Press gang

“ The reasons assigned for the pressing of men who ought never to have made the acquaintance of the warrant or the hanger were often as far-fetched as they are amusing. "You have no right to press a person of my distinction!" warmly protested an individual of the superior type when pounced upon by the gang. ”

“ Sham gangs and make-believe press-masters abounded, thriving exceedingly upon the fears and credulity of the people until capture put a term to their activities and sent them to the pillory, the prison or the fleet they pretended to cater for. ”

“ The press gangs looked for trained seamen, though when a war lasted for some years they took what they could get; landsmen were impressed, and the press was sometimes abused as a means of getting rid of a personal enemy, a rival in love, or an inconvenient claimant. ”

“ But both the composing-room and pressroom forces indignantly refused to listen to this sinister suggestion. They all liked their young employer, and admired him for the plucky fight he was making. There was not a man of them whose loyalty could be shaken. So this attempt proved as futile as had been the effort to bribe the Bulletin’s photo-engraver.
The other attempt was of a more violent nature. Just as the paper was going to press, a gang of hoodlums endeavored to force their way into the Bulletin Building, with the obvious intention of invading the pressroom, and smashing the forms. ”

“ Any attempt at estimating the number of seafaring men who evaded the gangs and the call of the State by means of the devices and subterfuges here roughly sketched into the broad canvas of our picture would prove a task as profitless as it is impossible of accomplishment. One thing only is certain. The number fluctuated greatly from time to time with the activity or inactivity of the gangs. When the press was lax, there arose no question as there existed no need of escape; when it was hot, it was evaded systematically and with a degree of success extremely gratifying to the sailor. ”

“ Men who had no protections, men whose papers bore evident traces of "coaxing" or falsification, men whose appearance and persons failed to tally exactly with the description there written down—these were set apart from their more fortunate messmates, to be dealt with presently. To their ranks were added others whose protections had either expired or were on the point of expiry, as well as skulkers who sought to evade His Majesty's press by stowing themselves away between or below decks, and who had been by this time more or less thoroughly routed out by members of the gang armed with hangers. ”

“ She had lost her faith in journalism as a drum for the rousing of the people against wrong. Its beat had led too often to the trickster’s booth, to the cheap-jack’s rostrum. It had lost its rallying power. The popular Press had made the newspaper a byword for falsehood. Even its supporters, while reading it because it pandered to their passions, tickled their vices, and flattered their ignorance, despised and disbelieved it. Here and there, an honest journal advocated a reform, pleaded for the sweeping away of an injustice. The public shrugged its shoulders. Another newspaper stunt! ”

“ And is he, who can find no entrance into their columns, without covering his paragraph with gold, to abstain from uttering a word against them when he comes before a public meeting, lest the people should espouse his cause and demolish their windows? Whence have they derived this privilege of assaulting him with impunity? He has no newspaper in his hands. He has no means of answering them through the press. They assail him, sitting snugly in their offices. They assail him daily. ”

“ In fact, the doctrine of the liberty of the press is an anachronism which has become harmful and the time has come when it ought to be discarded from our constitutions and laws. Like monarchy and priestcraft, it once answered a good purpose. When kings secretly imprisoned and beheaded men who thwarted their purposes it was an agency for the welfare of the people. Those times have gone. The newspaper is now a venture to make a profit and everywhere it shows the results of the temptation to sell those wares that find a market — filth, scandal and crime. ”

“ From some great business center the word goes out, and the newspapers catch up the echo. In this way the individual, the great personality that once made the newspaper a power for good, is lost; instead, the press has become a mob—the most dangerous mob that ever existed, for it comes in the guise of instruction, of morals, of culture, of learning. Thus masquerading, journalism to-day is fast lapsing—or rather plunging—into a vortex that is positively appalling in its aspects. ”

“ This establishment affords the most rational and cheapest way of spending an evening that has yet been presented to the public of any country, and since threats are held out against it, State warrants and indictments talked of, and plots—vile plots—planned, but foiled, the Prompter summons the Press to its aid and pledges a brave and glorious struggle and a successful war under its tri-colored banner against the aristocratical or clerical despotism, corruption, and ignorance of the whole country. ”

“ Let it be an unjust war—and the government proposing it, or appearing likely to precipitate it, bombarded by the artillery of the press, will quickly be shattered to pieces. All our institutions profit prodigiously by the wholesome scrutiny of the press. The Church, the Army, the Navy, the Law, every department of the executive—down to our police-offices, our prisons, our workhouses—in any and every of them, tyranny, peculation, misconduct of every sort, is quickly detected, and as quickly stopped and redressed. ”

“ Why, will he say, cannot I, if I frequent the same place, see and hear what those who are employed for the press see and hear there? He can; but the fact is, that our police reporters are by far too clever to set down the words of other people, without throwing in something of their own. Their plan is to drop the duller parts of a story or a speech, and to embellish its livelier portion—to select the tit-bits, and sauce and spice them up sufficiently high to please the palates of the news-reading public. ”

“ In fact, the publication of such articles has become one item, and that not a small one, of the subsistence of the newspaper press. The tendency of it is obvious. In the language of another: "When some monstrous or unusual crime has been revealed to the public, it seldom passes without a sad repetition. A link in the chain of intellect is struck, and a crime is perpetrated, which else had not occurred." ”

“ Having begun his political fortune with articles skilfully written in order to attract to himself prosecution, suits, and several weeks of imprisonment, he had considered the press as a weapon of opposition which every good government should break. ”

“ They will triumph and go on in their destructive career; they will assume that an unlimited confidence has been placed in them, and there will be no bounds to their already frightful oppression. A verdict of not guilty will stagger and shake them from their holds, will destroy the remains of ignorance and superstition, and establish the liberty of the Press and free discussion with all its valued influence. Every stratagem will be used by my persecutors and by that portion of the Press which adheres to them to excite a feeling of prejudice against me. ”

“ Our readers have often had to oblige us by their attention to what we have said of the blessed THING. We are now going to trouble them upon an extraordinary occasion indeed, and are going to give an instance of the baseness and infamy of the London newspapers, such as we never before had it in our power to give; and such as we are quite sure will, before we have done with it, implant the character of everlasting infamy upon that corrupt press, which has so long been boasting of its independence and its honour. What a deal we have heard about the press being the guardian of public morals! ”

“ Nor is the efficacy of the Press as an auxiliary agent of police confined to its success as a deterrent—newspapers advertise the bankrupt's loss of credit, expose the tricks of the swindler, ruin the trade of the impostor, and chastise many an offender whom the law cannot reach. Finally, a free Press, being a guarantee for public liberty, acts as a seton for the escape of evil humours which, if confined, might become a source of danger to the Commonwealth; for as Bentham has said, "a people sure of its rights, enjoys them with moderation and tranquillity." ”

“ By recognizing the possibilities of publicity, the chance which the broadcast sowing of newspapers and magazines put within the reach of the individual man to impress himself upon the whole country, upon the whole civilized world. The kings of finance relied upon the assiduity and dexterity of sundry paid agents, operating through the stealthy, clumsy, old-fashioned channels for the exercise of power. I relied only upon myself; I had to trust to no fallible, perhaps traitorous, understrappers; through the megaphone of the press I spoke directly to the people. ”

“ The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government calls the attention of the population to the fact that in our country, behind this liberal shield, is hidden the opportunity for the wealthier classes to seize the lion’s share of the whole press, and by this means to poison the popular mind and bring confusion into the consciousness of the masses.
Every one knows that the bourgeois press is one of the most powerful weapons of the bourgeoisie. ”

“ The press, which ought to be the shield of public liberty, the avenger of public wrongs—which above all should have exerted itself to preserve the purity of its favourite institution, the trial by jury—has directed its whole force to my injury and prejudice: it has heaped slander upon slander, and whetted the public appetite for slanders more atrocious: nay more, what in other men would serve to refute and repel the shaft of calumny, is made to stain with a deeper dye the villanies ascribed to me. ”

“ At any rate, it is certain that the calling of a reporter would afford many opportunities to a clever burglar, or even an adroit pickpocket. A reporter can take his walks abroad at any hour of the night without exciting the suspicion of a policeman; or, should such suspicion be aroused, he has only to say “Press,” and he may go anywhere he pleases. The Press rush in where the public dare not tread; and no one need be surprised if some day a professional burglar takes to stenography as an auxiliary to the realisation of his illegitimate aims. ”

“ She knew that the press had power, great power—for she was always hearing that—and it had not occurred to her as yet to examine the composition of that power so as to discover that, while the press certainly had a certain monopoly of expression, and that same 'spirit of body' which makes police constables swear by one another, it yet contained within its ring fence the sane and advisable futility of a perfectly balanced contradiction ”

“ Therefore, in great strikes, all the efforts of the employers are devoted to making it appear that the strikers are violent. The greatest single agency in America for making it appear that strikers are violent is the Associated Press. How does this agency perform its function?
In the first place, by the wholesale method of elimination. There are some violent strikers, needless to say, and Capitalist Journalism follows this simple and elemental rule—if strikers are violent, they get on the wires, while if strikers are not violent, they stay off the wires ”

“ We can never have too many arms, public or private, against the criminal. To this some people may answer that, by continually publishing the details of crimes, the press ends by encouraging their commission. ”

“ A Seditious Meetings Act has been enacted to make open propaganda impossible. An Explosives Act has been placed on the statute book. A Press Law has been passed to muzzle the press. Spies and detectives have been employed out of number. Teachers, professors, friends, pupils, class-fellows, parents, have all been requisitioned to crush the movement. The number of publications confiscated under the Press Act, the convictions for sedition, for seditious murders, for dacoities and for keeping arms, the sentences for failure to find securities for good behaviour, all continue to grow. ”

“ The little clique that controls the Associated Press is in turn under the complete domination of a few of the most narrow-minded and reactionary of the great capitalists of the country. If our Government fails to stand the strain of these terrible times and if revolution and bloodshed follow—which God forbid!—the responsibility will rest at the doors of men like Gary and law- breakers like the U. S. Steel Company who lack all vision and sense of justice.
Also there should be a law forbidding any newspaper to fake telegraph or cable dispatches. ”

“ Our newspaper and periodical press is bad enough. Its sins against propriety cannot be justified, and ought not to be defended. But its violence is meekness, its liberty restraint, and even its atrocities are virtues, when compared with that system of brutal and ferocious outrage which distinguishes the press in America. In England, even an insinuation against personal honour is intolerable. A hint—a breath—the contemplation even of a possibility of tarnish—such things are sufficient to poison the tranquillity, and, unless met by prompt vindication, to ruin the character of a public man ”