Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/279

 is annihilation; yet Mr. Stone feels virtuous because nobody rebels! Let Mr. Stone pay off his debts for office furniture, and place all the nine-hundred-odd members of the Associated Press on an equality as regards votes, and then let him boast that the bonds have no effect upon elections!

Ten years ago Mr. Kittle made a study of the fifteen directors of the Associated Press. They were all publishers of large newspapers, and from these newspapers could be judged. Just one was a "liberal," Nelson, of the "Kansas City Star"—and he has since died. All the other fourteen were classified as "conservative or ultra-conservative." Said Mr. Kittle:

The other fourteen papers are huge commercial ventures, connected by advertising and in other ways with banks, trust companies, railway and city utility companies, department-stores and manufacturing enterprises. They reflect the system which supports them.

There have been many changes of personality in the Associated Press in the last ten years, but there has been no change in this respect; the statement of Mr. Kittle's remains the truth about the fifteen directors. And likewise there has been no change in the policy of the organization, as Mr. Kittle reported it:

The dispatches themselves disclose the attitude of the management. They give scant courtesy to movements for constructive legislation in the public interest. The reports, scores of which have been examined, are meager, fragmentary, isolated. Every time Tom Johnson was successful in more than fifty injunction suits, the general public in other states heard little or nothing of it. When an election recently went against him, everybody heard of the "failure" of municipal ownership. When La Follette for five years, by a continuous contest, was placing law after law on the statute-books, the matter was ignored or briefly reported in distant states; and temporary defeats were given wide publicity. When Kansas, in 1908, rejected a conservative and elected a progressive United States Senator, the general public at a distance from that state did not know the real issue involved. For more than two years, there has been a strong movement in California against the rule of that state by special and corrupt interests, but that fact, merely as news, has never reached the general public in the East. The prosecution of offenders in San Francisco has only been a part of the wider movement in California. The strong movement in New Hampshire, headed by Winston Churchill, to free that state from the grasp of the Boston and Maine Railway Company and the movement in New Jersey led by Everett Colby, which resulted in the defeat of Senator Dryden, the president of the Prudential Insurance Company, have not been given to the people adequately as matters of news.