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.