I have before me a letter from C. E. S. Wood, poet and lawyer:
You doubtless know more newspaper men than I do, but I know
a great many—fine fellows personally; themselves writhing in the
detestable position of moral bandits, the disgrace of which they feel
as keenly as any, and yet economic determinism keeps them there.
They are in a trap. They are behind the bars, and as the thief said to
Talleyrand, or some minister of France, "One must live." I know of
no other profession that deliberately trains its neophytes to lying and
dishonor, which makes it a part of the professional obligation to ruin
man or woman by deliberate lies; which never honestly confesses a
mistake, and never has the chivalry to praise an adversary.
And again, William Marion Reedy:
To one who has lived all his life in cities, to one who has spent
most of his days and nights with the men who write the great daily
papers of the cities, it is perfectly evident that ninety out of one
hundred editorial writers on the press today are men who are in
intellectual and sympathetic revolt against present-day conditions.
You will find the average editorial writer a Socialist, and as for the
reporter, he is most likely to be an Anarchist. The reason of this is
plain enough. The men who make the newspapers are behind the
scenes—they see the workings of the wires—they note the demagogy of
politicians, they are familiar with the ramifications by which the public
service corporations control the old parties down to the smallest
offices, and even at times finance reform movements, which always
stop at the election of some respectable figurehead or dummy, but
never proceed to any attack upon the fundamental evils of our social
and economic system. It is my firm belief that were it not for the
capitalists at the head of the great daily newspapers, if it were possible
for the men who write the news and the editorials of all the
newspapers in the United States, to take absolute charge of their publications
and print the news exactly as they see it, and write their
views exactly as they feel them, for a space of three days, there would
be such a revolution in the United States of America as would put
that of France to shame. The only possible reason why this might not
occur is that the editorial writers and reporters actually believe in
nothing—not even in the various remedies, rational or wild-eyed,
which occasionally, in private, they proclaim.
And here is another letter, written by Ralph Bayes, for
many years city editor of the "Los Angeles Record," and now
laid up in a sanitarium with tuberculosis.
I wonder as you gallop gaily along the way, throwing rocks in
gypsy-like abandon at the starched and frilled little children of privilege—I
wonder whether you will give your readers just one glimpse
of the tragedies that are the lives of the men hired by the system to
do the work you condemn. It isn't merely that we journalists must
prostitute our own minds and bodies in answer to the call of that
