remember how I went to the head of the Denver office of the Associated Press, to try to get a hearing for my side—the people's side—and how completely I failed? Needless to say, it is different when a representative of Big Business makes complaint; this gentleman obtains the promise of the Associated Press to send out six hundred and fifty words, and later on Mr. Stone is found writing to his Denver manager:
Personally I am inclined to discourage the carrying of long statements
of a controversial nature, but inasmuch as we carried Mr.
Arbuckle's statement rather fully, my judgment is that we might have
handled a little more of Mr. Hamlin's provided it was prepared as
briefly as our copy here indicates.
Here, you see, we are close to the heart of a grave problem.
Here are enormous sums of "easy money" in sight. If
the managers and district managers and correspondents of
our great press associations all sternly decline to touch this
"easy money," they are all, all honorable men; also, they are
different from most other men in most other branches of
Big Business in America.
Do they all decline? I sincerely hope so. But I recall how Max Eastman, in the "Masses" for July, 1913, made very specific charges against the Associated Press, which thereupon caused Eastman's arrest for criminal libel. The indictment brought by the Grand Jury against Eastman and Art Young quotes a paragraph from the offending editorial, as follows:
I am told that every trust is to be encouraged to live its life
and grow to such proportions that it may and must be taken over
by the working public. But one trust that I find it impossible to
encourage is this Truth Trust, the Associated Press. So long as the
substance of current history continues to be held in cold storage,
adulterated, colored with poisonous intentions, and sold to the highest
bidder to suit his private purposes, there is small hope that even the
free and the intelligent will take the side of justice in the struggle
that is before us.
The indictment goes on to interpret the above:
Meaning and intending thereby that the said corporation intentionally
withheld, suppressed and concealed from its members
information of important items of news and intelligence and intentionally
supplied its members with information that was untruthful,
biased, inaccurate and incomplete, and that the said corporation for
and in consideration of moneys paid to it intentionally supplied to
its members misinformation concerning happenings and events that
constituted the news and intelligence of the day.
