Wolff Agency, was left to smoulder in an anteroom. When Reuters-Havas had decided the redivision of the globe, Mantler was called in and told the bad news.

Reuters and Havas, matching the political terms of the Versailles Treaty, built their own news agency cordon sanitaire around Germany. All the political states bordering on Germany were allowed to have only news agencies owned or controlled by either Reuters or Havas or both. In other words, the position of the news agencies in those border countries was harmonious with the determination of England and France to keep Germany hemmed in by little nations mostly pro-Ally, such as Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

A borderline area was the Saar Valley, the Palatinate and Rhenish Prussia. The French Government wanted that for Havas. Reuters was neither wholly unwilling nor enthusiastic, because Britain wanted a moderately strong Germany to act as a check on France. Finally, and subject to the Saar Plebiscite 15 years later, “they made a compromise by which Wolff Agency might serve there, but a copy of Wolff service should go to the Havas Agency, and if it was not satisfactory Wolff could be removed from there.”

The victors were not averse to tearing slices of territory from one another, either, so within the winning combination some changes were made. Havas retained the bulk of the Balkans, but Greece and Turkey passed “into Reuters’ [Britain’s] sphere of influence.”

Battle for Asia

A.P. remained a stepchild during all this time. It obtained a free hand in South America, as already related. But in general, just as Great Britain was slow to recognize and acknowledge the unmistakably superior position of the rival American imperialism, so Reuters took a haughty tone toward A.P. requests for adjustments in their relations. Outside the cartel, accordingly, A.P. built up positions and alliances for an ultimate showdown. Inside A.P., Kent Cooper gathered allies for his more aggressive program against the still dominant go-slow policy of Melville Stone.

While Britain was deeply involved in World War I, the U.S. greatly extended the American communications network. Monopoly in communications was deliberately fostered to “advance the national interests.” This process, begun during World War I and continued through World War II, is described in the previously-cited Report on Freedom of the Press.B As this study is financed by a Time magazine grant and has semi-governmental, semi-official news industry standing, it is not critical of imperialist expansion. All the more weight must be attached to its admission that State and industry are one in communications and news-export.

These new government-fostered monopolies now played an important part in the forward march of American news. Though A.P. had refused to do a propaganda-job under government control, it was not at all reluctant to let the government pay for A.P.’s expansion. This is what happened:

The Far East was the scene of the first open clash with Reuters. Reuters’ absolute domination of world news produced some peculiar effects on American-Oriental information exchange. West Coast publishers, led by Hearst, were frantic about the situation. Cooper’s first ally within A.P. was V. J. McClatchy, California publisher who reflected the violent anti-British, anti-Japanese policies of Hearst. McClatchy, in turn, won the support of Adolph Ochs, publisher of the most powerful newspaper in America—the New York Times. A.P. was now consciously but cautiously working toward an ultimate showdown with Reuters.

McClatchy went to Washington in 1919 to seek Congressional aid. When he told Congress about the news aspects of American imperialism’s secret struggle in the Orient, the legislators were indignant. Reuters, it was demonstrated, mangled all American news printed in Japan, China and the Far East as a whole. Even news between the U.S. and the Philippine Islands had to go by way of London for British profit and British editorial slant.

Japan was the key news country in the Far East. Until 1914, the country had no news agency of its own. Reuters not only controlled the import and export of news but had the direct internal monopoly as well. Japan had to pay Reuters what amounted to an annual subsidy, after 1914, to get out of Japan and let the Japanese form a news agency, Kokusai, which got all its non-Japanese news from Reuters. The American news report for Far East distribution was now circulated by Kokusai; Reuters-Havas Far East news to the U. S. was transmitted via Kokusai. It amounted to an Anglo-Japanese alliance against the U. S. The garbling of news that resulted was beyond imagination; British bias strained through Japanese culture and policy!

Congress ordered the U. S. Navy to put its radio circuits at the disposal of the agencies. The order specified rates that were, in effect, a subsidy to permit the agencies to compete with Reuters. Again, it was U.P. that moved first. A new Japanese agency, Nippon Dempo, was set up and it used the U.P. “report.” Later, Nippon Shimbun Rengo was formed to replace Kokusai. Rengo constantly sought A.P. service, but the cartel would not consent. On the whole, British control of Far Eastern news remained unimpaired.

This was the situation in 1925 when Kent Cooper became General Manager of A.P. In 1927, Cooper went to Europe to negotiate a new “treaty” with Reuters, Havas and Wolff. He wanted A.P.’s gains since 1893—the rights acquired in South America, for instance—put in writing. He especially wanted the cartel to admit A.P. to Japan on the plea that other American agencies were there and were serving the home market with non-cartel news.

As Cooper put it, he wanted a new contract primarily in the interest of plain-speaking. He said: “It seemed to me that if the A.P. wanted to be in on a division of the world as between the other three agencies the contract should specify what territories were allotted to each.” The new contract did exactly that. Without the shadow of double-talk, it stated: “Reuters shall have the exclusive exploitation of the following territories....” The British and Dutch Empires and most of the Far East were included in these territories. Havas had “exclusive exploitation” of Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Balkans as well as the French Empire. Associated Press had “exclusive exploitation” of North America and shared South America with Havas.

Now that is plain enough even for me, a disillusioned newspaperman weary of piffle about “freedom of the press.” That is straight business talk as among “legitimate” monopolists. It is, in short, a cartel agreement for the division of the world market in news. But there is a sequel to the story. When Cooper returned from Europe with his new contract, A.P. Board members were horrified by the word “exploitation.” Cooper explains their squeamishness by saying that “the word has taken on a stigma in the United States which it does not have in Europe.” An evasive word was substituted and the contract was approved. “Exploitation” disappeared but the cartel reality remained.C

With respect to Japan, the head of Reuters, Sir Roderick Jones, made a verbal agreement to permit A.P. dealings with Rengo. He could not put it in writing, he said, because it would be a loss of face to Reuters (that is, to the British Empire). Neither side had any intention of yielding to the other, in practice. Power would tell, they knew, and force would decide the issue.

The Showdown

They differed in their estimates of power distribution. The relationship of forces had vastly changed since 1893. The United States had been slow to enter world competition because it was busy with internal development. But the delay actually improved its chances, for when it finally laid down a claim for world position, it did so on the basis of an incomparable home market. In the commodity-news industry this was strikingly clear. At a meeting of the A.P. Board of Directors, Chicago Tribune publisher McCormick once offered some estimates in this connection. The estimates were so impressive that Cooper got him to repeat his statement for the benefit of any directors who had missed the import. Said McCormick:

We are pretty much the most important country in the world and much the richest country in the world, and in comparing America with other foreign countries the press stands probably higher in America than any other institution. I think it is a pretty good guess that American newspapers print and supply two-thirds of all the world’s news, and I think that the revenue of all the American newspapers is probably three-fourths of all the revenue of the newspapers of the world.

It was on the strength of this tremendously favorable competitive position that A.P. laid down the gauntlet to Reuters in 1932. It demanded “free competition.” Meaning that Japan, for instance, must be free to switch from Reuters to A.P. service. All American monopolies tend to demand “free competition” because they are now in a position to strangle their isolated competitors. Nourished by a huge home market built up with plenty of government aid, they no longer need direct subsidy and want to establish a no-subsidy rule for younger and weaker national news industries. The newspaper industry is in an even stronger position than chemicals, steel and other monopolies. In no other country has news-publishing grown into a business of comparable size and power. In no other country does the newspaper business stand so near the top in the list of Big Businesses.

A.P. understood this very well. Reuters misunderstood it badly. For years it held out stoutly against A.P.’s right—verbally admitted but never put in writing—to operate in Japan. Jones was confident that A.P. would never risk a break with Reuters; he counted on the threat that Reuters would take U.P. into the cartel if A.P. walked out. Cooper deliberately led Jones into a trap, pretending eagerness to maintain the alliance but needling him at all points.

“While I wondered how long it would be before this bubble of Reuters world domination would burst, I was willing for Sir Roderick to blow his own bubble so big that it would burst through his own exertion but I would not puncture it myself,” Cooper gloats.

It burst in 1934. Carrying his pretense of humility and loyalty to the uttermost limits, Cooper travelled from Japan to London to explain to Sir Roderick that A.P.’s activities in Japan were within the meaning of the contract. Pretending to mollify Jones, he encouraged him to think that his own actions were due to weakness either of A.P. or of his position within A.P. Accordingly, Jones refused to sanction the A.P.-Rengo deal. He announced that the cartel agreement must be renewed on the old terms or Reuters would allow it to lapse.

Reuters had fallen into a trap. Not only A.P., but the American news monopoly as a whole was determined to humble the British. United Press joined A.P. in an agreement establishing between themselves the principle of “non-exclusive access to foreign news at its source.” This meant that U.P. would not agree to replace A.P. in the European cartel. So A.P. blandly notified Reuters that it “agreed” to let the “alliance” lapse.

This announcement exploded with bomb-force in London. Sir Roderick’s house of cards collapsed. Reuters was through as the news dictator of the world and A.P. was king. Within a few hours Reuters, recognizing what it had long failed to see, offered to capitulate. Jones hurried to New York, begging for an audience. He was forced to humiliate himself enough to satisfy Cooper who had been waiting years for that triumph. Then the “alliance” was renewed—on A.P.’s terms.

World Conquest

American news domination of the world was now assured. The “non-exclusive” principle did not in the least destroy the cartel; it merely made the cartel an instrument of American policy. The old system of recognizing political controls remained to some extent, in that Reuters, for instance, retained the dominions and protectorates as partially privileged territory. But a new system became the dominant one. The new system opened territories once dominated by Britain, France and Germany, to American news penetration, just as the basic industrial-military potential of the United States was beating the way for American political-economic penetration into those sacred preserves. The “non-exclusive” principle governed the new contract. The term sounds very lofty and moral. It seems to mean that A.P. and Reuters would compete everywhere on equal terms and let the better man win. Not only that, but A.P.’s American rivals would have the same chance.

Alas, it meant nothing of the sort. The principle merely established a new kind of monopoly in which political intervention of the State on behalf of the monopoly no longer was so blatant. Competition was still sharply restricted—not by cartel agreement but by economic pressure. A.P. informed Reuters for instance, that the British agency was absolutely free to deal with U.P. The new contract guaranteed that and so did A.P.’s agreement with U.P. But, said A.P., if Reuters chose to exercise that freedom, A.P. would choose to deal with Reuters’ British rival, Exchange Telegraph, and so destroy Reuters! A.P. also informed Reuters it would have to deal with Canadian Press through A.P.: thus, Canada passed from the British to the American Empire!

That wasn’t really the end. World War II put the period on the new contract. Havas crumbled all-at-once-and-nothing-first like the wonderful one-hoss shay. Reuters’ internal crisis matured and in 1941 the agency was liquidated as a private profit-seeking body. It was reorganized as the British equivalent of A.P. Within the Empire it is struggling for survival against terrific American pressures, just as the Empire itself is creaking under American expansionist strains and the impact of the rising liberation forces released by the anti-Axis war. Sideswiped as a British government propaganda agency in a semi-official State Department document recently, Reuters indignantly denied the charge. In doing so, it acknowledged the British surrender to the American commercial-sensational news pattern which it resisted for so many years. Said Reuters chief Christopher Chancellor: “We are not purveyors of British news; news cannot be British or American—it is an international commodity.”

The German D.N.B. has, of course, been liquidated. So has Japan’s Domei. An American-sponsored German Agency, D.A.N.A., has been set up in U.S.-occupied Germany with favorable competitive advantages as against the British and French agencies. U. S. Treasury funds have been used openly in the battle for news control of Austria and other countries. In Japan, under exclusive American occupation, American news dictatorship is assured. With Britain restricted to Southeast Asia, the whole Far East is rapidly becoming an American private preserve. And not even the limits of the thinly-concealed modern American empire provide boundaries for the American news empire.

Only the Soviet Union and the new Eastern European democracies, together with the anti-imperialist forces within the dominated territories, stand in the way of complete global sway by the new empire-aspirant and its news monopoly. Against them, the “free press” monopolists are mobilizing the blackmail batteries of atomic diplomacy. “It is unthinkable,” declares Kent Cooper, “that the peace will not be dictated by America and Britain and that there should not be included in its terms the principles affecting the press as I have outlined them.”

Chapter VI
RESPONSIBILITY—A CHALLENGE TO THE PRESS

If World War I was a complex struggle for redivision of the world between two imperialist groups, World War II was still more complicated. An effective alliance of all forces opposed to German-Japanese enslavement of the world was achieved. Yet behind this alignment a good many battles were fought for imperialist advantage.

The capitalist powers had joined with the Socialist Soviet Union in a Grand Alliance, but the military activities of Britain and the United States indicated that their whole heart was not in the arrangement. The Soviet Union was permitted for three whole years to carry the burden of the fiercest assault known to history; under British pressure, the Anglo-American military power was distributed along the relatively inactive Empire lifeline. Thus, in effect, the allies fought Germany with one hand and with the other built up positions from which to crowd and “contain” the Soviet State.

Within the Anglo-American camp there was likewise double dealing. Each party maneuvered with a view to postwar advantage for No. 1 at the expense of his “gallant ally.” Early in the war, Washington could boast that there was no need of a Second Front since there were already a Third, Fourth, and even a Tenth Front. This merely revealed that United States forces were scattered all over the globe with little relation to the needs of the alliance but with obvious effects on future adjustment of Anglo-American differences. As part of the “war effort” for instance, a contract was made to build and operate an American military airfield in Arabia, across the gulf from Persia, for three years after the war. This was but the expression of a series of deals with Arabia, notably for oil, by which the U. S. became dominant there while Britain was forced back into second place. The phenomenon was worldwide.

As a result, American imperialism feels superbly assured of its present strength. That assurance is demonstrated by our current atom-bomb diplomacy. All loan and other negotiations stress the determination of our profit-swollen trusts to impose their rule over the world. In the process, the British are often forced to divide former private preserves, such as southern Iran, and virtually to abandon competitive rights in huge areas once under their chief control, such as China. The American methods tend to be oblique: military and technical missions are established in the country in question, “upon request.” No request, no loan. This method replaces the crude “Opium War” pattern in which Britain built and maintained the world’s greatest empire of the past. But the same bloody suppression of “natives” is behind both methods. In recent months the British have slaughtered Greeks and Indonesians; unwilling Marines have made Lidices in North China.

A dispatch to the New York Times from Athens helps illustrate the new method. After noting that the United States is far from withdrawing from Greece, the dispatch says: “The State Department’s comments ... sounded much like what the British had been telling the Greeks for some time.... It is believed that the only substantial difference between British and American views relates to the extent to which Allied officials should be injected into the Greek civil administration. The British originally intended to ask for a practical veto over acts of the Central Bank and Ministries dealing with economic affairs. It is now suggested that the British will suggest something much closer to the concept enunciated by the State Department yesterday: technical assistance to Greece ‘upon the request of the Greek Government.’”

In effect, as in Kent Cooper’s 1927 contract, the word “exploitation” has been removed, but the imperialism is still there. And among the industries making great headway in all “assisted” countries is the American news industry. It is favored by the change in the ownership of communications. Britannia no longer rules the waves—either of the air or the sea. Telephone, telegraph, cable dominance is no longer hers. Aviation, radio, multiple-address newscasting and facsimile broadcasting, are off to a good start under the control of American interests. And whatever advantages British imperialism still has, she is forced by the State Department to relinquish in return for a loan. Cable communications with British Empire points, for instance, are still in British hands. Yet not long ago conferences were held in Bermuda and Rio de Janeiro at which American government representatives compelled the British to cut press cable rates from New York to Empire points. This admitted American opinion-forming “news” to at least equal status with similar British propaganda in the Empire itself.

Now the government is also going into the business of distributing “news about America, by Americans.” The news agencies contend that a government information service is “propaganda,” whereas they “distribute the news as such, wholly unbiased and without intent to influence.” This is an empty boast. Riegel, in Mobilizing for Chaos, says: “The press associations differ in the amount of direct government control affecting them, but all are obviously governed by the newspapers they serve, and the destinies of all of them are inseparably united with the destinies of the nations with which they are identified. An impartial international news-gathering organization does not exist.” The Report on Freedom of the Press calls news-export an “adjunct of diplomacy and national policy. This inevitable relationship is no less real in the U.S. for having been avoided by the government, resisted by industry, and needlessly confused by imaginary threats of encroachment upon the First Amendment.”

State Department, A.P., U.P., I.N.S., alike provide “opinion-forming” material designed to further the current dangerous drive for American imperialist rule of the world. They are at one, moreover, in pressing foreign news services to abandon their present spheres of influence in favor of the American news monopoly. The Soviet news system, which checks the functioning of outside opinion-formers in the Soviet Union and helps limit their activities in Eastern Europe, is their favorite target. But they have made little headway there.

When Randal Heymanson of the North American Newspaper Alliance visited Czechoslovakia last year, government spokesman Dr. Theodore Kuska talked with him. Dr. Kuska said the Czech film industry would be nationalized and newspapers would be published only by political parties, trade unions and similar responsible groups. “Only in this way,” said Dr. Kuska, “can the press be regarded as truly free.”

It is not recorded whether the N.A.N.A. representative swooned on the spot. But for the benefit of Brooks Atkinson, it should be pointed out that some of the responsible groups Dr. Kuska speaks of cannot even be heard in the American press. The conditions earlier described prevent their publishing papers or obtaining circulation of their views. Thus, control of the press and control of opinion is rigidly frozen into monopoly shapes here; the Czech proposal seems to promise a much broader freedom of the press.

Responsibility of the Press

Indeed, if Mr. Atkinson will look about him in the Soviet Union, he will see an extension of the idea suggested by Dr. Kuska. As described by Alexander Kendrick at an American-Soviet Cultural Conference in New York recently, the Soviet press is unique. Before the Revolution, there were 859 newspapers in the Czar’s realm, with a total circulation of 2,700,000 and a policy dictated by the Russo-Asiatic Bank. Today there are 9,000 papers in 80 languages with a circulation of 40,000,000 and several readers to every copy of each paper.

Compared to our papers, there are obvious differences: no sensation, no spice, no scandal, no desperate competitive drive for entertainment. The newspapers are all informative, they tend to be typographically excellent, their news is presented in careful, balanced form so that the constant reader is prepared to grasp new developments as they take place. The cultural leaders of the country, scholars, critics, writers and musicians, contribute to the papers.

The principal difference, however, is in their publishers. No paper is published for profit. No multimillionaire can control public opinion. No people’s organization is without a newspaper: trade unions, hundreds of them; national groups; local, district and national government councils; sport groups; youth groups; women’s organizations. They are crusaders, too; not reactionary anti-vivisection crusaders like the Hearstlings here, but stinging critics of public and governmental bodies for sloppy execution of their tasks. And there is a contact between the readers and the papers that would be inconceivable here. Newspaper staffs hold regular meetings with readers to discuss problems raised by the readers and most papers have an annual readers’ conference at which editors make public accounting of their stewardship. The Soviet Constitution guarantees printing presses and stocks of paper to the organizations of the people, such as trade unions, cultural and scientific organizations, etc. It has not remained a paper promise: the press is entirely in popular hands. It operates in a responsible way to further Soviet objectives by stimulating more active support, by exposing failures.

There is, however, definitely no freedom of the press for rent-collecting landlords, bankers, industrial monopolists. The Soviet press is frankly not a formally democratic press but a press of the working people. That no longer bars any important body of Soviet citizens, since exploiting classes no longer exist there. The rule operates primarily to assure an ever-expanding popular participation in the nation’s political and economic life, while it hampers the work of hostile foreign intelligence services. This would hardly seem the fit subject of a diplomatic protest by the British Foreign Office or the U. S. State Department.

A press of that kind would solve most of the problems of “freedom of the press” in our country. It can be attained somewhat short of Socialism, as is occurring in some parts of Eastern Europe. But such a goal must be recognized as a distant one. Its attainment will require the utmost effort of the whole American people. A first step is to spread understanding of the class character and function of the press as a whole.

What Can We Do?

Is there anything we can do about the present super-monopoly control of our press which gags all but a handful of the 140,000,000 Americans? The individual writer can hardly formulate meaningful proposals along this line. Labor itself, particularly the larger progressive unions, the C.I.O. as a whole, and strong combinations in industrial areas where trade union membership is concentrated, must certainly give more thought to the publication of newspapers. To be successful, they will need labor’s formal participation but they must not be limited to trade union scope. On the contrary, they should champion labor’s political and other interests, as well as the interests of the people as a whole. Labor must also seek a more direct voice in the few relatively pro-labor dailies now in circulation, because direct participation will reduce the waverings to which liberal papers tend. Labor must also combat the commodity-news pattern and help create an audience for balanced, trustworthy information. A labor paper should aim at that end.

Beyond that, labor and liberals should consider legislation to ease the present monopoly. Postal and communications subsidies—free mailing, in fact—plus other government aid, should be given to newspapers and mail-circulation newsletters of responsible popular bodies. At the same time, government subsidies should be taken away from the monopoly press; private enterprise should be compelled to stand on its own feet in the publishing business.

Finally, the truth about the American press—that it is the uncontrolled and unlimited voice of monopoly capital—should not operate to discourage constant pressure on the owners to deal fairly and adopt more liberal policies. This is a democracy, whatever its monopoly limitations; the publishers cannot completely ignore voices that are numerous enough and insistent enough. But the pressure should be concentrated where it has most chance to do good: on the powerful pro-fascist press bloc responsible for the worst excesses of our monopoly press. The recent picket lines and boycott of the Daily News in protest against columnist John O’Donnell’s anti-Semitic provocations, demonstrate that results can be obtained. As a matter of fact, the “Fascist fringe” is very vulnerable. A good, strong, nationwide boycott, centering on the more blatantly fascist preachings of the bloc, might very well act as a deterrent and check on both policy and ownership. The curbing of the reactionary bloc would improve the whole tone of the press. This is the nearest thing to an attainable free press objective in the United States, at least for today.

It goes without saying that any realistic effort to improve our press, must operate within the framework of a larger political program. Only a program that understands the necessity for curbing the huge monopolies—even within the limits of the capitalist system—can seriously approach the problem of press freedom. None but a program of independent labor-progressive political action can even aim at this goal. Only a program that takes Socialism as its ultimate objective, will consistently understand and face the problems along the way. This places the heaviest responsibility upon Marxists and class-conscious workers, manual and intellectual, newspapermen not least among them.

FOOTNOTES

A Banks, oil companies, etc., still have experts stationed in key cities abroad to keep them posted on specialized business developments of the greatest ultimate general political significance. “This kind of intelligence service, which many foreign chancelleries might envy, has been of great service to America’s foreign trade,” says O. W. Riegel, in Mobilizing for Chaos. The vital news gathered by these private agencies is withheld from the press, except when calculated “leaks” will serve the interests of industry or of the State as a whole. The press never howls about this kind of censorship.

B Published April, 1946, under the title of Peoples Speaking to Peoples.

C Word doctoring is a national industry. The award for the best public relations trick of 1945 went to Dr. Claude Robinson for helping industry in its biggest job: “The proper interpretation of profits to the public.”

New Publications

WHO OWNS AMERICA, by James S. Allen | $ .10
PEACE OR WAR. THE PEOPLE AGAINST THE WAR-MAKERS, by Eugene Dennis | .03
SOCIALISM—WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU, by A. B. Magil | .10
THE CASE AGAINST DAVID DUBINSKY, by William Weinstone | .30
THE PATH OF A RENEGADE, by Robert Thompson | .05
WHAT AMERICA FACES, by Eugene Dennis | .10
MEET THE COMMUNISTS, by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn | .03
WHY NEGROES ARE JOINING THE COMMUNIST PARTY, by Doxey A. Wilkerson | .03
TELL THE PEOPLE HOW BEN DAVIS WAS ELECTED, by Robert Minor | .05
COMMUNISTS ON THE WATERFRONT, by Herb Tank | .35
WHAT ARE WE DOING IN CHINA?, by Joseph North | .05
AMERICA’S HOUSING CRISIS, by Louise Mitchell | .05
ENEMIES OF THE PEACE: PROFILE OF THE “HATE-RUSSIA” GANG, by Sender Garlin | .10
THE FIGHT FOR A NEW CHINA, by Mao Tse-tung | .25

NEW CENTURY PUBLISHERS · 832 Broadway, New York 3, N. Y.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

On the Publisher’s page, to the left of “209” is a symbol that probably is a Union label.

Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of pages, have been resequenced and placed together at the end of the main text, but before the advertisement.

Page 32: ‘Moreover, “government propaganda”’ occurs on two consecutive lines, but the first one was incomplete, ending with ‘propa-’ (no quotes). Transcriber completed it to make it comprehensible.

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Table of Contents

- THE “FREE PRESS” PORTRAIT OF A MONOPOLY
- CONTENTS
- About the Author

- THE “FREE PRESS” By GEORGE MARION Part I: Portrait of a Monopoly

- Chapter I IT’S FREE—FOR MILLIONAIRES!

- Ask Marshall Field
- Regimentation
- This Is Monopoly
- Pikers Barred

- Chapter II FOR WHOM THE PRESS TOILS

- The American State

- Private Power

- Chapter III WORDS FOR SALE

- Subsidies
- What Is News?
- True and Unbiased News
- Remote Control
- The Fascist “Fringe”

- Part II: News—Arm of Empire

- Chapter IV THE ROVER NEWSBOYS ABROAD

- Lawful Spies

- News Since Feudal Days

- Chapter V SECRET HISTORY OF A CARTEL

- A Conflict Is Born
- Peak of Reuter’s Power
- Conquest of South America
- Redividing the World
- Battle for Asia
- The Showdown
- World Conquest

- Chapter VI RESPONSIBILITY—A CHALLENGE TO THE PRESS

- Responsibility of the Press

- What Can We Do?

- FOOTNOTES
- New Publications
- Transcriber’s Notes
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE