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The condition has arisen not by the will of any individual or group, but from a gradual growth of custom, both in newspaper operation and in the purchase of advertising space.

This refers to the preference of advertisers for fewer papers with larger circulations. The net effect is that the local monopolies are barricaded against competition and the price of admission is several million dollars.

FOR WHOM THE PRESS TOILS

If ownership of the press is closed to all but an estimated 1,300 multimillionaire owners, whose opinions appear in it? The obvious answer is: the opinions of the owners. They make no bones about it. Canons of ethics sometimes pay lip service to "public interest," but in making legal commitments the publishers insist on written guarantees that their views and nobody else's shall go into "their" newspapers. The American Newspaper Guild, for instance, is forced to reacknowledge, from time to time, its formal acceptance of the publishers' opinion monopoly. Newspaper workers claim no right to speak through the pages of their employers' papers. From copyboy to top editor, newspapermen are hired hands, engaged for the sole purpose of putting their employer's opinions in print.

The press is, in fact, an important part of the State apparatus. It plays a key role in maintaining the rule of the Sixty Families over the 140,000,000 people of the United States. It is a tool in the hands of the few finance capitalists who remain all-powerful so long as they are able to keep the masses divided and confused.

It is true that the press lords are forever wailing about an alleged government menace to press freedom. The conflict of press and government does not contradict, however, the charge that the press is an instrument of the State. The common notion that State and government are two names for one thing, makes a few words on theory advisable at this point. A hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, there would have been less likelihood of similar confusion. In the great political strife that attended and immediately followed the adoption of the United States Constitution, political theory was treated with more respect than it is today. Federalists and Jeffersonians agreed that the State was an instrument of class rule. Jeffersonian John Taylor saw revolution and "order" as "two modes of invading private property; the first, by which the poor plunder the rich ... sudden and violent; the second, by which the rich plunder the poor, slow and legal." Summarizing Taylor's views, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. says: "The succession of privileged orders through history--the priesthood, the nobility, now the banking system--showed how every age had known its own form of institutionalized robbery by a minority operating through the State." Lenin later put it scientifically: "The State is an organ of class domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another; its aim is the creation of 'order' which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression."

The American State

Classes do not march in a straight line to their goals. Sometimes the executive arm of government is completely responsive to the views of the most reactionary section of capitalism, as when Hoover, Harding, Coolidge were President. Sometimes the President is not fully "manageable," as in the case of President Roosevelt. But he then finds himself pretty well invested by "trustworthy" men; he must accept a John Garner for Vice-President; he must put men like Jesse Jones in his Cabinet. In the same way, Congress may be an easy tool of reactionary interests one term, curbed by public pressure the next. Note the speed with which the last few Congresses have enacted drastic anti-labor legislation and tax bills pouring billions into the coffers of Big Business. If an active public conscience restricts the freedom of executive departments and legislative departments otherwise favorable to Big Business, there are always the courts. When the democrats, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, held the presidency, Martin Van Buren noted that the party of rich-man's-rule fled to "the judicial department of the government, as to an ark of future safety which the Constitution placed beyond the reach of public opinion." So today the courts readily grant anti-picketing injunctions to employers despite laws expressly designed to halt such use of the injunction. Below the Federal level, government is even more easily dominated by big capital. The local police are always at hand for strike duty. Governors and mayors dance to Big Business tunes.

Beyond all these departments of government are other tools at the service of the ruling class to help it maintain political dominance, regiment public opinion, terrorize and repress dissenters, employ and reward servants and agents of all kinds, to the end of constantly increasing its profits, intensifying its exploitation of the population and extending its enormous powers. Schools, churches, theaters are manipulated by boards directly selected by leading capitalists. The Morgans and Rockefellers personally oversee, as trustees, the largest universities, public libraries and museums. Radio, moving pictures, and the press--frankly described by their private owners as "opinion-forming industries"--are even more elaborately controlled devices for class rule.

Of all these, the press is the most powerful single force in our time. The United States maintains a public-opinion-forming apparatus unparalleled in history and unequalled in any other land for the sheer weight of "information" hurled at a defenseless public. There is no chance for the public to make up its own mind.

Private Power

The newspaper owners have virtually unlimited control of this apparatus despite their elaborate pretense of suffering government constraint. The outcry against the government is a complete fraud. The owners are simply demanding a monopoly power over public opinion. They go so far as to impose a virtual censorship on an Administration with which they are not in complete sympathy. They got Congress to pass an act frankly designed to suppress Marshall Field's pro-Roosevelt newspapers. If you so much as criticize the opinion-monopoly, you are accused of attacking freedom of the press. The monopolists have bulldozed the politicians until no less bold a critic than Mr. Ickes has gone on record as opposing publication of even a single government newspaper.

Modern industry, however, requires millions of literate workers. The general level of education and information must rise. The new ruling classes, the merchant princes, the industrialists, the finance capitalists, are forced to accede to this trend. Their attitude toward the press changes. Instead of seeking to limit the volume of newspaper information, they seek to control the content and use the papers as a tool. The deliberate spread of misinformation and class propaganda replaces the tactic of suppression. Neither government, nor the ruling classes who dominate the government, try to restrict this outpouring. That was a problem in the age of feudalism; the true problem today is that the press is monopolized by a wealthy and powerful clique. It has become one of the most powerful instruments of the capitalist State, on a par with the government itself!

"The use as well as the misuse of information has made the power of suggestion the decisive force in world affairs," says Dean Ackerman of the Columbia School of Journalism, a pillar of the news industry. "It can cause or prevent war. It can strengthen or destroy a democracy. It can build or wreck a nation."

WORDS FOR SALE

Class control of the press does not mean simple operation in the interests of capitalist newspaper owners. The owners are kept in line by the class as a whole so that they protect the interests of Big Business, and express the views of capital in general, rather than merely personal views.

The pressure of advertisers, the family connections of the publisher and so on, do not fully explain the capitalist owner's loyalty to his class. There is a deeper reason. The class function is so thoroughly built into the structure of the American newspaper industry that even millionaire mavericks, Marshall Fields, can stray but slightly from the class corral. The publishers themselves are powerless to change the over-all character of the press as the voice of finance capital.

The "built-in" class control of the press did not come about through a convention or secret meeting of machiavellian bankers, nor even through the constant pressure of the National Association of Manufacturers. It came about in a way no one could have planned. It was a historical process of a complicated kind. The best thing we can do is to study the process and the resulting structure of the press without oversimplifying.

Subsidies

The United States government subsidizes the press by means of special mailing privileges. Postal rates for newspapers at newspapers. What price subsidy? In 1908, 64 per cent of all mail was newspapers; it brought the Post Office but 4 per cent of its revenues. The press, for all its cries of rage at "government extravagance," insists on continuance of this patronage. The welcomed "handout" costs taxpayers from ,000,000 to ,000,000 a year, it is estimated.

Second-class mailing privileges and the like are only a minor factor in the subsidy system. Preferential wire rates for news is the big thing. Billions of news-words transmitted each year ordinarily get their low rates from private companies owning the telephone, telegraph, wireless, radio, cable and other facilities. But all communications are matters of public franchise and the preferential rates were the result of State intervention.

Where the State creates and controls communications, subsidizing them, is it not nonsense to speak of the press--the communications-based news industry--as independent of the State?

What Is News?

Man-bites-dog may be a gag but it is no joke. It contains the link between the obvious faults of our press and their hidden disease. The techniques by which American newspapers turn events into profit are all an expression of the man-bites-dog idea. The compulsory use of the "lead" and headline , is merely the final expression of the technical process. The whole process consists in finding or creating sensations to exploit. The object being to sell papers, not to maintain just values, "news" is not that which informs but that which sells another newspaper to a badgered reader. Not only complicated international affairs but even "local" stories are distorted beyond recognition of the facts by these techniques. The "crime waves" cooked up out of quite average statistics from time to time are a sample .

True and Unbiased News

News was not always limited to this formula of sensation. The telegraph changed the whole basis of newspaper production and sale. It compelled papers to carry a picture of the whole country and ultimately the whole world whereas they used to be little more than local bulletins. Costs greatly increased, and to defray them publishers formed pools. Thus the modern news agency was born and with the agency came a standardized manner of treating news.

When the first agencies began operating, newspapers were very violent in their opinions and intemperate in expressing them. If a news agency wanted to serve all, it would have to find a way of reporting what would offend none. At first, transmission of a limited kind of news was undertaken: deaths, fires, market prices, textual matter. To cover the whole range of news, however, the agency had to learn how to report controversial matters that all the papers wanted, in a way acceptable to all. For instance, it must report a political contest in a form printable by papers backing either major party. The news agencies learned to do that just 100 years ago.

This reporting formula is what the American news industry calls "true and unbiased news." It is regarded as something holy. A more than religious fervor marks the industry's references to it. Kent Cooper, executive director of A.P., admits that it was not "the result of philosophic study or prayer," but he is proud that A.P. puts "into forceful and lasting effect the moral concept that necessity had invented." He further calls it the "greatest moral concept ever developed in America and given to the world."

Though United Press is today as pompous as A.P. about the supposed "objectivity" of American agency "news," Roy Howard was franker when he was fighting an uphill battle for U.P.'s life. He then complained bitterly of A.P.'s monopolistic practices in "collecting and selling a basic journalistic commodity--news--in a highly competitive field." He also said: "I do not subscribe to the general idea that news and opinion are two different and easily separated elements." Consider news about Negroes, for instance, as handled by the agencies. Most of it emanates from Southern newspapers with avowed lily-white views; it is for distribution to all subscribers but must not "offend" the large bloc of Southern papers. So it is all bias and a continent wide.

The management of the Federated Press has never subscribed to the hypocritical assertion of the capitalist newspapers that news can be without bias. The Federated Press is very careful about facts but they are presented with a decidedly pro-labor interpretation just as we believe the capitalist press interprets news so that it becomes pro-capitalist.

Remote Control

Incidentally, a comparison of the Federated Press budget with that of the capitalist agencies casts some light on the difference between real and formal equality. Federated Press spent ,000 in 1936. The three employer-minded agencies spent ,048,000 in a similar 12-month period !

The Fascist "Fringe"

It was war-long support by this bloc that prepared MacArthur's dictatorship of the Pacific today. It was their persistent slandering of the Soviet Union throughout the war that prepared the general hysteria of the press immediately the war had ended. The mere fact of their operation as a bloc, would assure their dominance over the press as a whole unless there were an equally powerful counterbloc. But there is as yet no effective counterbloc--this is one of the primary tasks still to be tackled by labor and the people. For the reactionary program of the pro-fascist bloc is but the unrestrained expression of Big Business' inner drives. It is but the crude utterance of the prejudices hidden by more cultured newspaper owners. It is the open sore that betrays the hidden disease of our unfree-press: complete subservience to the private interests of the biggest monopolies.

Part II: News--Arm of Empire

THE ROVER NEWSBOYS ABROAD

"I want the people of every land to be as fully informed as we are, through a press of varied inclinations toward the philosophies of the day."--Kent Cooper.

What the American press is at home--an arm of the State--it is abroad. The press, and the forces behind it, have formulated an aggressive program for pushing American commodity news into every corner of the earth. The program is put in the form of a demand for adoption of "freedom of the press as we know it" by all nations. The President, the State Department, the Congress have formally adopted the news industry's program as a basic unit in American foreign policy.

The first major action of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights was to set up a subcommittee on the "free press," to consider a resolution along American lines. There was strong pressure to adopt the American view in its entirety. The U.S. has also insisted that many foreign countries accept American correspondents and adopt American news concepts if they want diplomatic recognition.

Speaking for the American newspaper industry, Kent Cooper has further proposed that no country should obtain aid of any kind from the U.S. without acceptance of these views. Official backing of Cooper has gone so far that Congress even delayed a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency appropriation in an attempt to impose a "free press" condition for U.N.R.R.A. aid.

It is not generally known that the American news industry has now attained virtual domination of the world news market--which means every country except the Soviet Union and its immediate neighbors. The story of the battle for world opinion control will be told in later pages. Here it is enough to point out that official pressure for world news "freedom" has a double purpose. First, it is aimed to break down Soviet resistance, especially in respect to reported plans of Tass, official Soviet news agency, to serve Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary and Rumania. Second, it is designed to further expand and consolidate the powerful world position of the American news monopoly against future challenges by its now feeble rivals.

I do not believe that free peoples can afford to trust dictatorships. We should not share our military secrets, or make any financial agreements, calculated to build the Soviet Union until we in this country have more knowledge of her and her ways.... I think we should put definite limits upon our cooperation ... until we have the same freedom of access to the news of Russia as they have to the news over here....

What Sulzberger and the news industry are demanding, is acceptance by the Soviet Union of the system of special privileges for private enterprise that prevails here. At the very least, they would require the Russians to agree that information is a commodity to be peddled exclusively by morally irresponsible private organizations. If the Soviet Union could be forced to bow to American private enterprise in this instance, a capitalist wedge would have been inserted in the Socialist system.

Lawful Spies

The recent Pearl Harbor inquiry dented the old shallow idea of "intelligence" which centered on beautiful Mata Haris and stolen plans, though the recent Canadian spy-scare exploited this popular misconception. The United States has just created a new national intelligence agency on a more realistic basis. Gathering of every kind of public and secret information, plus the over-all evaluation of the total information, is the job of the new agency. Evaluation of information at every stage is essential. Poor evaluation led General Marshall to believe--and to tell a press conference--that the Nazis would go through the Red Army like a hot knife through butter; later that Japan was militarily a joke.

For the function of gathering information and evaluating it as it is gathered, the correspondent is ideally equipped. Since his work is conditioned to the objectives of the dominant interests in his own country, and even of his own government to varying degrees, he cannot be regarded as an innocent man from Mars, dispassionately reporting history as it unfolds. As a matter of fact, news values are determined, for the correspondent, with relation to state policy. Events are not "news" unless they have some bearing on the progress or lack of progress of specific American policies. The current American coverage of the Balkans is typical. Correspondence from that area is almost exclusively concerned with the Anglo-American effort to get "reliable" governments installed. The correspondent makes no pretense of drawing a positive picture of life in those lands.

But over and beyond what the correspondent reports, or does not report, is his value as a contact man. It is not for nothing that Sulzberger stresses complete freedom of motion and contact for the business man and correspondent alike. In the Socialist sphere, and in rival imperialist territory, the American newspaperman is part of a network of capitalist contacts within the country to which he is assigned. He is a war correspondent and intelligence agent in peacetime!

This question of contacts is as decisive for the newspaper business as it is for intelligence work. And it provides an interesting link with the secret history of the world news cartel. For just such contacts were the foundation of the global news monopoly. And the cartel was, from the start, unmistakably at the service of commercial and state interests!

News Since Feudal Days

The telegraph broke that situation wide open. It made the relative isolation of the newspapers impossible; it spelled the doom of the private news systems. It ended feudalism in the information field. But not everyone saw that immediately. Paul Julius Reuter, Prussian government courier with many business clients and topnotch European contacts, understood it at once. He determined to switch to newspapers, offering a telegraphic news service to several papers at once. Germany was no place for a progressive idea in 1851, and Britain was the nation with the most extensive world interests, so Reuter set up shop in London. His idea was a smashing success. Reuters soon was the all-powerful government-backed British Empire news monopoly.

Mr. Cooper, like most big business executives, experiences a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage. In his ode to Liberty there is no suggestion than when all barriers are down the huge financial resources of the American agencies might enable them to dominate the world. His desire to prevent another Goebbels from poisoning the wells will be universally applauded, but democracy does not necessarily mean making the whole world safe for A.P. In this, as in other post-war issues--such as civil aviation--commercial practices are habitually confused with such big words as "liberty and the Rights of Man."

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