George Marion

“ Linked to sensationalism, the commodity form of news destroyed the old profession of journalism and replaced it with pure business. The individual honest reporter or correspondent, however pure his intent, is sunk from the start. The form of news he is taught to seek and permitted to send is hostile to the nature of truth. Not only the reporter, but the newspaper owner himself is alienated from the process of gathering reliable information and printing it. He is a merchant bound up with the problems of purchase and sale of goods, circulation, advertising and the like. ”

“ Of all these, the press is the most powerful single force in our time. The United States maintains a public-opinion-forming apparatus unparalleled in history and unequalled in any other land for the sheer weight of “information” hurled at a defenseless public. There is no chance for the public to make up its own mind.
Private Power
The newspaper owners have virtually unlimited control of this apparatus despite their elaborate pretense of suffering government constraint. The outcry against the government is a complete fraud. The owners are simply demanding a monopoly power over public opinion. ”

“ Class control of the press does not mean simple operation in the interests of capitalist newspaper owners. The owners are kept in line by the class as a whole so that they protect the interests of Big Business, and express the views of capital in general, rather than merely personal views. ”

“ The preoccupation with selling papers against fierce competition leads to the American practice of an edition every thirty seconds. This mania for speed, plus the man-bites-dog news formula, works to corrupt and discourage the men who handle news. At length, even the boasted accuracy of the press about elementary facts becomes a myth and a fraud. “The reliability of news accounts is far below what it was years ago ... the reporter is trained to look for the bizarre as all-important ...” writes Oswald Garrison Villard in The Disappearing Daily. ”

“ Finally, the truth about the American press—that it is the uncontrolled and unlimited voice of monopoly capital—should not operate to discourage constant pressure on the owners to deal fairly and adopt more liberal policies. This is a democracy, whatever its monopoly limitations; the publishers cannot completely ignore voices that are numerous enough and insistent enough. But the pressure should be concentrated where it has most chance to do good: on the powerful pro-fascist press bloc responsible for the worst excesses of our monopoly press. ”

“ Germany had not yet fully emerged as a modern industrial power. Russia, ruling a sprawling empire, was herself, in a sense, something of a political and economic “colony” of the more advanced European states. The Far East was one huge, thinly-disguised sphere for European exploitation, too, with Britain hogging the lion’s share. The United States, in addition to exercising little influence in world affairs, lacked the immediate facilities for world news competition: Great Britain controlled almost all cable and other communications. ”

“ Labor must also combat the commodity-news pattern and help create an audience for balanced, trustworthy information. A labor paper should aim at that end.
Beyond that, labor and liberals should consider legislation to ease the present monopoly. Postal and communications subsidies—free mailing, in fact—plus other government aid, should be given to newspapers and mail-circulation newsletters of responsible popular bodies. At the same time, government subsidies should be taken away from the monopoly press; private enterprise should be compelled to stand on its own feet in the publishing business. ”

“ Cooper, like most big business executives, experiences a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage. In his ode to Liberty there is no suggestion than when all barriers are down the huge financial resources of the American agencies might enable them to dominate the world. ”

“ There is no use dreaming about building—on however broad a liberal-labor cooperative plane—an independent apparatus to escape the news, picture and feature service squeeze. It would cost not millions but billions. Though the services have acquired an independent existence and structure, they are basically the American press itself. ”

“ Germany, too, had built up a modern industrial productive apparatus far greater than that of Britain. It found the world already divided. Markets, raw materials, the slave labor of colonies and their investment opportunities, had been “parcelled out” among Britain, France and their satellites: Holland, Belgium, Portugal. British and French guns were levelled against any suggestion of sharing the plunder with the newcomers. So German imperialism levelled its guns, too, and World War I was on. ”

“ But newspapers are already, in effect, edited at the central headquarters of banking and industry. And thus the boasted “free press” of America has become a simon-pure example of Big Business, absolute, brutal monopoly.
The Fascist “Fringe”
The increasingly monopolistic character of the press has made its control by Big Business an automatic process. But it has had still another result: to put the press under the influence of the most reactionary, least responsible wing of Big Business. The direct agency of this influence is the more openly pro-fascist section of the press. ”

“ The class function is so thoroughly built into the structure of the American newspaper industry that even millionaire mavericks, Marshall Fields, can stray but slightly from the class corral. The publishers themselves are powerless to change the over-all character of the press as the voice of finance capital. ”

“ The Soviet Union goes on coldly repeating Marxian myths about America—that we have no freedom of the press, that our democracy is formal but not real. Only the other day the Moscow Bolshevik was saying:
In the conditions of bourgeois democracy the workers do not have the minimum material requirements for actual use of the rights that are proclaimed. They do not have at their disposal printing presses and paper. Newspapers, clubs, theatres—all are the property of private individuals or groups. ”

“ If you want readers, you must meet the competition. Field had to have features, pictures and so on. He struggled to create his own comics and after three years felt he had achieved some readable ones, though by no means as successful as those controlled by the rival press. But news pictures can’t be invented. Without photographs, successful newspaper publication is impossible. Pictures, however, are as tightly controlled as news services. Even the Communist Daily Worker, the outstanding labor daily newspaper in the country, has to buy from the syndicates as they are. ”

“ Charles Havas, a Hungarian, established a similar monopoly for the French Empire and France’s sphere of interest, and Dr. Bernhard Wolff did as much for Germany. In the United States, Associated Press grew out of the same conditions, except that the agency, like the nation itself, was almost wholly absorbed in internal development, almost entirely disinterested in the rest of the world. Toward the close of the century, however, there were signs that the tremendous productive forces developed under American capitalism would ultimately seek an empire if not world empire. ”

“ Anglo-French ridicule was gall and wormwood to American Big Business as it moved more and more into competition for world markets, world influence and world power. It was more immediately vexing to Associated Press but A.P. never went outside the gentlemanly bounds of the conspiracy. It used the cartel as a club to beat back United Press and other would-be rivals at home.
Nevertheless, an ultimate conflict between A.P. and Reuters was inevitable. The United States was building up industrial might and developing resources to overtake and pass Great Britain in the race for world power. ”

“ The recent picket lines and boycott of the Daily News in protest against columnist John O’Donnell’s anti-Semitic provocations, demonstrate that results can be obtained. As a matter of fact, the “Fascist fringe” is very vulnerable. A good, strong, nationwide boycott, centering on the more blatantly fascist preachings of the bloc, might very well act as a deterrent and check on both policy and ownership. The curbing of the reactionary bloc would improve the whole tone of the press. This is the nearest thing to an attainable free press objective in the United States, at least for today. ”

“ The newspapers are all informative, they tend to be typographically excellent, their news is presented in careful, balanced form so that the constant reader is prepared to grasp new developments as they take place. The cultural leaders of the country, scholars, critics, writers and musicians, contribute to the papers.
The principal difference, however, is in their publishers. No paper is published for profit. No multimillionaire can control public opinion. No people’s organization is without a newspaper: trade unions, hundreds of them ”

“ Meaning that Japan, for instance, must be free to switch from Reuters to A.P. service. All American monopolies tend to demand “free competition” because they are now in a position to strangle their isolated competitors. Nourished by a huge home market built up with plenty of government aid, they no longer need direct subsidy and want to establish a no-subsidy rule for younger and weaker national news industries. The newspaper industry is in an even stronger position than chemicals, steel and other monopolies. ”

“ Access to the news means freedom to travel at will—to talk with whomsoever one wishes—it means finding communications systems available—it means the right of a business man to see how his product is used or whether a market for it exists.... I say this as a newspaper man, it is true, but in this all-important24 freedom we in the newspaper profession act as your agents.
What Sulzberger and the news industry are demanding, is acceptance by the Soviet Union of the system of special privileges for private enterprise that prevails here. ”

“ There is, however, definitely no freedom of the press for rent-collecting landlords, bankers, industrial monopolists. The Soviet press is frankly not a formally democratic press but a press of the working people. ”

“ There is no doubt that the Constitution of the United States formally guarantees to anyone the right to publish a newspaper in our country. The law is just and equal, forbidding unemployed worker and millionaire alike to sleep on park benches, guaranteeing either the freedom to buy or establish the huge6 enterprise called a newspaper. But where does Mr. Atkinson think a working man can obtain the means to publish and widely circulate a daily newspaper? ”

“ The capitalist powers had joined with the Socialist Soviet Union in a Grand Alliance, but the military activities of Britain and the United States indicated that their whole heart was not in the arrangement. The Soviet Union was permitted for three whole years to carry the burden of the fiercest assault known to history; under British pressure, the Anglo-American military power was distributed along the relatively inactive Empire lifeline. ”

“ In no other country has news-publishing grown into a business of comparable size and power. In no other country does the newspaper business stand so near the top in the list of Big Businesses.
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A.P. understood this very well. Reuters misunderstood it badly. For years it held out stoutly against A.P.’s right—verbally admitted but never put in writing—to operate in Japan. Jones was confident that A.P. would never risk a break with Reuters; he counted on the threat that Reuters would take U.P. into the cartel if A.P. walked out. ”

“ Anyone who has ever figured in a news story knows that the printed “facts” have little to do with reality!
True and Unbiased News
News was not always limited to this formula of sensation. The telegraph changed the whole basis of newspaper production and sale. It compelled papers to carry a picture of the whole country and ultimately the whole world whereas they used to be little more than local bulletins. ”

“ Beyond all these departments of government are other tools at the service of the ruling class to help it maintain political dominance, regiment public opinion, terrorize and repress dissenters, employ and reward servants and agents of all kinds, to the end of constantly increasing its profits, intensifying its exploitation of the population and extending its enormous powers. ”

“ Said Reuters chief Christopher Chancellor: “We are not purveyors of British news; news cannot be British or American—it is an international commodity.”
The German D.N.B. has, of course, been liquidated. So has Japan’s Domei. An American-sponsored German Agency, D.A.N.A., has been set up in U.S.-occupied Germany with favorable competitive advantages as against the British and French agencies. U. S. Treasury funds have been used openly in the battle for news control of Austria and other countries. In Japan, under exclusive American occupation, American news dictatorship is assured. ”