P A G E 14
IS THE PRESS CORRUPT?
But Jefferson did not foresee that the American press
which creates opinion and which rules indirectly would become
almost exclusively a millionaire’s press, or a corporation influen­
ced press, or the medium of big business via its advertising, and
therefore the corrupt press which serves private interests rather
than the public interest. If America is to be bossed by the public
opinion created by its press, if it is to fight and win this war, if it
is to make a great peace, then it should know the power of the
most powerful force which is abroad in the land.
The press which attacked George Washington, which
denounced him as everything from a traitor tc a drunkard, was
not a corrupt press. It was in fact a free press. But the press
which from 1922 (or thereabouts) to the present day attacks
New Deal Franklin D. Roosevelt, the same press which tried
to suppress the old Teapot Dome scandal and the doings of
Harding’s Ohio gang, while sniping at every governmental
action for the general welfare of the American people, is a
corrupt press.
Why has the press become corrupt?
So long as it was possible for an itinerant printer or
any tiny minority possessing a few hundred dollars to set up
shop and issue a newspaper, there was no monopoly of public
opinion. And there was no corrupt press. In Boston, in New York,
in colonial days, and later in Washington, and in every city and
town in the wake of the pioneers marching westward, wandering
printers kept alive the free press and produced the most picture-
esque era in the nation’s journalism. It was still possible toward
the end of the 19th century to get out a newspaper without being
a millionaire, or a company with a soul mortgaged to the banker
in a small town.
But as William Allen White — the man always chosen
to prove the publishers' claim that the press still has integrity —
now confesses, it takes a comparatively large bankroll to start
a paper anywhere — his own Emporia Gazette is worth $70,000,
and if a man with another viewpoint wanted to start an opposi­
tion sheet in Emporia it would involve a much greater sum. In
Chicago or New York it would mean the risk of a million dollars
a year for many years.
Mr. White does not disagree with Frank Munsey, the
great newspaper wrecker whom he saved from oblivion with
the famous phrase: He turned a great profession into an 8%
investment. The fact is now accepted that the newspaper is big
business. Whether it is therefore ipso facto corrupt because big
business is corrupt is still being debated.
BY GEORGE SELDES
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the bom again
North Coast Times Eagle, we offer a critique o f the American
press by George Seldes, who died in 1995 at the age o f 103. He
was one o f the premier journalists o f the 20th century, reporting
on World War 1, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War,
and the rise o f fascism and Nazism. His honesty and independ­
ence got him into trouble but also led him to publish from 1940
to 1950 the first American magazine o f media criticism IN FACT,
which inspired the famous and trenchantly independent I. F.
Stone's Weekly. The following is an excerpt from Seldes' self-
published book, “The Facts Are..."(published during World War
2) which appeared in a collection of his writings just before his
death.
What is the most powerful force in America today?
Answer: Public opinion.
What makes public opinion?
Answer: The main force is the press.
Can you trust the press?
Answer: The baseball scores are always correct (except
for a typographical error now and then). The stock market tables
are correct (within the same limitation). But when it comes to
news which will affect you, your daily life, your job, your relation
to other people, your thinking on economic and social problems,
and, more important today, your going to war and risking your
life for a great ideal, then you cannot trust about 98% (or per­
haps 99%%) of the big newspaper and big magazine press of
America.
But why can’t you trust the press?
Answer: Because it has become big business. The big
city press and the big magazines have become commercialized,
or big business organizations, run with no other motive than
profit for owner or stockholder (although hypocritically still main­
taining the old American tradition of guiding and enlightening the
people). The big press cannot exist a day without advertising.
Advertising means money from big business.
I have written several books on the press and I am
publishing a weekly newsletter devoted largely to criticizing the
big city newspapers (the public opinion-making newspapers) and
exposing their corruption, because I still believe that the press is
the greatest force in the world and can be used for good or evil.
And I believe that the American press by its control of public
opinion can either fool all the people into restoring a world in
which one-third of the nation will again live in economic slavery
without sufficient food, clothing and shelter, or it can, if it wants
to, bring out of this united effort against native as well as foreign
fascism a world approaching the Jeffersonian ideal.
In 1787, Jefferson declared that “the basis of our
government is the opinion of the people.” Given the choice
of “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without
government," he would prefer the latter. Think of it! Jefferson
was willing to let the press itself rule the country instead of
merely creating the public opinion that rules.
GERALD MOSS
AM ERICA’S BEST JOURNALIST
BY TRISTRAM COFFIN
At his death in 1989, I. F. Stone (bom in 1907)was the
elder statesman o f American journalism and the inspirational
model for much o f its alternative press. He played a pivotal
role in developing modem investigative journalism. Without the
example o f his iconoclastic newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly, the
alternative press o f the 1960s, 70s and 80s might never have
been relevant. He is probably the best journalist the United
States has produced. The late Tristram Coffin (1912-1997),
founding editor o f The Washington Spectator, was one o f
Stone's many apprentices.
He was the best reporter I have known, a short, wiry,
blackhaired man with piercing eyes behind thick glasses. Izzie
Stone (his friends always called him “Izzie”) had an absolute
faith in truth, and he pursued it with an almost religious fervor.
If anything could save humanity from its follies, it was truth.
He was restless, innately curious, and had a splendid
scorn of those in power. He did not rely on press releases, public
relations hokum, or structured press conferences for news.
Instead, he dug and dug until he discovered the facts cunningly
hidden away. His sources were the government reports that
most media people in Washington take one look at, note the
number of pages, and put down.
For too many reporters, Washington is a country club
life, picking up news like flowers at a florist’s, already prepared
and fussed up, going to official gatherings and being hailed by
the first name, playing cards in the pressroom, swapping yams
at the National Press Club, and accepting government favors
such as trips on Navy vessels in the balmy Mediterranean. But
not Izzie.
He did not trust the accuracy or slant of government
hokum. He knew the well-paid press agents tried to put the best
face on any situation. So he went behind the scenes. Nothing
mysterious about it. He dug into official but little-read accounts
of congressional investigations or of the General Accounting
Office. And he always kept a file of the best foreign newspapers.
Izzie found out, for example, that Le Monde of Paris had far
more accurate accounts of the fighting in Vietnam than most
of the American media, because the French had been there for
years before we entered the fray.
When other reporters flocked around Joe McCarthy,
begging for a tidbit that would make a front page byline, Izzie
was checking the record. He knew that McCarthy's stories were
mostly sham made up from the senator's alcoholic imagination.
One tactic of the Washington politician is to make
friends of reporters by giving them leaks, and sharing whiskey
or sherry with them. Not Izzie.
Yet he was not an austere or remote individual. Izzie
gained an immense enjoyment from his work, and he was
always ready to help a young reporter on his way. Between the
intense bouts of reporting and writing, he took his wife dancing
and on cruises.
Izzie became a folk hero during the Vietnam War, for he
told the naked, bare truth of that terrible adventure. He did not
buy the optimistic chants of the administration. He knew this was
a war we could not fight without awesome losses.
Izzie was essentially a scholar, one who went to the
roots for the real facts. When he retired from the newsletter,
leaving a vacuum (for none could match his spirit), he resolved
to find the roots of democracy and liberty. He believed he would
find it in the golden age of Greece, so he went back to school,
taught himself to read ancient Greek, and translated official
reports of the time. The result in 1987 was a book, The Trial o f
Socrates, which to the surprise of the publishers became a best
seller. This was because thousands had faith in Izzie Stone.
They knew he would find the truth.
(I. F. Stone wrote: “I tried to bring the instincts of a
scholar to the service of journalism; to take nothing for granted;
to turn journalism into literature; to provide radical analysis
with a conscientious concern for accuracy; and in studying the
current scene to do my very best to preserve human values
and free institutions ”)
(I. F. Stone also wrote," All idols must be overthrown;
all sacred dogmas exposed to criticism; the windows thrown
open; the cobwebs swept away! Every government is run by
liars and nothing they say should believed.")
(And I. F. Stone wrote: “To be a pariah is to be left alone
to see things your own way, as truthfully as you can.Not because
you’re brighter than anyone else— or your own truth so valuable.
But because, like a painter or a writer or an artist, all you have to
contribute is the purification of your own vision, and add that to
the sum total of other visions.To be regarded as nonrespectable,
to be a pariah, to be an outsider, this is really the way to do it.
To sit in your tub and not want anything. As soon as you want
something, they’ve got you ")
- T H E N A T IO N (1989)
There is only one viewpoint which the entire press of the
nation expresses, respects, represents and works for: the view­
point of business, money, wealth and power represented by what
is generally known as the God of Things As They Are, or the
Status Quo. The press has been united almost to a paper in
defending existing conditions and opposing not only some
radical plan for change but even all those mild reforms which
friends of big money and the status quo, the latest of whom is
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, have initiated for the double purpose
of helping the Have-Nots and saving the and preserving the
system of the Haves.
The change that has come over America is this: that
beneath the uproar the press made in our early history, the
motivation was not money, it was not commercial. Today the
the press is motivated almost entirely by the motive of profit
for itself and its backers. This profit motive not only affects the
handling of all the news about labor, “defense" strikes, wage
increases, the whole problem of taxation, a large part of the
legislation of state and nation, but it also affects the news of
world events.
It is my claim that the press, which could be the most
powerful force in making this country over into an industrial
democracy in which poverty would be unknown, wealth equitably
distributed, every person certain of the minimum requirements
of decent living (as well as the four freedoms), has, on the
contrary, become the most powerful force against the general
welfare of the majority of the people.
R iv e r S ea
GALLERY
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