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.