"Journal" tabulating the amount of advertising it publishes each week or each month, and boasting that it is greater than the "World" publishes; and maybe you feel proud about that, you like to be in the boat with the best fishermen—even though you are there as a fish.
Anyone who is familiar with the newspaper-world can think of a score of publications to which the above statement would apply. There exists a chain of one-cent evening papers scattered over the country, the Scripps papers, catering to working-class audiences. They were founded by a real radical and friend of the people, E. W. Scripps, and for a decade or two were the main resource of the workers in many localities. Now E. W. Scripps is a sick man, out of the game, and his eldest son, who runs the papers, is a young business man, interested in the business management of a great property; so in one city after another you see the Scripps papers "toned-down." They espouse the cause of strikers no longer. The other day I was staggered to find them dragging out that shop-worn old bugaboo, the nationalization of women in Russia! In the Seattle strike the Scripps paper, the "Star," "scabbed" on the strike, and its editorial attitude won it the name, the "Shooting Star."
Or take the "New York World." This paper was built up by one crusade after another; it was the people's friend for a generation. Today it is a property worth several million dollars, living on its reputation. It still makes, of course, the old pretenses of "democracy," but when it comes to a real issue, it is an organ of bitter and savage reaction, it is edited by the telegraph and railroad securities in which the Pulitzer fortune is invested. The "New York World's" opinion of the "Plumb plan" is that of a Russian grand duke discussing Bolshevism.
Or the Hearst papers. They too have been made out of the pennies of the masses; they too have lured the masses by rainbows of many-colored hopes. They still ask for government ownership—when they happen to think of it; but they lie remorselessly about radicals, and exclude the word Socialism from their columns, except when some Socialist is sent to jail. They support Sinn Fein and twist the lion's tail, because it brings in the Irish-Catholic pennies; but the one revolution in which their heart is really engaged is the one which is to make Hearst's Mexican acres into American acres.
