Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/275

 CHAPTER XLII

OWNING THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

When it comes to the Associated Press, the clearest statement I have read was made by Charles Edward Russell in "Pearson's Magazine," April, 1914. Says Russell:

About nine hundred daily newspapers in the United States, comprising the great majority of the journals of influence and circulation, receive and print the news dispatches of the Associated Press.

This means that concerning any event of importance an identical dispatch is printed about fifteen million times and may be read by thirty million persons.

According to the construction and wording of that dispatch, so will be the impression these thirty million persons will receive, and the opinion they will form and pass along to others.

Here is the most tremendous engine for Power that ever existed in this world. If you can conceive all that Power ever wielded by the great autocrats of history, by the Alexanders, Caesars, Tamburlaines, Kubla Khans and Napoleons, to be massed together into one vast unit of Power, even this would be less than the Power now wielded by the Associated Press.

Thought is the ultimate force in the world and here you have an engine that causes thirty million minds to have the same thought at the same moment, and nothing on earth can equal the force thus generated.

Well-informed men know that the great Controlling Interests have secured most of the other sources and engines of Power. They own or control most of the newspapers, most of the magazines, most of the pulpits, all of the politicians and most of the public men.

We are asked to believe that they do not own or control the Associated Press, by far the most desirable and potent of these engines. We are asked to believe that the character and wording of the dispatches upon which depends so much public opinion is never influenced in behalf of the Controlling Interests. We are asked to believe that Interests that have absorbed all other such agencies for their benefit have overlooked this, the most useful and valuable of all. We are even asked to believe that, although the Associated Press is a mutual concern, owned by the newspapers, and although these newspapers that own it are in turn owned by the Controlling Interests, the Controlling Interests do not own, control or influence the Associated Press, which goes its immaculate way, furnishing impartial and unbiased news to the partial and biased journals that own it.

That is to say that when you buy a house you do not buy its foundations.