Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/208

 for twenty years, and I can say that I have never written a single word that I did not believe."

I have had much to say about the Associated Press in the course of this book. I need say only one thing about it in Southern California—that its headquarters are in the editorial rooms of the "Los Angeles Times." A good part of what goes on the Associated Press wire is first strained through the "Times" sieve; and so I can inform Mr. Fabian Franklin, formerly of the "New York Evening Post" and now of the "Review," that his sacred divinity, the Associated Press, has established here in Southern California a system which makes it impossible that any news favorable to the radical cause should get onto the Associated Press wires, and that everything dealing with the radical movement in Southern California which goes over the Associated Press wires should be not merely false, but violently and maliciously false. For example a prominent criminal lawyer in Los Angeles is blown up by a bomb, and the report goes out to the country that the police authorities believe that this was the work of "radicals." But next day the police authorities state officially that they have no such belief; and a couple of days later the crime is proven to have had a purely personal motive.

I have myself tested out, not once but several score of times, the system of the concrete wall and the news channel as it works here in Los Angeles. For example, when I read that Russia had a Socialist premier by the name of Kerensky, and that he did not know what to do with the Tsar and his family, I wrote to him a letter suggesting "An Island of Kings"—one of the Catalina Islands, off Los Angeles, as a place where the dethroned sovereigns of Europe might be interned, under the guardianship of the United States government. This, you perceive, was a "boost" to Southern California; it conveyed to the outside world the information that Southern California has a wonderful out-door climate, and beautiful islands with wild goats running over them, and deep sea fishing off the shores. I offered this story to the "Los Angeles Times," and they grabbed it, and it went out at once over the Associated Press wires.

Then, again, America went into the war, and I found myself compelled to revise the conclusions of a life-time, and to give my support to a war. I debated the issue at a gathering of Socialists; and here again was news which world