is annihilation; yet Mr. Stone feels virtuous because nobody rebels! Let Mr. Stone pay off his debts for office furniture, and place all the nine-hundred-odd members of the Associated Press on an equality as regards votes, and then let him boast that the bonds have no effect upon elections!
Ten years ago Mr. Kittle made a study of the fifteen directors of the Associated Press. They were all publishers of large newspapers, and from these newspapers could be judged. Just one was a "liberal," Nelson, of the "Kansas City Star"—and he has since died. All the other fourteen were classified as "conservative or ultra-conservative." Said Mr. Kittle:
The other fourteen papers are huge commercial ventures, connected
by advertising and in other ways with banks, trust companies,
railway and city utility companies, department-stores and manufacturing
enterprises. They reflect the system which supports them.
There have been many changes of personality in the Associated
Press in the last ten years, but there has been no change
in this respect; the statement of Mr. Kittle's remains the truth
about the fifteen directors. And likewise there has been no
change in the policy of the organization, as Mr. Kittle
reported it:
The dispatches themselves disclose the attitude of the management.
They give scant courtesy to movements for constructive legislation in
the public interest. The reports, scores of which have been examined,
are meager, fragmentary, isolated. Every time Tom Johnson was
successful in more than fifty injunction suits, the general public in
other states heard little or nothing of it. When an election recently
went against him, everybody heard of the "failure" of municipal
ownership. When La Follette for five years, by a continuous contest,
was placing law after law on the statute-books, the matter was ignored
or briefly reported in distant states; and temporary defeats were given
wide publicity. When Kansas, in 1908, rejected a conservative and
elected a progressive United States Senator, the general public at a
distance from that state did not know the real issue involved. For
more than two years, there has been a strong movement in California
against the rule of that state by special and corrupt interests, but
that fact, merely as news, has never reached the general public in the
East. The prosecution of offenders in San Francisco has only been a
part of the wider movement in California. The strong movement in
New Hampshire, headed by Winston Churchill, to free that state from
the grasp of the Boston and Maine Railway Company and the movement
in New Jersey led by Everett Colby, which resulted in the defeat
of Senator Dryden, the president of the Prudential Insurance Company,
have not been given to the people adequately as matters of news.
