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 CHAPTER LIX

THE PRESS AND THE WAR

War came upon the world, and the writer, as a student of Journalism, watched the great tide of public opinion. There had been newspapers in America which had kept a careful pretense of impartiality; under the pressure of war this pretense was forgotten. For example, the "New York Times." Everyone would admit that the editorial page of the "Times" is class-propaganda, but the "Times" tries not to let you know that its news-columns are class-propaganda. It avoids the cruder blunders, such as false headlines. But when the threat of war came, and the "Times" was trying to force the country into war, the "Times" forgot even that precaution. On Thanksgiving Day, 1915, some twelve hundred clergymen in New York preached sermons. The "Times" selected eleven of these sermons and put them all under this headline:

PREPAREDNESS FROM MANY PULPITS

Thanksgiving Sermons Justify War for Defense of American Liberty and Ideals

Then you read the sermons, and what did you find? Three of them contained utterances which might be construed as urging preparedness; the other eight contained not a word in reference to preparedness!

And the same with the magazines. There had been magazines which in the old days would give excuses for not publishing this or that—they were concerned with questions of dignity, of art; they could not lend their columns to propaganda. But now these magazines became frankly organs of propaganda. Long before America entered the war, "McClure's" turned all its energies to a campaign for "preparedness." The "American," the "Metropolitan," the "Outlook" did the same. "Current Opinion" abandoned its policy of reprinting from other publications, and introduced propaganda of its own. The "Literary Digest," supposed to be an impartial survey of public opinion, became a partisan organ of hate. Says a writer in "Reedy's Mirror":