Since the organization, over one hundred elections of directors have taken place. In one case only, I believe, was the result different from what it would have been if no votes had been cast upon the bonds.
And here again Mr. Stone is treating me as a child. Of the total bonds the big insiders control nine-tenths. Of the total number of votes cast at elections, they control five-sixths. A successful rebellion is thus obviously impossible; and the penalty of an unsuccessful rebellion, as I shall presently show, is annihilation; yet Mr. Stone feels virtuous because nobody rebels! Let Mr. Stone pay off his debts for office furniture, and place all the nine-hundred-odd members of the Associated Press on an equality as regards votes, and then let him boast that the bonds have no effect upon elections!
Ten years ago Mr. Kittle made a study of the fifteen directors of the Associated Press. They were all publishers of large newspapers, and from these newspapers could be judged. Just one was a “liberal,” Nelson, of the “Kansas City Star”—and he has since died. All the other fourteen were classified as “conservative or ultra-conservative.” Said Mr. Kittle:
The other fourteen papers are huge commercial ventures, connected by advertising and in other ways with banks, trust companies, railway and city utility companies, department-stores and manufacturing enterprises. They reflect the system which supports them.
There have been many changes of personality in the Associated Press in the last ten years, but there has been no change in this respect; the statement of Mr. Kittle’s remains the truth about the fifteen directors. And likewise there has been no change in the policy of the organization, as Mr. Kittle reported it:
The dispatches themselves disclose the attitude of the management. They give scant courtesy to movements for constructive legislation in the public interest. The reports, scores of which have been examined, are meager, fragmentary, isolated. Every time Tom Johnson was successful in more than fifty injunction suits, the general public in other states heard little or nothing of it. When an election recently went against him, everybody heard of the “failure” of municipal ownership. When La Follette for five years, by a continuous contest, was placing law after law on the statute-books, the matter was ignored or briefly reported in distant states; and temporary defeats were given wide publicity. When Kansas, in 1908, rejected a conservative and elected a progressive United States Senator, the general public at a distance from that state did not know the real issue involved. For more than two years, there has been a strong movement in California against the rule of that state by special and corrupt interests, but that fact, merely as news, has never reached the general public in the East. The prosecution of offenders in San Francisco has only been a part of the wider movement in California. The strong movement in New Hampshire, headed by Winston Churchill, to free that state from the grasp of the Boston and Maine Railway Company and the movement in New Jersey led by Everett Colby, which resulted in the defeat of Senator Dryden, the president of the Prudential Insurance Company, have not been given to the people adequately as matters of news.
And this is the testimony of every independent-minded newspaper man with whom I have talked about the Associated Press. Will Irwin, writing in “Harper’s Weekly,” shows how the old reactionary forces shape the policy of the organization. “The subordinates have drifted inevitably toward the point of view held by their masters.” And again, of the average Associated Press correspondent: “A movement in stocks is to him news—big news. Wide-spread industrial misery in a mining camp is scarcely news at all.” At a conference at the University of Wisconsin, the editor of the “Madison Democrat” stated that he had been a correspondent of the Associated Press for many years, and had never been asked “to suppress news or to color news in any way whatever.” Reply was made by A. M. Simons: “I have had many reporters working under me, and every one of you know that you will not have a reporter on your paper who cannot ‘catch policy’ in two weeks.”
The general manager of the Associated Press makes public boast of the high character of his employes. “Throughout the profession, employment in its service is regarded as an evidence of character and reliability.” Such is the glittering generality; but investigate a little, and you find one Associated Press correspondent, Calvin F. Young, of Charleston, West Virginia, engaged in sending strike-news to his organization, and at the same time in the pay of the mine-owners, collecting affidavits against the strikers. You find a second Associated Press correspondent, E. Wentworth Prescott, of Boston, dipping into the slush funds of the New Haven Railroad, and giving an explanation of his services, so lacking in plausibility that Interstate Commerce Commissioner Anderson remarks: “I don’t see why they couldn’t just as well have hired you to count the telegraph poles on the street!”
The Associated Press is probably the most iron-clad monopoly in America. It was organized originally as a corporation under the laws of Illinois, but the Illinois courts declared it a monopoly, so it moved out of Illinois, and reorganized itself as a “membership corporation,” thus evading the law. Today, if you wish to start a morning newspaper in the village of Corn Center, Kansas, you may get an Associated Press franchise; but if you want to start one in any city or town within circulating distance of the big “forty-one-vote” insiders, you might as well apply for a flying-machine to visit the moon. The members of the Associated Press have what is called “the right of protest”—that is, they can object to new franchises being issued; and this power they use ruthlessly to maintain their monopoly. Says Will Irwin:
To the best of my knowledge, only two or three new franchises have ever been granted over the right of protest—and those after a terrible fight. Few, indeed, have had the hardihood to apply. When such an application comes up in the annual meeting, the members shake with laughter as they shout out a unanimous “No!” For owing to the exclusive terms of the charter, an Associated Press franchise to a metropolitan newspaper is worth from fifty thousand dollars to two hundred thousand dollars. Abolish the exclusive feature, throw the Association open to all, and you wipe out these values. The publishers are taking no chances with a precedent so dangerous.