Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/360

 square deal during the big copper strike. He answered: "They were so unfair that I quit dealing with them at all." I said: "What paper in your state capital do they work with?" He answered: "There are only two—one owned by a millionaire land-speculator, the other owned by the 'Ray'!" (The "Ray" is a copper company, one of the most powerful and most corrupt.) Said Ex-Governor Hunt: "I proposed a law in Arizona requiring that papers should carry the line: 'This paper owned by the "Ray," or the "Copper Queen," or whatever the case might be.'" No wonder this ex-governor is an "ex"!

He comes to see me, and brings a clipping from the "Messenger," an independent weekly of his state capital. It appears that the wealthy bandits of the copper companies, who two years ago seized over a thousand miners and deported them from their homes, are now being tried for their crime. Says the "Messenger":

Associated Press reports from Bisbee and Douglas relative to the preliminary trial of alleged kidnappers are enough to condemn that service forever. It was bad enough to withhold service on July 12, 1917, the day of deportation, but the present stuff—

And then the "Messenger" goes on to explain in detail what is happening; the reporters of the local, copper-owned dailies of Bisbee and Douglas are acting as Associated Press correspondents, and are sending out "doctored stuff" to the country. Three times during one week of the trial at Douglas the "Bisbee Review" has had to apologize and correct statements attributed to a woman witness; these errors, "telegraphed broadcast" by the Associated Press, have been corrected "only by local mention"!

And here is the Central Trades Council of Tucson adopting a resolution, denouncing the "brazen one-sidedness" of the Associated Press reports of the trial:

Resolved, That to date we have not seen a single article that did not feature some silly remark made by some foreigner or illiterate witness for the state, and the vital news parts omitted.

In the case of the Colorado coal-strike, I have shown you what the Associated Press did in New York and in Denver. What was it doing meantime in the actual strike-field? In Walsenburg the publisher was "Jeff" Farr, whiskey-magnate, coal company sheriff and organizer of assassination, popularly known as the "King of Huerfano County." In Trinidad there