Neither has ever had to do a stroke of work in his life, and the attitude of both toward the man on the payroll is the most typically snobbish I have ever encountered. The younger brother directs the paper, although he could not earn fifteen dollars a week salary in any department if he were put on his own. The paper consequently is so wobbly in its policies and practices that it rapidly is becoming a joke.
In this vicinity is a third paper, owned by a politician of whom friends tell me that he has in past times taken the popular side, but now is old, and has got himself a business manager. A friend who knows this young man describes him:
“Energetic, cold as steel, a typical corporation, business, money man, who is wiping the paper clean of every trace of democracy.”
And then, moving farther North to Seattle, there is the “Times,” an enormously valuable property, built up with the financial assistance of the Hill interests and the Great Northern Railroad—which, I believe, made more money out of a small investment than any other enterprise in America. The “Times” is paying five per cent dividends on six million dollars, and so naturally believes in the profit system. Also there is the “Star,” a Scripps paper—the “Shooting Star,” which was willing to lose thirty-five thousand readers in order to smash the Seattle strike. And finally there is the “Post-Intelligencer,” which was purchased in the interest of James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railroad, and placed one hundred and seventy thousand dollars worth of its bonds in the hands of these interests. The paper was taken over, says my informant, by “the notorious Jacob Furth interests of Seattle. Furth was head of the Seattle transportation lines and the Seattle National Bank, and was the village pawnbroker. The paper had gradually gotten more and more into debt to the banks, and its present ownership arose out of that fact.”
Such is the newspaper plight of the Pacific coast! And now come to the Atlantic coast, and take one of our great centers of culture; take the Hub of the Universe, take Boston. The newspaper plight of Boston is beyond telling. There is the “Evening Transcript,” owned by an extremely wealthy and reactionary family, serving every wealthy and reactionary interest, and incidentally taking advertising bribes, as I shall presently show. There is the “Boston American,” owned by Hearst, and the “Boston Daily Advertiser,” also owned by Hearst. The latter is the oldest newspaper in Boston, and a year ago its circulation was cut down to a thousand copies, its publication being continued merely in order that Hearst may retain its Associated Press franchise. There is the “Boston Globe,” and its evening edition, controlled, I am informed, by Standard Oil. There is the “Boston Herald,” and its evening edition, the “Traveler,” owned by the Plant and United Shoe Machinery interests, with ex-Senator Crane holding the balance of power. There is the “Post,” also heavily in debt to Crane—who is one of the leading reactionaries of New England. The owner of the “Post” is described to me by one who knows him as “a sick man, who like all men who have accumulated a great deal of wealth, is inclined to be conservative and fearful of change.”
Finally, there is the “Christian Science Monitor,” owned and run by a group of wealthy metaphysicians, who teach that Poverty is a Delusion of Mortal Mind, and that Hunger can be relieved by Thinking. I make it a practice when a public emergency arises, and I have something to say which I think is important, to send it to leading newspapers by telegraph collect. Sometimes the newspapers publish it, nearly always they accept it and pay for it—because they judge there is a possibility of their getting something important by this method. The “Christian Science Monitor” stands alone among American newspapers in that it wrote me not to send it telegrams, because there was no chance of its caring to print what I might have to say!
Or take Cincinnati, where I happen to have friends on the “inside.” There is the “Cincinnati Inquirer” and “Post,” owned by the estate of McLean, who made thirty million dollars out of street railway and gas franchises, obtained by bribery. This estate also owns the “Washington Post,” whose knaveries I shall tell about later on. And there is the “Times-Star,” owned by Charles P. Taft, brother of our ex-president. “Charlie” Taft married twenty million dollars, and bought a newspaper, and started out as a valiant reformer, and everybody in Cincinnati thought how lovely that a fine, clean, young millionaire was going in for civic reform. But at the very outset he trod on the toes of Boss Cox, and Boss Cox showed how he could injure the Taft fortune; whereupon “Charlie” made a deal with the boss, and since then his paper has been the leading champion of civic corruption.
In most big cities you find papers owned by big local “trusts,” and one or two others belonging to a “trust” of newspapers, a publishing-system like that of Calkins or Capper or Munsey or Scripps or Hearst. For the rule that the big fish swallow the little ones applies in the newspaper world as elsewhere. The publisher of a big newspaper comes upon a chance to buy a small newspaper in a neighboring city, and presently he finds himself with a chain of newspapers. Then he learns of a magazine that is “on the rocks,” and it occurs to him that a magazine can help his newspapers, or vice versa. So you find Munsey, a self-confessed stock-gambler, with three magazines and several newspapers; the Hearst machine with a dozen newspapers, also “Hearst’s Magazine,” the “Cosmopolitan,” and four other periodicals. Every month in the Hearst newspapers you read editorials which are disguised advertisements of these magazines.
Also it has been discovered that magazines can combine to their financial advantage. The agents who come to your home and pester the life out of you for subscriptions find that they can get more of your money by offering clubbing-rates for a group of magazines: a farm paper, another paper with “slush for the women,” a third paper with slush for the whole family—such as I have quoted from the “American” and “McClure’s.” So you see a vast commercial machine building itself up. There is Street and Smith, with no less than eight magazines, all of them having enormous circulations, and devoted exclusively to trash. There is the Butterick Company, with seven; “Vanity Fair” and the Crowell Company, with four each; the Curtis Company, “Munsey’s,” the “Atlantic,” the “World’s Work,” the “Smart Set,” the “Red Book”—each with three. In England we have seen great chains of publications built up in connection with the selling of cocoa and soap; in America we see them built up in connection with the selling of dress-patterns, as with the Buttericks; with the boosting of moving pictures, as formerly done by “McClure’s”; with grocery-stores and stock-manipulation, as “Munsey’s”; with the selling of subscription-books, as “Collier’s,” or dictionaries, as the “Literary Digest.” Or perhaps it will be a magazine run by a book-publisher, as a means of advertising and reviewing his own books; and if you investigate, you find that the book-publisher in turn is owned by some great financial interest, which sees that he publishes commercial stuff and rejects all new ideas. This process of centralization has continued in England until now Lord Northcliffe owns fifty or sixty magazines and newspapers of all varieties.
Northcliffe had a personal quarrel with Lloyd George, and that part of British “Big Business” which makes its profits out of the Lloyd George policies felt the need of more publicity, and went into the market and bought the “Chronicle” for several million dollars. When the masters of industry pay such sums for a newspaper, they buy not merely the building and the presses and the name; they buy what they call the “good-will”—that is, they buy you. And they proceed to change your whole psychology—everything that you believe about life. You might object to it, if you knew; but they do their work so subtly that you never guess what is happening to you!