The Brass Check/Chapter 62

Chapter LXII Cutting the Tiger’s Claws

Every day the chasm between the classes in America grows wider; every day the class struggle grows more intense. Both sides become more conscious, more determined - and so the dishonesty of American Journalism becomes more deliberate, more systematic. And what is to be done? It must be evident to any sensible man that the conditions portrayed in this book are intolerable. Mankind will not consent to be lied to indefinitely.

William Marion Reedy discussed the question ten years ago, and his solution was pamphleteering. We must return to the custom of the eighteenth century, printing and circulating large numbers of leaflets, pamphlets and books. And for the past ten years we have been doing this; the Socialist party, for example, is a machine for the circulating of pamphlets and leaflets, and the holding of public meetings to counteract the knaveries of the capitalist press. There are innumerable other organizations which serve the same purpose: the "People's Council," the "Civil Liberties Bureau,” the  "International Workers' Defense League," the I. W. W. groups,  "The Rand School," the "People's College,” the "Young People’s Socialist League,” the  "Intercollegiate Socialist Society."  But, obviously, this can only be a temporary solution.  The workers of the country are in the condition of a frontier settlement besieged by Indians. They defend themselves with such weapons as they find at hand; but sooner or later, it is evident, they will organize a regular force, and invade the woods, and be done with those Indians once for all.

Take the Moyer-Haywood case, the Mooney case, the Ludlow massacre, or the Bisbee deportations; and consider what happens. For days, for weeks, perhaps for years, the Associated Press and its thousand newspapers prepare a carefully constructed set of falsehoods, and twenty or thirty million copies per day of these falsehoods are sold to the public.

Whereupon men and women of conscience all over this country are driven to protest. They call mass-meetings, they organize a new league and raise defense funds, print leaflets and pamphlets and devise a system of house-to-house distribution, they call big strikes and parades of protest; by this prodigious mass of effort they succeed in conveying some small portion of the truth to some small portions of the population. Is it not obvious that society cannot continue indefinitely to get its news by this wasteful method? One large section of the community organized to circulate lies, and another large section of the community organized to refute the lies! We might as well send a million men out into the desert to dig holes, and then send another million to fill up the holes. To say that William Marion Reedy, after a study of our journalistic dishonesty, could find no better solution of the problem than pamphleteering is merely to say that bourgeois thought is bankrupt.

The first remedy to which every good American takes resort is the law. We pass fifty thousand new laws in America every year, but still we cling to the faith that the next thousand will "do the business." Let us have laws to punish the lying of the press!

I, as a good American, have thought of laws that I would like to see passed. For instance, a law providing that newspapers shall not publish an interview with anyone until they have submitted the interview and had it O.K.'d; or unless they have obtained written permission to quote the person without such O.K.

Also, a law providing that when any newspaper has made any false statement concerning an individual, and has had its attention called to the falsity of this statement, it shall publish a correction of the statement in the next edition of the publication; and in the same spot and with the same prominence given to the false statement.

For example, the press sends out a report that the Rev. Washington Gladden is about to resign his pulpit. His mail is full of letters from people all over the country, expressing regret. Says Dr. Gladden:

The trouble with such a report is that you can never get it corrected. I have done my best to get such correction, but in this I have signally failed. Anything which discredits a man is "good stuff," which most newspapers are ready to print, provided it is not actionable; any correction which is made of such a report is not so apt to find a place on the wires, and is pretty sure to be blue-penciled by the telegraph editors.

It happens, while I am preparing this book for the printer, that I visit a friend, and mention what I am doing; he says: "There was one newspaper story which almost caused me to despise you. I wonder how much truth there was in it." He explains that he was in Chicago in the early days of the war, attending a conference of the People’s Council, and in a Chicago newspaper he read that I had denounced Emma Goldman to the government, and had turned over some of her private letters to the government.

I tell my friend what happened. An insane man had threatened my life, and I had applied to the Los Angeles police department for permission to carry a revolver. They promised to keep secret my application, but within half an hour there were two newspaper reporters after me. I refused to talk about the matter; so, as usual, they made up a story. It happened that I had given to the chief of detectives what information I had as to the insane man's past conduct; among other things, that he had caused a disturbance at a meeting of Emma Goldman's. That was the way her name came in, and the only way. I barely know Emma Goldman, having met her twice at public meetings; I knew nothing whatever about her activities at this time, and had no letters from her in my possession. I now have one, for immediately I wrote to her to say that the published story was false, and she replied that I need not have worried; she had known it was false.

Now, I sent a denial of that story to every newspaper in Los Angeles, and also to the Associated Press; but my denial went into the wastebasket. And why? At this time the capitalist press was engaged in hounding Emma Goldman to prison; the lie was useful to the hounders, so it stood, in spite of all my protests.

Obviously enough, here is a gross injustice. Common sense dictates a law that any newspaper which prints a false statement shall be required to give equal prominence to a correction. The law should provide that upon, publication of any false report, and failure to correct it immediately upon receipt of notice, the injured party should have the right to collect a fixed sum from the newspaper—five or ten thousand dollars at least. At present, you understand, the sum has to be fixed by the jury, and the damages have to be proven. If the "Los Angeles Times" calls Upton Sinclair an "Anarchist writer," if the "Chicago Tribune" calls Henry Ford an "Anarchist," it is up to the plaintiffs to prove just how and to what extent they have been damaged. The newspaper has the right to question their character and reputation, to examine them about every detail of their lives and opinions. Was Upton Sinclair justified in divorcing his wife? Does Henry Ford know how to read? If not, then it is all right to call them "Anarchists."

There is the problem of the Associated Press, the most powerful and most sinister monopoly in America. Certainly there will be no freedom in America, neither journalistic freedom nor political freedom nor industrial freedom, until the monopoly of the Associated Press is broken; until the distributing of the news to American newspapers is declared a public utility, under public control; until anyone who wishes to publish a newspaper, in any American city or town may receive the Associated Press service without any formality whatever, save the filing of an application and the payment of a fee to cover the cost of the service.

Proceedings to establish this principle were begun a year ago by Hearst before the Federal Trade Commission. Hearst had been barred from getting the "A.P." franchise in certain cities, and I venture to guess that his purpose was to frighten his enemies into letting him have what he wanted. At any rate, he found himself suddenly able to buy the franchises, so he dropped his proceedings against the "A.P." The attorney in this case was Samuel Untermyer, who writes me about the issue as follows:

If the prevailing opinion is right, the monopoly of the Associated Press over the news of the world is complete. Unless the courts will hold, as I think they will, when the question comes before them, that news is a public utility; that the Associated Press is engaged in interstate commerce, using the cables, telegraph lines and telephones and that it is, therefore, bound to furnish its service on equal terms to all who choose to pay for it. If that is not the law, it should be the law, and can readily be made the law by Federal legislation. Until this is done, the monopoly of the Associated Press will continue intolerably. I have fought it for years and thus far in vain, but I shall continue to fight until it is broken. The little clique that controls the Associated Press is in turn under the complete domination of a few of the most narrow-minded and reactionary of the great capitalists of the country. If our Government fails to stand the strain of these terrible times and if revolution and bloodshed follow—which God forbid!—the responsibility will rest at the doors of men like Gary and law- breakers  like the U. S.  Steel Company who lack all vision and sense of justice.

Also there should be a law forbidding any newspaper to fake telegraph or cable dispatches. At present, this is a universal custom in newspaper offices; the most respectable papers do it continually. They clip an item from some other newspaper, re-write it, and put it under a "telegraphic headline." They will take the contents of some letter that comes to the office, and write it up under a "London date-line." They will write their own political propaganda, and represent it as having come by telegraph from a special correspondent in Washington or New York. In "Harper's Weekly" for October 9, 1915, there was published an article, "At the Front with Willie Hearst." Mr. Hearst's "Universal News Bureau" was shown to be selling news all over the country, purporting to come from "more than eighty correspondents, many of them of world-wide fame." Every day, if you read this "Universal Service," you became familiar with the names of Hearst correspondents in London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Berlin, and Petrograd. All these correspondents were imaginary persons; all this news was written in the Hearst offices in New York, being a re-hash for American afternoon papers of the news of the London morning papers. This is obvious fraud, and the law should bar it, precisely as it bars misbranded maple syrup and olive oil and strawberry jam.

Such laws would help; and I could suggest others that would help; nevertheless, the urging of such laws is not the purpose of this book. It is a problem of cutting the claws of a tiger. The first thing you have to do is to catch your tiger; and when I undertake the hard and dangerous job of invading a jungle and catching a tiger and chaining him down, am I going to be content with cutting off the sharpest  points of the beast's claws, and maybe pulling one or two of his teeth? I am not!