Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/361

 were two dailies owned by the chief attorney of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, whose son took command of one of the gunmen armies, and seized a United States mail-train to transport them. The "A. P." day man was the editor of the evening paper; the "A. P." night man was the telegraph-editor of the morning paper! Max Eastman tells me of interviewing one of them—introducing himself as a Chautauqua lecturer, desirous of getting the truth about the strike. The editor was in a mood of frankness, and said:

There's no use coming to me for the truth. A man in my position naturally gets only one side, the operators' side.

And, of course, he sent out that side. During the latter part of the strike the "Rocky Mountain News" of Denver sent its own correspondent to the field, and one of the editors told me of a conversation with the Associated Press representative in Denver. Said the latter, "Why do you keep a man down there?" Said the editor, "Because you people refuse to send me the news." And it was exactly the same during a strike in another part of the state, the "Northern field," where several score labor leaders were thrown into jail, but when it came to trial were nearly all acquitted. George Creel writes: "The Associated Press furnished the newspapers with accounts of these cases, but lost interest when the verdicts were returned."

As I write, there is a great steel strike, and from the "Panhandle" of West Virginia comes the following special dispatch to the "New York Call":

The capitalist press representatives have so falsely reported the existing strike conditions that steel strike leaders here now refuse to make any statements at all to them. Several times, after having promised to write, without alterations, the reports which the strike leaders had given, the Associated Press representatives deliberately reversed the statements.

So much for steel. And now hear what Charles Edward Russell has to say (Pearson's for April, 1914) concerning the conduct of the Associated Press in the Calumet copper-strike. In a letter to me he writes:

I may say that the Associated Press made a loud squeal on the story and blacklisted me for some years afterward, so you will see that the subject is one on which they are sensitive.