Linked to sensationalism, the commodity form of news destroyed the old profession of journalism and replaced it with pure business. The individual honest reporter or correspondent, however pure his intent, is sunk from the start. The form of news he is taught to seek and permitted to send is hostile to the nature of truth. Not only the reporter, but the newspaper owner himself is alienated from the process of gathering reliable information and printing it. He is a merchant bound up with the problems of purchase and sale of goods, circulation, advertising and the like.
The Report on Freedom of the Press takes for granted the merchandising realities. It speaks constantly of “marketable words and images” rather than “news.” No wonder! The contents of newspapers are standard goods manufactured in distant news agencies, syndicates, canned-editorial factories. Development of 4-color facsimile processes by 800-word-per-minute wireless transmission, plus air-express of films, mats and plates, accentuates a trend. Simultaneous publication on five continents of a whole magazine, forty-eight hours after the material is written in a central editorial office anywhere, is now possible. But newspapers are already, in effect, edited at the central headquarters of banking and industry. And thus the boasted “free press” of America has become a simon-pure example of Big Business, absolute, brutal monopoly.
The Fascist “Fringe”
The increasingly monopolistic character of the press has made its control by Big Business an automatic process. But it has had still another result: to put the press under the influence of the most reactionary, least responsible wing of Big Business. The direct agency of this influence is the more openly pro-fascist section of the press. Unfortunately, progressives cling to the illusion that this section of the press is a sort of fanatical “fringe,” ill-regarded in the trade. That is an illusion, a dangerous one. This so-called “fringe” section comprises the chains owned by Hearst, Roy Howard and Patterson-McCormick. Their combined direct circulation, according to the Editor and Publisher Yearbook for 1944, was 9,649,108 daily and 13,578,687 Sunday, roughly a quarter of all newspaper circulation. Moreover, the readers of newspapers subscribing to the Hearst International News Service, which carries the Hearst political line in full, should be added to the direct circulation figures. A tabulation from the 1944 Yearbook shows I.N.S. was sold to 290 daily and 104 Sunday papers in 220 cities and towns of 38 states. Total circulation of I.N.S.-subscribing papers was 15,827,856. This figure, plus the circulation of the papers in the three chains (after eliminating duplications) gives 22,043,146 as the actual audience of the three chainsters—half the national circulation!
It is only the beginning. They also own all the important feature syndicates and the two private news agencies, U.P. and I.N.S. They control most of the columnists, more powerful than the editorial pages. (Westbrook Pegler alone is said to have 10,000,000 circulation.) Their competition and methods exert a direct influence on rival papers and on Associated Press, aside from their many memberships in A.P. (one for each member paper). Their papers dominate circulation in such key areas as New York, Chicago and Washington.
But there is still more. Decisive is this fact: they form, in effect, a single political bloc. The power of the bloc begins with its material foundation, as described above. Here the new factor enters. The three chains are not just important units in the highly profitable merchandising enterprise called the newspaper industry. They are active and conscious political forces. They have a program. They utilize their papers and personnel for active organization of reactionary movements and drives. They are not only available to such characters as Representative Rankin and Senator Bilbo; they not only feature the hate-speeches of such men: they write the speeches and inspire their delivery. They instigate fascist activities. Goering and Rosenberg did not have to seek Hearst out and bribe him to print their Nazi ravings under their own by-lines: he sought them out!
It was war-long support by this bloc that prepared MacArthur’s dictatorship of the Pacific today. It was their persistent slandering of the Soviet Union throughout the war that prepared the general hysteria of the press immediately the war had ended. The mere fact of their operation as a bloc, would assure their dominance over the press as a whole unless there were an equally powerful counterbloc. But there is as yet no effective counterbloc—this is one of the primary tasks still to be tackled by labor and the people. For the reactionary program of the pro-fascist bloc is but the unrestrained expression of Big Business’ inner drives. It is but the crude utterance of the prejudices hidden by more cultured newspaper owners. It is the open sore that betrays the hidden disease of our unfree-press: complete subservience to the private interests of the biggest monopolies.
Part II: News—Arm of Empire
Chapter IV
THE ROVER NEWSBOYS ABROAD
“I want the people of every land to be as fully informed as we are, through a press of varied inclinations toward the philosophies of the day.”—Kent Cooper.