He is acute and politic, as you discover when first you hear him call up Henry N. De Smith to ask for a decision. Such action is very seldom necessary. The assistant managing editor knows the owner’s prejudices and failings by long association. He is versed in a most essential knowledge of what may be printed in the paper, and what it would be dangerous for the public to know. Under his care comes the immense problem of general policy, the direction of opinion in the city in the paths most favorable to his master’s fame and fortune. Nothing unpleasing to friend or advertiser must by any chance appear. It means nothing to him that given such conditions, advertising becomes a kind of legitimate blackmail, for his mind is not attuned to delicate moral vibrations.
Such is San Francisco; and lest you think that is prejudice, or an anomaly, come to Chicago and have a glimpse of the insides of the “Chronicle,” given in a book of confessions, “The Career of a Journalist,” by William Salisbury:
It was no easy matter, either, to be Copy Reader on the “Chronicle.” In addition to the average Copy Reader’s immense fund of knowledge, one had to know almost by heart the names of the sixteen corporations in which owner Walsh was interested, such as banks and street railways and gas and contracting companies. He had to know, too, the names of the prominent men Mr. Walsh liked or disliked, so as to treat them accordingly. A mistake in such things would much more quickly bring a telephone order from Mr. Walsh’s banking offices for changes in the staff than any other error.
It may seem an extreme statement; but I doubt if there is a newspaper-office in America in which such things as this do not happen. There may be newspapers whose owners sternly refrain from using them as a means of personal glorification; there may be newspapers which do not give special attention to the owner’s after-dinner speeches, and to the social events that go on in the owner’s home. But is there any paper which does not show consideration for the associates and intimate friends of the owner? It happened to me once to be sitting in a hotel-room with a millionaire who was under arrest and liable to serve ten years in jail. This man’s relatives were among the rulers of the city, and I heard him go to the telephone and call up his relatives, and advise them how to approach the newspapers, and precisely what instructions to give; next morning I saw those instructions followed by the newspapers. Has any man ever held an executive position on a newspaper in America without witnessing incidents of this sort? The testimony available is not merely that of radicals and “muck-rakers.” Here is a most conservative editor, Hamilton Holt, in his book, “Commercialism and Journalism,” mentioning “a certain daily whose editor recently told me that there was on his desk a list three feet long of prominent people whose names were not to be mentioned in his paper.”
Is there any newspaper which does not show consideration for the business interests of its owners? Come to Los Angeles, which I happen to know especially well, because I live only twelve miles away from it. It calls itself the “City of the Angels”; I have taken the liberty of changing the name to the “City of the Black Angels.” This city gets its water-supply from distant mountains, and its great financial interests owned vast tracts of land between the city and the sources of supply. There were four newspapers, all in a state of most ferocious rivalry; but all of them owned some of this land, and all of them united in the campaign for an aqueduct. For years they kept the population terrified by pictures of failing water-supply; people say they had the water run out of the reservoirs, and the city parks allowed to dry up! So they got their aqueduct, and land that had cost forty dollars an acre became worth a thousand dollars. A single individual cleared a million dollars by this deal.
I have given in this book a fairly thorough account of the “Los Angeles Times,” the perfect illustration of a great newspaper conducted in the financial interest of one man. The personality of that man infected it so powerfully that the infection has persisted after the man is dead. I have never heard anybody in Los Angeles maintain that the “Times” is an honest newspaper, or a newspaper which serves the public interest; but I have heard them say that Otis was “sincere according to his lights,” that “you always knew where to find him.” I have heard this said by several different men, and it is extraordinary testimony to the extent to which newspaper knavery can be successful.
No, you didn’t “always know where to find Otis”; for many years it was a toss-up where you would find him, for Otis had two offices in Los Angeles. One was the office of the “Times,” a “Republican” newspaper, maintaining ferociously the “open-shop” policy—so ferociously that some outraged labor leaders blew it up with a dynamite-bomb. But at the same time Otis owned secretly another Los Angeles newspaper, the “Herald”; and the “Herald” was an “independent” newspaper, a “Democratic” newspaper, a “closed-shop” newspaper! So here was Otis handing out one kind of dope to the Los Angeles public with one hand, and handing out the opposite kind of dope to the Los Angeles public with the other hand—and taking in money from the Los Angeles public with both hands. When you read my statement that “Big Business stages a sham-battle every now and then, to make the people think they are controlling the government,” you smiled, no doubt—taking it for the exuberance of a radical. But what better proof could you have of a sham-battle, than to find the same man fighting furiously on both sides?
And how comes it that the public of Los Angeles is ignorant of this extraordinary situation? Why, simply that when the news came out, there was no Los Angeles newspaper that would feature it; the newspapers were in on some “deal,” and the only place the story could be exploited was in “La Follette’s,” in Wisconsin! It was told there by Frank E. Wolfe, formerly managing editor of the “Herald,” the man who took the orders of Otis and carried them out.
Some thirty years ago my friend Gaylord Wilshire started in Los Angeles a publication called the “Nationalist,” advocating the ideas of Edward Bellamy. This paper was printed at the office of the “Los Angeles Express,” and one day, walking down the street, Wilshire met General Otis.
“I see you people have got a weekly paper,” said the General.