Chapter I: Part I: Portrait of a Monopoly

_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.

_Chapter II_

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.

Newspapers being a Big Business, the views of newspaper owners are the views of Big Business. Thousands of specific instances of unmitigated partisanship have been assembled and documented by George Seldes in his several books and in his weekly newsletter, _In Fact_. Former Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and others have also written books and articles primarily devoted to this theme. One has only to observe the handling of the recent wage crisis by the press. It stacked the cards against labor, playing up the strikes and playing down capital’s bold blackmail drive for higher prices and weaker unions.

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.

_Yet the very idea of government as the chief enemy of press freedom is a fraud on history._ Long before the rise of modern industry, when printing was invented, the feudal ruling classes were indeed opposed to the spread of information among the dark masses. They objected not only to newspapers but even to the printing and distribution of the Bible. Not the content of the printed matter but the general increase of knowledge and understanding was the point at issue. The greater the ignorance of the people, the less danger to their rule.

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.”

_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.