It is of the highest importance to see to it that we have a good press here.... As an example of how useful it is to have money to offer the press ... I know how Tittoni has worked up the leading French papers most thoroughly and with the most open hand. The result is now manifest to all.
We read about such infamies in Europe, and shudder at them, and congratulate ourselves that our “sweet land of liberty” is more clean. But put yourself in the place of an educated Mexican, and see how it appears to him. American financial promoters bring their wealth to Mexico, and buy the Mexican government, and obtain ownership of the most valuable land and oil and minerals of the country. The Mexican people overthrow this corrupt government, and attempt to tax these legally stolen properties; but the foreign governments say that these properties may not be taxed, and the newspapers owned and published by these foreign interests carry on for years an elaborate campaign of slanders against Mexico, to the end that the American people may make war upon the Mexican people and exploit them. And this is done, not merely by the Otis paper and the Hearst papers, which all thinking people know to be corrupt; it is done by papers like the “New York Times” and “Tribune” and “Chicago Tribune,” which are considered to be entirely respectable. As I write, the correspondent of the “New York Tribune” in Mexico, L. J. de Bekker, resigns, and states as his reason that his dispatches were suppressed or cut in the “Tribune” office.
And of course, in a campaign of this sort they count upon the cordial help of the Associated Press. Says the “Heraldo de Mexico,” August 15, 1919: “We see that the Associated Press lies with frequency.” And you do not have to take this solely on the word of a Mexican newspaper. The Mexican minister of foreign relations gives out a letter from the vice-president of the Mexican Northwestern Railroad, whose offices are in Toronto, Canada: “I see that the Associated Press mentions with frequency, in its reports, the name of our company.” He goes on to explain that the Associated Press has stated that his company complains of the confiscation of lands, whereas these reports are wholly false; his company has had no difficulty whatever with the Mexican government. He says: “It is intolerable that our name should be used.” And also the Associated Press sends out a circumstantial story of the alleged withdrawal of the Canadian Pearson’s from business in Mexico. The vice-president of this company issues a point-blank denial that he has had any difficulty with the Mexican government. Says Mr. de Bekker, protesting to the assistant manager of the Associated Press: “It is a most marked example of the A. P.’s unfairness. And it is a fair presumption that the A. P. will not carry this denial.”
The Mexicans are a backward people, and we complain that there are bandits among them. But which is worse, the spontaneous violence of a primitive people, or the organized and systematic treachery of a highly developed people? You have a child; and suppose that, instead of loving this child, understanding and helping it, you do nothing but scold at it, menace it, and tell falsehoods about it—would you be surprised if the child now and then kicked your shins?
CHAPTER XL
OWNING THE OWNERS
The second of the methods by which our Journalism is controlled is by far the most important of all the four. I do not mean merely that the owners are owned by mortgages, and such crude financial ties. They are owned by ambition, by pressure upon their families, by club associations, by gentlemen’s agreements, by the thousand subtle understandings which make the solidarity of the capitalist class. I have written elsewhere of labor-leaders, otherwise incorruptible, who have accepted “the dress-suit bribe.” These same bribes are passed in the business-world, and are the biggest bribes of all. When you have your shoes shined, you pay the bootblack ten cents; but can you figure what you are paid for having your shoes shined? When you buy a new suit of clothes, you pay the dealer, say, one hundred dollars; but can you figure what you are paid for being immaculately dressed, for having just the right kind of tie, just the right kind of accent, just the right manner of asserting your own importance and securing your own place at the banquet-table of Big Business?
If you are the publisher of a great newspaper or magazine, you belong to the ruling-class of your community. You are invited to a place of prominence on all public occasions; your voice is heard whenever you choose to lift it. You may become a senator like Medill McCormick or Capper of Kansas, who owns eight newspapers and six magazines; a cabinet-member like Daniels, or an ambassador like Whitelaw Reid or Walter Page. You will float upon a wave of prosperity, and in this prosperity all your family will share; your sons will have careers open to them, your wife and your daughters will move in the “best society.” All this, of course, provided that you stand in with the powers that be, and play the game according to their rules. If by any chance you interfere with them, if you break their rules, then instantly in a thousand forms you feel the pressure of their displeasure. You are “cut” at the clubs, your sons and daughters are not invited to parties—you find your domestic happiness has become dependent upon your converting the whole family to your strange new revolutionary whim! And what if your youngest daughter does not share your enthusiasm for the “great unwashed”? What if your wife takes the side of her darling?
It is such hidden forces as this which account for much of the snobbery in American newspapers; the fact that in every department and in every feature they favor the rich and powerful, and reveal themselves as priests of the cult of Mammon. I have watched the great metropolitan dailies, and those in many smaller cities and towns; I have yet to see an American newspaper which does not hold money for its god, and the local masters of money for demi-gods at the least. The interests of these Olympian beings, their sports, their social doings, their political opinions, their comings and goings, are assumed by the newspapers to be the object of the absorbed interest of every American who knows how to read.
On every page and in every column of every page the American newspaper preaches the lesson: “Get money, and all things else shall be added unto you—especially newspaper attention.” When Mr. John P. Gavit, managing editor of the “New York Evening Post,” wrote to Mr. Melville E. Stone, general manager of the Associated Press, that I had a reputation “as an insatiable hunter of personal publicity,” what Mr. Gavit meant was that I was accustomed to demand and obtain more space in newspapers than the amount of my worldly possessions entitled me to. Some years ago my wife went for a visit to her home in the far South, after the unusual adventure of marrying a Socialist; she met one of her girlhood friends, who exclaimed:
“My, but your husband must be a rich man!”