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.