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.”