propaganda which they published as reading matter. For one item, supplied to about one hundred different papers, the agent had been paid over five thousand dollars. What the newspapers were paid was not brought out, but the agent testified that he had been paid one dollar a line, while the papers had been paid as high as five dollars a line. Also there was another agency, through which the Mutual Life was sending out what it called "telegraphic readers." The big newspapers had special advertising agents to solicit this kind of paid material, and they had regular printed schedules of rates for publishing it.
In the same way Attorney-General Monnett of Ohio brought out that the Standard Oil Company maintained the "Jennings Advertising Agency" to distribute and pay for propaganda upon this contract:
The publisher agrees to reprint on news or editorial pages of said
newspaper such notices, set in the body type of said paper and bearing
no mark to indicate advertising, as are furnished from time to
time by said Jennings Agency at the rate of per line, and to
furnish such agency extra copies of paper containing such notes at
four cents per copy.
In the same way the Standard Oil Company was shown to
have paid from five hundred to a thousand dollars for the
publication of a single article in Kansas newspapers. The
Standard Oil had a subsidized press of its own—for example,
the "Oil City Derrick"—and it had subsidized "Gunton's Magazine"
to the extent of twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
In the same way it was brought out by Governor Hunt of Arizona, during the recent great copper strike, that the mine-owners had been bribing the local newspapers in Greenlee County for printing "plate-matter" favorable to them. It was shown that the liquor lobby had maintained an enormous "slush" fund for the press. It was shown that the great public utility interests of the Middle West had maintained a publicity bureau to send out material against municipal ownership. It was shown that the high tariff interests had been maintaining a Washington bureau and sending out "news letters," all paid for. It was shown that the railroad companies were doing the same thing; in a single office of their publicity department—that in Chicago—they had forty-three employes, and the manager stated to Ray Stannard Baker that before this bureau began its work, four hundred and twelve columns of matter
