III
That in consequence of its commercialization, and its frequent subjection to outside interests, the daily newspaper is constantly suppressing important news, will appear from the instances that follow. They are hardly a third of the material that has come to the writer’s attention.
A prominent Philadelphia clothier visiting New York was caught perverting boys, and cut his throat. His firm being a heavy advertiser, not a single paper in his home city mentioned the tragedy. One New York paper took advantage of the situation by sending over an extra edition containing the story. The firm in question has a large branch in a Western city. There too the local press was silent, and the opening was seized by a Chicago paper.
In this same Western city the vice-president of this firm was indicted for bribing an alderman to secure the passage of an ordinance authorizing the firm to bridge an alley separating two of its buildings. Representatives of the firm requested the newspapers in which it advertised to ignore the trial. Accordingly the five English papers published no account of the trial, which lasted a week and disclosed highly sensational matter. Only the German papers sent reporters to the trial and published the proceedings.
In a great jobbing centre, one of the most prominent cases of the United States District Attorney was the prosecution of certain firms for misbranding goods. The facts brought out appeared in the press of the smaller centres, but not a word was printed in the local papers. In another centre, four firms were fined for selling potted cheese which had been treated with preservatives. The local newspapers stated the facts, but withheld the names of the firms—a consideration they are not likely to show to the ordinary culprit.
In a trial in a great city it was brought out by sworn testimony that, during a recent labor struggle which involved teamsters on the one hand and the department stores and the mail-order houses on the other, the employers had plotted to provoke the strikers to violence by sending a long line of strike-breaking wagons out of their way to pass a lot on which the strikers were meeting. These wagons were the bait to a trap, for a strong force of policemen was held in readiness in the vicinity, and the governor of the state was at the telephone ready to call out the militia if a riot broke out. Fortunately, the strikers restrained themselves, and the trap was not sprung. It is easy to imagine the headlines that would have been used if labor had been found in so diabolical a plot. Yet the newspapers unanimously refused to print this testimony.
In the same city, during a strike of the elevator men in the large stores, the business agent of the elevator-starters’ union was beaten to death, in an alley behind a certain emporium, by a “strong-arm” man hired by that firm. The story, supported by affidavits, was given by a responsible lawyer to three newspaper men, each of whom accepted it as true and promised to print it. The account never appeared.
In another city the sales-girls in the big shops had to sign an exceedingly mean and oppressive contract which, if generally known, would have made the firms odious to the public. A prominent social worker carried these contracts, and evidence as to the bad conditions that had become established under them, to every newspaper in the city. Not one would print a line on the subject.
On the outbreak of a justifiable street-car strike the newspapers were disposed to treat it in a sympathetic way. Suddenly they veered, and became unanimously hostile to the strikers. Inquiry showed that the big merchants had threatened to withdraw their advertisements unless the newspapers changed their attitude.
In the summer of 1908 disastrous fires raged in the northern Lake country, and great areas of standing timber were destroyed. A prominent organ of the lumber industry belittled the losses and printed reassuring statements from lumbermen who were at the very moment calling upon the state for a fire patrol. When taxed with the deceit, the organ pleaded its obligation to support the market for the bonds which the lumber companies of the Lake region had been advertising in its columns.
On account of agitating for teachers’ pensions, a teacher was summarily dismissed by a corrupt school board, in violation of their own published rule regarding tenure. An influential newspaper published the facts of school-board grafting brought out in the teacher’s suit for reinstatement until, through his club affiliations, a big merchant was induced to threaten the paper with the withdrawal of his advertising. No further reports of the revelations appeared.
During labor disputes the facts are usually distorted to the injury of labor. In one case, strikers held a meeting on a vacant lot enclosed by a newly-erected billboard. Forthwith appeared, in a yellow journal professing warm friendship for labor, a front-page cut of the billboard and a lurid story of how the strikers had built a “stockade,” behind which they intended to bid defiance to the bluecoats. It is not surprising that, when the van bringing these lying sheets appeared in their quarter of the city, the libeled men overturned it.
During the struggle of carriage-drivers for a six-day week, certain great dailies lent themselves to a concerted effort of the liverymen to win public sympathy by making it appear that the strikers were interfering with funerals. One paper falsely stated that a strong force of police was being held in reserve in case of “riots,” and that policemen would ride beside the non-union drivers of hearses. Another, under the misleading headline, “Two Funerals stopped by Striking Cabmen,” described harmless colloquies between hearse-drivers and pickets. This was followed up with a solemn editorial, “May a Man go to his Long Rest in Peace?” although, as a matter of fact, the strikers had no intention of interfering with funerals.
The lying headline is a favorite device for misleading the reader. One sheet prints on its front page a huge “scare” headline, “‘Hang Haywood and a Million Men will march in Revenge,’ says Darrow.” The few readers whose glance fell from the incendiary headline to the dispatch below it found only the following: “Mr. Darrow, in closing the argument, said that ‘if the jury hangs Bill Haywood, one million willing hands will seize the banner of liberty by the open grave, and bear it on to victory.’” In the same style, a dispatch telling of the death of an English policeman, from injuries received during a riot precipitated by suffragettes attempting to enter a hall during a political meeting, is headed, “Suffragettes kill Policeman!”
The alacrity with which many dailies serve as mouthpieces of the financial powers came out very clearly during the recent industrial depression. The owner of one leading newspaper called his reporters together and said in effect, “Boys, the first of you who turns in a story of a lay-off or a shut-down gets the sack.” Early in the depression the newspapers teemed with glowing accounts of the resumption of steel mills and the revival of business, all baseless. After harvest time they began to cheep, “Prosperity,” “Bumper Crops,” “Farmers buying Automobiles.” In cities where banks and employers offered clearing-house certificates instead of cash, the press usually printed fairy tales of the enthusiasm with which these makeshifts were taken by depositors and workingmen. The numbers and sufferings of the unemployed were ruthlessly concealed from the reading public. A mass meeting of men out of work was represented as “anarchistic” or “instigated by the socialists for political effect.” In one daily appeared a dispatch under the heading “Five Thousand Jobs Offered; only Ten apply.” It stated that the Commissioner of Public Works of Detroit, misled by reports of dire distress, set afoot a public work which called for five thousand men. Only ten men applied for work, and all these expected to be bosses. Correspondence with the official established the fact that the number of jobs offered was five hundred, and that three thousand men applied for them!