- grams to Dr. James P. Warbasse and Mrs. Jessica Finch Cosgrave.
It was a crime when the newspapers of New York bribed a court-clerk to give them the testimony in my divorce case. Any lawyer will tell you that these things are crimes, yet they are a recognized part of the practice of American Journalism, and follow logically and inevitably from the competitive sale of news.
Nietzsche says of the soul of man that it "hungers after knowledge as the lion for his food." Just so the yellow journals hunger after news, and just so their proprietors hunger after profits. When profits are at stake, they stop at nothing. I have quoted Hearst's telegram to Frederick Remington: "You make the pictures and I'll make the war." I have told of Hearst's ruffian conduct towards myself in the case of Adelaide Branch. Do you think that a man who would commit such acts would stop at anything? When Hearst ventured to run for governor of New York State, his enemies brought out against him a mass of evidence, showing that he had deliberately organized his newspapers so that the corporations which published them owned no property, and children who had been run down and crippled for life by Mr. Hearst's delivery-wagons could collect no damages from him.
Mr. Hearst poses as a friend of labor, but he keeps his newspapers on a non-union basis, and when his employes go on strike, he treats them as other corporations treat their strikers. And all newspaper corporations do the same. I could name not one, but several cities in which newspapers have hired thugs to break the strikes of newsboys; or where they have hired strikes against their rivals. During the Colorado coal-strike the "Denver Express" was publishing the truth about the strike, and the other newspapers organized a boycott of the dealers who handled the "Express." When the "Express" hired its own newsboys, mysterious gangs of rowdies appeared, and beat up these newsboys and scattered their papers in the streets. And no interference from the police, no line about these riots in any Denver newspaper—except the "Express," which could not get distributed!
Wherever you dig in the cellars of these great predatory institutions, you find buried skeletons. I have dragged some of them into the light of day; I would drag others—but the test here is not what I know to be true, but what I can prove in a court of law. And it is so easy for a great newspaper to
