I returned to the “Times” office in a fever of excitement. I told what I knew. The managing editor consulted with the business manager. Then he came to me and said: “We won’t print any more meat trust stories for a while.”
Several days later I saw packing-house advertisements in all the newspapers. But none of the papers published any more news about the price of meat for a very long time.
I quote this story, and then I realize that I have got out of my classification; this isn’t a bribe, this is an advertisement! I can only plead that it is hard to keep to a classification, because those who are corrupting the press do not keep to it. They use various methods; and sometimes the methods shade into one another, so that only a legal expert could sort them out!
When is a bribe not a bribe? When it is an order for extra copies? When it is a share in a land deal? When it is a nomination for senator? When it is an advertising contract? For example, is this a bribe? Arthur Brisbane, the most highly paid and most widely read editorial writer in America, serves announcement to the public that he is going to follow with regard to the drama a policy of “constructive criticism”; he is going to tell the people about the plays that are really worth seeing, so that the people may go to see them. He writes a double-column editorial, praising a play, and two or three days later there appears in the “Evening Journal” a full-page advertisement of this play. Brisbane writes another editorial, praising another play, and a few days later there appears a full-page advertisement of this play. This happens again and again, and all play-producers on Broadway understand that by paying one thousand dollars for a full-page advertisement in the “New York Evening Journal,” they may have a double-column of the “constructive criticism” of Arthur Brisbane!
Or is this a bribe? There is a fight for lower gas-rates in Boston, and Louis Brandeis, now a Justice of the Supreme Court, makes a plea in the interest of the public. One Boston newspaper gives half a column of Brandeis’ arguments; no other Boston newspaper gives one word of Brandeis’ arguments; but every Boston newspaper prints a page of the gas company’s advertisements, paid for at one dollar per line!
If you will count these things as bribery, you are no longer at a loss for evidence. You discover that great systems of corruption of the press have been established; the bribing of American Journalism has become a large-scale business enterprise, which has been fully revealed by government investigations, and proven by the sworn testimony of those who do the work.
CHAPTER XLVII
THE BRIBE WHOLESALE
Every now and then some pillar of Capitalism is overthrown, and a mess of journalistic worms go wriggling to cover. For example, the “New Haven” scandal: Some five years ago the Interstate Commerce Commission revealed the fact that the band of pirates who had wrecked the great “New Haven” system had been paying four hundred thousand dollars a year to influence the press; and more significant yet, the president of the railroad swore that this was “relatively less than was paid by any other large railroad in the country!” The “New Haven” had a list of reporters to whom it paid subsidies, sometimes two hundred dollars in a lump, sometimes twenty-five dollars a week. It was paying three thousand dollars a year to the “Boston Republic.” “Why?” was the question, and the answer was, “That is Mayor Fitzgerald’s paper.” The agent of the road who had handled this money stated that “All the newspapers and magazines knew what it was for.” He had paid money to over a thousand papers, among them the “Boston Evening Transcript,” for sending out railroad “dope.” This “New Haven,” you understand, was the road which wrecked “Hampton’s” for refusing to be bought. It was a “Morgan” road.
It was the same way with the Mulhall revelations, brought out by a committee of the United States Senate. Here was the “National Association of Manufacturers” and the “Merchant Marine League,” spending enormous subsidies for propaganda with newspapers. When the La Follette Seamen’s Law was being fought in the Senate, it was shown that the great newspapers were distributing every year two million dollars for shipping advertisements, and they claimed and got their return in the form of bitter opposition to this bill. During the Life Insurance investigations in New York, it was shown that every one of these great financial enterprises maintained not merely an advertising bureau, but a “literary bureau.” The Mutual Life Insurance Company had employed a certain “Telegraphic News Bureau,” which supplied newspapers with propaganda which they published as reading matter. For one item, supplied to about one hundred different papers, the agent had been paid over five thousand dollars. What the newspapers were paid was not brought out, but the agent testified that he had been paid one dollar a line, while the papers had been paid as high as five dollars a line. Also there was another agency, through which the Mutual Life was sending out what it called “telegraphic readers.” The big newspapers had special advertising agents to solicit this kind of paid material, and they had regular printed schedules of rates for publishing it.
In the same way Attorney-General Monnett of Ohio brought out that the Standard Oil Company maintained the “Jennings Advertising Agency” to distribute and pay for propaganda upon this contract: