Part 1 — Chapter I IT’S FREE—FOR MILLIONAIRES!

Brooks Atkinson filed a peevish dispatch to the New York Times from his Moscow post not long ago. Atkinson, ex-dramatic critic, is a highly-civilized, able and honest correspondent whose reports from China and the Soviet Union have shown a certain respect for people as people. His cablegrams are often touched with humor. All the more striking was the humorless dispatch in which he complained:

The Soviet Union goes on coldly repeating Marxian myths about America—that we have no freedom of the press, that our democracy is formal but not real. Only the other day the Moscow Bolshevik was saying:

In the conditions of bourgeois democracy the workers do not have the minimum material requirements for actual use of the rights that are proclaimed. They do not have at their disposal printing presses and paper. Newspapers, clubs, theatres—all are the property of private individuals or groups.

Atkinson sneered: “If these old myths are not deliberately false then they are products of the lack of a basic understanding.”

There is no doubt that the Constitution of the United States formally guarantees to anyone the right to publish a newspaper in our country. The law is just and equal, forbidding unemployed worker and millionaire alike to sleep on park benches, guaranteeing either the freedom to buy or establish the huge enterprise called a newspaper. But where does Mr. Atkinson think a working man can obtain the means to publish and widely circulate a daily newspaper?

The entire labor movement has been unable to maintain a single daily newspaper comparable in physical facilities and size of circulation to the average privately-owned newspaper. Publication of a daily requires a starting sum beyond the present reach of working people. Oswald Garrison Villard, proud of his family’s 125 years in the publishing field, says that “no one would dream of starting a metropolitan newspaper with less than ten or even fifteen millions in the bank.” The newest modern presses alone run into the millions. The physical plant of the New York Daily News, occupied in 1930, was then worth $10,000,000. A few bad years while a paper is getting on its feet may cost millions more.

Ask Marshall Field

Enough capital to start a paper is only the beginning. Marshall Field, who inherited $164,000,000, found that all his millions could buy him only a curiously limited area of press freedom. His Chicago Sun, set up to combat the ultra-reactionary Chicago Tribune, had to fight for its very life—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Field’s conclusion as the result of his own experience is that it is easier to buy an established daily newspaper than to launch a new one.

Do you want to buy a newspaper? There is probably not a daily in America that can be bought for less than $2,000,000! The Philadelphia Inquirer was sold in 1930 for a reported $18,000,000. The New York Times has no price. It boasted a gross annual business of $20,000,000 as much as twenty-five years ago. Since then, the bulk of its constantly mounting profits has been ploughed back into the business year after year until the paper, considered purely as a business, represents a fabulous investment. Naturally, money will not buy it.

Very well, you can’t buy a paper. Try to establish a new one. Field found out what that meant. The local news-gathering service, in Chicago, was barred to him. He had to set up his own reportorial staff on a scale to overcome this handicap. But for national and worldwide news, no such solution was possible. Not even his fortune could finance an adequate global news service.

There are only three such American news agencies, Associated Press, United Press and International News Service. Associated Press is a professedly “cooperative” membership association embracing some 1,300 of America’s 1,744 English-language dailies. United Press, controlled by Roy Howard, is based on his newspaper chain. I.N.S. rests on the Hearst chain. Major newspapers try to have as many of these services as they can get. The Howard-owned papers, for instance, are by no means content with their own U.P. service, but seek also the A.P. “report.” The Hearst papers never operate with I.N.S. alone; almost all have A.P. franchises and several boast that they alone, in their respective areas, have all three services. For a variety of reasons, however, A.P. is the decisive agency. It is rather hopeless to try to compete with a major paper on the basis of U.P. or I.N.S. service.

Field could not get A.P. The by-laws of the “cooperative” permitted the Chicago Tribune to blackball his application for membership. He could not get I.N.S. because it is available only to the Hearst paper in Chicago, the Herald-American. He had no choice but to publish on the basis of United Press service only. That cost him $110,000 in 1942 against an estimated $50,000 he would have paid for the superior A.P. report.

Regimentation

News agency coverage was only the beginning of the problem. Look at your daily newspaper, wherever you live. It is the same paper as the one I read. There is, in effect, only one American newspaper, or let us say three or four papers which are parts of one pattern. Your paper and mine print exactly the same news, the same pictures, the same columnists, the same features ranging from comics through recipes, and often the same canned editorials supplied by the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Moreover, these canned features, together with new mechanical inventions, make for standardized typography and appearance. Even grammatical style, width of column, size of type, must be uniform. The standardization reaches its ridiculous peak in the Hearst papers where “The Chief,” octogenarian William Randolph Hearst, dictates by teletype the manner and form in which his “publishers” must display many important items.

There is no escaping this regimentation. If you want readers, you must meet the competition. Field had to have features, pictures and so on. He struggled to create his own comics and after three years felt he had achieved some readable ones, though by no means as successful as those controlled by the rival press. But news pictures can’t be invented. Without photographs, successful newspaper publication is impossible. Pictures, however, are as tightly controlled as news services. Even the Communist Daily Worker, the outstanding labor daily newspaper in the country, has to buy from the syndicates as they are. Field couldn’t buy any!

Associated Press owns A.P. Wirephotos and the Wideworld newsphoto service. The Tribune barred sale of these pictures to Field. Acme, the Howard-dominated picture service, was likewise denied him through an “exclusive contract” between Acme and the Tribune. Hearst’s International News Photos were not available in Chicago because they went to the Herald-American.

In 1942 Field spent $63,000 on pictures and $425,000 to maintain news bureaus and other items, an outlay due chiefly to the monopoly conditions he faced—which anyone who wants to publish must face. A smaller capitalist would have been licked at that point, but Field had sufficient power to launch anti-trust proceedings against Associated Press as a means of breaking out of the encirclement.

The United States Supreme Court sustained Field. The Tribune-A.P. were forced to let him purchase the A.P. news report. But the court decision has not made a general break in the monopoly structure. If one of the major trade union bodies, for instance, wants to publish a daily newspaper in New York, Chicago, Detroit or Los Angeles, there is nothing to prevent A.P. and all the other services from declining to sell their indispensable goods.

There is no use dreaming about building—on however broad a liberal-labor cooperative plane—an independent apparatus to escape the news, picture and feature service squeeze. It would cost not millions but billions. Though the services have acquired an independent existence and structure, they are basically the American press itself. The newspapers are not only their market but their major source of supply. They provide most of the local news and pictures used by the agencies.

This Is Monopoly

Some idea of the concentration and integration of the American newspaper industry may be obtained by a glance at Associated Press, the typical expression of the industry. A.P. has bureaus in 250 world cities, 94 within the U.S. Seven of these have fifty or more full-time staff members and the whole A.P. domestic payroll covers 7,200 employees, 1,940 on a full-time basis. A.P. also has 2,500 correspondents abroad using a leased transatlantic cable. It has 290,000 miles of leased wires linking 727 American cities. Its daily general news report alone exceeds 1,000,000 words, single metropolitan papers taking from 250,000 to 300,000 words a day. There are endless additional reports. A.P.’s 1942 expenditures totalled $12,986,000. (United Press spent $8,628,000; I.N.S., $9,434,000.) A.P.’s material reserves exceed $100,000,000.

But all this describes only the independent structure of Associated Press. The bulk of the personnel of the American press is also a part of the A.P. apparatus. Member papers—which means most of the country’s newspapers and all the important ones—must make all their news available to A.P. and are expected to withhold it from anyone outside of A.P. Even employees of the papers are similarly bound. Any news they “spontaneously” acquire belongs to A.P. Thus, instead of a mere 5,000 to 10,000 employees, A.P. really has some 100,000 persons working for it every hour of the day and night. It coordinates the whole news-gathering apparatus of the American press. It does this on an exclusive basis. It is not only a monopoly but the expression of the monopolistic organization of the American press.

Pikers Barred

The monopoly structure of the industry plus the size and complexity of newspaper operation from a business point of view, have made it impossible for any but multimillionaires to enter the field. As a logical result, there has been a steady shrinkage of the field—a drop in the number of dailies from 2,600 in 1909 to 1,744 at the beginning of 1945.

This shrinkage has been accompanied by a virtual disappearance of competition in most cities. In 1899, 353 cities were dominated by a single newspaper. In 1920 there were 720 such cities. In 1945 there were 1,103. In many of the remaining cities, the “competing” papers were under a single ownership so that the actual number of cities without competition in 1945 was 1,277. Conversely, there were 549 cities with local competition in 1920 but only 117 in 1945. In percentages it is still worse. Of all cities having newspapers, only 8.4 per cent had competition in 1945.

Even these figures are flattering to the myth of free and competitive enterprise. Veiled joint ownership and “gentlemen’s agreements” plus the spread of the chains and the general standardization process still further reduce the area of competition and restrict the diversity of views. Only the half-dozen largest cities in the United States have dailies with competing views in even the narrowest sense. The 25 largest cities average but three ownerships. Editor and Publisher, organ of the owners, admits the phenomenon and apologizes for it.

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.