The "Christian Science Monitor" stands alone among American newspapers in that it wrote me not to send it telegrams, because there was no chance of its caring to print what I might have to say!
Or take Cincinnati, where I happen to have friends on the "inside." There is the "Cincinnati Inquirer" and "Post," owned by the estate of McLean, who made thirty million dollars out of street railway and gas franchises, obtained by bribery. This estate also owns the "Washington Post," whose knaveries I shall tell about later on. And there is the "Times-Star," owned by Charles P. Taft, brother of our ex-president. "Charlie" Taft married twenty million dollars, and bought a newspaper, and started out as a valiant reformer, and everybody in Cincinnati thought how lovely that a fine, clean, young millionaire was going in for civic reform. But at the very outset he trod on the toes of Boss Cox, and Boss Cox showed how he could injure the Taft fortune; whereupon "Charlie" made a deal with the boss, and since then his paper has been the leading champion of civic corruption.
In most big cities you find papers owned by big local "trusts," and one or two others belonging to a "trust" of newspapers, a publishing-system like that of Calkins or Capper or Munsey or Scripps or Hearst. For the rule that the big fish swallow the little ones applies in the newspaper world as elsewhere. The publisher of a big newspaper comes upon a chance to buy a small newspaper in a neighboring city, and presently he finds himself with a chain of newspapers. Then he learns of a magazine that is "on the rocks," and it occurs to him that a magazine can help his newspapers, or vice versa. So you find Munsey, a self-confessed stock-gambler, with three magazines and several newspapers; the Hearst machine with a dozen newspapers, also "Hearst's Magazine," the "Cosmopolitan," and four other periodicals. Every month in the Hearst newspapers you read editorials which are disguised advertisements of these magazines.
Also it has been discovered that magazines can combine to their financial advantage. The agents who come to your home and pester the life out of you for subscriptions find that they can get more of your money by offering clubbing-rates for a group of magazines: a farm paper, another paper with "slush for the women," a third paper with slush for the whole family—such as I have quoted from the "American" and
