The “Kansas City Journal” has pursued me every season I lecture there because it is an organ of the local public utilities. At one time they twisted some statement of mine in a report of a lecture which they headed: “Zueblin Believes Every Woman Should Marry a Negro.” There was no doubt this was done solely to queer other things that might be said which had no connection with this invention.
Senator La Follette is a radical—and here is a public man who has been almost wiped out by deliberate newspaper boycott. The story of what was done to La Follette in the 1912 presidential campaign can hardly be made to sound like reality; it is a plot out of an old-time Bowery melodrama. La Follette was a candidate for the Republican nomination. He was conducting a tremendous campaign all through the Middle West, and the Associated Press was suppressing the news of it. At an open conference of newspaper-men, held at the University of Wisconsin, the editor of the “Milwaukee Journal,” a strong capitalist paper, openly stated that the Associated Press was sending—“something, of course—but so little that it amounted to nothing.” But when the governor of the state made an attack upon La Follette—“Well, the Associated Press suddenly woke up, and sent out that entire address word for word!”
Nevertheless, La Follette was winning, and stood an excellent chance to get the nomination. He was invited to a dinner of the Periodical Publishers’ Association in Philadelphia, and at that dinner he told a little about the control of newspapers by the big advertising agencies—such facts as fill Chapter XLVII of this book. After the dinner was over the newspaper-men got together on the proposition, and decided that they would end the career of La Follette that night. They cooked up an elaborate story, describing how he had raged and foamed at the mouth, and rambled on and on for hours, until the diners had got up and left him orating to the empty seats and dinner-plates. It was evident, said the story, sympathetically, that La Follette was suffering from overwork and exhaustion; his mind was failing, and he would be compelled to retire from public life. After that, by deliberate arrangement, the Washington correspondents reported not a line of anything that La Follette wrote or said for a couple of years!
Again, during the war, they did the same thing to him. He made a speech before the Nonpartisan Convention in St. Paul, denouncing bitterly the war profiteers, who were being protected by our big newspapers. The Associated Press took this speech and doctored it, as a means of making La Follette odious to the country. They had to make such a slight change in it! La Follette said, “We had grievances against the German government.” And all the Associated Press had to do was to slip in one little word, “We had no grievances against the German government!” The whole country rose up to execrate La Follette, and the United States Senate ordered him placed on trial. When it came to a show-down, they discovered they had nothing against him, and dropped the case, and the Associated Press, after many months’ delay and heavy pressure from La Follette, finally admitted that it had misquoted him, and made a public apology.
And then La Follette came before the people for their verdict on his conduct. He carried the state by a vote of 110,064 to 70,813; but the big capitalist newspapers of Milwaukee deliberately held back the returns favorable to him, and on election night the story was telegraphed all over the country that the La Follette ticket had been overwhelmed. The leading Chicago newspapers reported the election of twenty out of twenty-six anti-La Follette delegates, and the repudiation of La Follette by “an overwhelming majority of Wisconsin voters.” Next morning there followed editorials in all the leading Wall Street organs, gloating over this defeat. And, as usual in newspaper practice, this first story got all the space that the subject was worth; the later news of La Follette’s victory was “buried.”
CHAPTER LII
THE PRESS AND THE SOCIALISTS
The particular kind of radical who is most disliked by our newspapers is of course the Socialist. The Socialist meets the class-consciousness of the newspapers with another class-consciousness, almost as definite and aggressive. The Socialist is noisy; also the Socialist has a habit of printing pamphlets and leaflets, thus trespassing on newspaper profits. Every newspaper differs in the names it puts on its “son-of-a-bitch list,” but every newspaper agrees in putting the most conspicuous Socialists on its “son-of-a-bitch list.” The Hearst newspapers pose as friends of the people; they print a great deal of radical clamor, but there is a standing order in all Hearst offices that American Socialism shall never be mentioned favorably. All newspapers have a rule that if any Socialist get into trouble, it shall be exploited to the full; when Socialists don’t get into trouble often enough to suit them, they make Socialists out of people who do get into trouble. Says Max Sherover:
When the King of Greece was shot by an insane and irresponsible man, the “New York Times” and hundreds of other papers ran the headline: “King of Greece Assassinated by a Socialist.” And although it was proven conclusively that the assassin hadn’t even heard of Socialism, none of these papers saw fit to retract their lie.
When the great novelist, David Graham Phillips, was shot by one Goldsborough, every paper in New York knew that Goldsborough not only was not a Socialist, but had often spoken against Socialism. They also knew that the latter had a personal grievance against the author. Notwithstanding these facts, the “New York World” and other papers came out with headlines: “David Graham Phillips Shot by Socialist.” None of the papers retracted that lie.
When Theodore Roosevelt was shot at in Milwaukee, the Associated Press sent broadcast the news that a Socialist had assaulted the Colonel. Though it was proven by the evidence of the assailant’s own statement that he was an affiliated member of a Democratic organization in New York, that he had always voted the Democrat ticket, the “New York Evening Telegram” ran the headline: “Roosevelt Shot by Socialist.” This the “Telegram” never retracted.