Part 1 — Chapter III 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

Even before the War of Independence, the American press lived on subsidies. Our holier-than-thou “free” publishers love to point scornfully at the subsidies paid their “un-free” European rivals. These they call “bribes” to spread national propaganda. The American publisher can see the mote in his brother’s eye but not the beam in his own. For political parties, the government and private interests have at various times subsidized our papers—and still do. There is no secret about it. Any competent study of the business—The Daily Newspaper in America, by A. M. Lee, for instance—has the detailed story.

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 (by weight) 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 $25,000,000 to $10,000,000 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.

The recently published Report From the Commission on Freedom of the Press further reveals how government directly intervenes by creating communications. During World War II the armed services tripled telecommunications mileage and fabulously multiplied capacity. Against a pre-war private cable-wireless capacity of 12,500,000 words a day, “the service networks have done as much as 50,000,000 words per day.” The new State-created communications include marvelous technological advances such as multiple-address newscasting, simultaneous broadcasting of several messages through the same microphone, and facsimile newscasting.

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?

Still more deeply hidden is a curious twist in the character of news itself. What is news? A well-worn “gag” accurately describes the publishing industry’s concept. “If a man bites a dog, that’s news.” There is nothing unexpected, nothing unusual, nothing sensational about a dog biting a man; hence, that isn’t news. In short, an accurate picture of what is happening is not news. News is a name for unrelated, torn-from-context events or incidents of a sensational character.

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 (with the consequent development of the “headline mentality” decried by the late President Roosevelt), 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 (whatever further reactionary ends they may serve).

The preoccupation with selling papers against fierce competition leads to the American practice of an edition every thirty seconds. This mania for speed, plus the man-bites-dog news formula, works to corrupt and discourage the men who handle news. At length, even the boasted accuracy of the press about elementary facts becomes a myth and a fraud. “The reliability of news accounts is far below what it was years ago ... the reporter is trained to look for the bizarre as all-important ...” writes Oswald Garrison Villard in The Disappearing Daily. Anyone who has ever figured in a news story knows that the printed “facts” have little to do with reality!

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.”

A second’s thought is enough to reveal that there is nothing “moral” about the concept at all. The successful agency formula does not require “truth.” It requires only the transmission of views or “facts” acceptable and useful to all capitalist newspaper owners. It does not eliminate bias. It merely eliminates differences between individual publishers and reduces reporting to the common bias of owners as a group. This formula for standardized treatment of events and opinions is completely devoid of moral content. It has melted all varieties of information, all events and interrelations, down to one kind of easily sold and exchanged piece of goods: the commodity, news.

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.

Oddly enough, labor journalism had to solve the same problem that led the capitalist agencies to their news formula. The American Federation of Labor established Federated Press in 1919 to serve the labor press, chiefly weekly and monthly membership journals. The labor movement was and is rent by factions; jurisdictional feuds are topped by the present division of labor into the A. F. of L. and C.I.O. camps. Yet Federated Press has always been able to supply news acceptable to warring factions and rival unions. The agency never pretended, however, that it was non-partisan in a larger sense. F.P. Chief Carl Haessler said:

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 $18,000 in 1936. The three employer-minded agencies spent $31,048,000 in a similar 12-month period (1942)!

Linked to sensationalism, the commodity form of news destroyed the old profession of journalism and replaced it with pure business. The individual honest reporter or correspondent, however pure his intent, is sunk from the start. The form of news he is taught to seek and permitted to send is hostile to the nature of truth. Not only the reporter, but the newspaper owner himself is alienated from the process of gathering reliable information and printing it. He is a merchant bound up with the problems of purchase and sale of goods, circulation, advertising and the like.

The Report on Freedom of the Press takes for granted the merchandising realities. It speaks constantly of “marketable words and images” rather than “news.” No wonder! The contents of newspapers are standard goods manufactured in distant news agencies, syndicates, canned-editorial factories. Development of 4-color facsimile processes by 800-word-per-minute wireless transmission, plus air-express of films, mats and plates, accentuates a trend. Simultaneous publication on five continents of a whole magazine, forty-eight hours after the material is written in a central editorial office anywhere, is now possible. But newspapers are already, in effect, edited at the central headquarters of banking and industry. And thus the boasted “free press” of America has become a simon-pure example of Big Business, absolute, brutal monopoly.

The Fascist “Fringe”

The increasingly monopolistic character of the press has made its control by Big Business an automatic process. But it has had still another result: to put the press under the influence of the most reactionary, least responsible wing of Big Business. The direct agency of this influence is the more openly pro-fascist section of the press. Unfortunately, progressives cling to the illusion that this section of the press is a sort of fanatical “fringe,” ill-regarded in the trade. That is an illusion, a dangerous one. This so-called “fringe” section comprises the chains owned by Hearst, Roy Howard and Patterson-McCormick. Their combined direct circulation, according to the Editor and Publisher Yearbook for 1944, was 9,649,108 daily and 13,578,687 Sunday, roughly a quarter of all newspaper circulation. Moreover, the readers of newspapers subscribing to the Hearst International News Service, which carries the Hearst political line in full, should be added to the direct circulation figures. A tabulation from the 1944 Yearbook shows I.N.S. was sold to 290 daily and 104 Sunday papers in 220 cities and towns of 38 states. Total circulation of I.N.S.-subscribing papers was 15,827,856. This figure, plus the circulation of the papers in the three chains (after eliminating duplications) gives 22,043,146 as the actual audience of the three chainsters—half the national circulation!

It is only the beginning. They also own all the important feature syndicates and the two private news agencies, U.P. and I.N.S. They control most of the columnists, more powerful than the editorial pages. (Westbrook Pegler alone is said to have 10,000,000 circulation.) Their competition and methods exert a direct influence on rival papers and on Associated Press, aside from their many memberships in A.P. (one for each member paper). Their papers dominate circulation in such key areas as New York, Chicago and Washington.

But there is still more. Decisive is this fact: they form, in effect, a single political bloc. The power of the bloc begins with its material foundation, as described above. Here the new factor enters. The three chains are not just important units in the highly profitable merchandising enterprise called the newspaper industry. They are active and conscious political forces. They have a program. They utilize their papers and personnel for active organization of reactionary movements and drives. They are not only available to such characters as Representative Rankin and Senator Bilbo; they not only feature the hate-speeches of such men: they write the speeches and inspire their delivery. They instigate fascist activities. Goering and Rosenberg did not have to seek Hearst out and bribe him to print their Nazi ravings under their own by-lines: he sought them out!

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.