Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/388



"None of them drew salaries?"

"No."

"But you drew your salary when you went over-seas, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"And your salary is about twenty thousand dollars a year, isn't it?*'

Witness admitted that it was.

"The World's Greatest Newspaper."

Or take the Nonpartisan League of North Dakota. All through the war the newspapers strove to make this appear a disloyal organization. The League held a convention at St. Paul, at which hundreds of speeches were made; and the Associated Press found it possible to make one of the speakers, La Follette, appear disloyal by misquoting him. So it featured La Follette—and reported the other speakers hardly at all. As this book is going to press, the League bank is raided, and the farmers by thousands come pouring into Fargo in the rain, and at two enormous gatherings they pledge themselves to make their bank the biggest in the state. The bank is reopened, and on the first day forty-five thousand dollars is put in and only nine thousand taken out. And how is all this handled by the Associated Press? Hear the "Idaho Leader":

Several newspaper representatives from St. Paul and Minneapolis were present to send as unfavorable reports of the great meeting to their papers as they could, and the Associated Press, the news agency which supplies the "Boise Statesman" with its daily fables from North Dakota, evidently fearing that their local manager was not capable of falsifying in the manner which big business demands, sent a special representative out from St. Paul to report the meeting. And this "A. P." representative did himself proud, or rather he did the bidding of his masters.

Among other highly colored and untrue statements which the Associated Press representatives made was that "when the speaking was ended in the auditorium and a recess taken before the evening meeting, the crowds made a rush for the doors to get away so that they would not have to subscribe for stock in the Scandinavian bank!"

The crowd did make a rush but it was not for the doors. The crowd rushed, jostled, and pushed, in the anxiety of dozens of men to reach the front of the building, where a number of persons took subscriptions for stock. Those handling the subscriptions were swamped, and many men were forced to stand in line for a long time before they were waited on.