Great credit is due the Associated Press for the manner in which it has handled the news end of this matter.
In city after city, you will find the Associated Press thus tied up with the worst reactionary influences. In Louisville, for example, it co-operates with the “Courier-Journal,” whose serio-comic story I have told in detail. In St. Paul, Minnesota, we saw the Associated Press misquoting Senator La Follette in a manner calculated to ruin him. It sought at first to put the blame upon its “member paper,” the “St. Paul Pioneer Press.” You recall the charges made against this paper by Walter W. Liggett, quoted on page [268]. Note that the Associated Press did not cease taking its news through a paper which had failed to resent such grave charges as these.
I cannot find that the “A. P.” ever did raise this issue with one of its member-papers. An interesting light is thrown on this very important subject by a controversy between the “Sacramento Bee” and the “San Francisco Star.” The “Bee” printed a long defense of the Associated Press, and the “Star” discussed it as follows:
Another damaging admission is that the Associated Press doesn’t care a picayune what manner of pirates buy a newspaper that has an Associated Press franchise. It mentions the case of the “San Francisco Globe,” which bought the special privilege news service of the “Post” when it bought the name of that paper. The franchise went with the name to a band of industrial pirates who wanted a special privilege news service to supplement their special privilege traction service in this city.
The “San Francisco Star” is a weekly, and so its editor does not need to be afraid of the Associated Press. I have a letter written by this editor, James H. Barry, to Prof. Ross of the University of Wisconsin:
You wish to know my “confidential opinion as to the honesty of the Associated Press.” My opinion, not confidential, is that it is the damndest, meanest monopoly on the face of the earth—the wet-nurse for all other monopolies. It lies by day, it lies by night, and it lies for the very lust of lying. Its news-gatherers, I sincerely believe, only obey orders.
In great labor centers, from which strike-news comes, you find this situation: that even if the Associated Press wished to deal with a fair newspaper, there is no fair newspaper to deal with. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, in Paterson, New Jersey, in Trinidad, Colorado, in Bisbee, Arizona, the newspapers are owned by the local industrial magnates and their financial and political henchmen. In Montana the Anaconda Mining Company, a Rockefeller concern, owns or controls practically every newspaper in the state; so of course the Associated Press sends no fair labor news from Montana. I asked Ex-Governor Hunt of Arizona how the Associated Press had treated him while he was giving the miners a square deal during the big copper strike. He answered: “They were so unfair that I quit dealing with them at all.” I said: “What paper in your state capital do they work with?” He answered: “There are only two—one owned by a millionaire land-speculator, the other owned by the ‘Ray’!” (The “Ray” is a copper company, one of the most powerful and most corrupt.) Said Ex-Governor Hunt: “I proposed a law in Arizona requiring that papers should carry the line: ‘This paper owned by the “Ray,” or the “Copper Queen,” or whatever the case might be.’” No wonder this ex-governor is an “ex”!
He comes to see me, and brings a clipping from the “Messenger,” an independent weekly of his state capital. It appears that the wealthy bandits of the copper companies, who two years ago seized over a thousand miners and deported them from their homes, are now being tried for their crime. Says the “Messenger”:
Associated Press reports from Bisbee and Douglas relative to the preliminary trial of alleged kidnappers are enough to condemn that service forever. It was bad enough to withhold service on July 12, 1917, the day of deportation, but the present stuff—
And then the “Messenger” goes on to explain in detail what is happening; the reporters of the local, copper-owned dailies of Bisbee and Douglas are acting as Associated Press correspondents, and are sending out “doctored stuff” to the country. Three times during one week of the trial at Douglas the “Bisbee Review” has had to apologize and correct statements attributed to a woman witness; these errors, “telegraphed broadcast” by the Associated Press, have been corrected “only by local mention”!