sent in. Thus it appears that during one hundred and thirteen days of a great strike the Associated Press considered it necessary to send only two brief items—and these containing not one line about the causes of the strike, not one line about the demands of the miners, not one line about the economic significance of a ferociously bitter labor struggle! I have before me the affidavit of Thomas Cairns, president of the United Mine Workers' West Virginia district, stating that during these sixteen months, which brought West Virginia to a state of civil war, not once did the correspondent of the Associated Press come to him for information about the strike!
And now, in 1919, there is more trouble in this district, and I pick up my morning paper and read that three thousand miners of Cabin Creek have taken up arms and are marching to battle against machine-guns. The strike has been going on for weeks, says the report; but this is the first hint I have heard of it—I who read four Associated Press newspapers, the "Los Angeles Times" and "Examiner," and the "New York Times" and "World"!
The first point to be got clear is that in cases of big strikes the Associated Press is getting its news through its local newspaper member. I have shown that in Los Angeles it is content to co-operate with the unspeakable "Times." In San Diego it works with the "Union," personal organ of John D. Spreckles, the "sugar-king"; and a few years ago, when a murderous mob of bankers, lawyers and merchants was engaged in shooting, clubbing, tarring and feathering, throwing into prison, and there torturing, drugging, and starving the radicals of that city, the "San Diego Union" paid editorial tribute to the fact that the Associated Press was handling this situation to the satisfaction of the murderous mob of bankers, lawyers and merchants. The "San Diego Union," which had done most of the inciting of this mob, stated editorially:
Great credit is due the Associated Press for the manner in which
it has handled the news end of this matter.
In city after city, you will find the Associated Press thus
tied up with the worst reactionary influences. In Louisville,
for example, it co-operates with the "Courier-Journal," whose
serio-comic story I have told in detail. In St. Paul, Minnesota,
we saw the Associated Press misquoting Senator La Follette
in a manner calculated to ruin him. It sought at first to put
