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THE MONOPOLY PRESS

VITALY PETRUSENKO

__TITLE__ THE MONOPOLY PRESS
or how American Journalism
found itself in the vicious circle
of the "crisis of credibility"

OKI

NS^V Published by

THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF JOURNALISTS

CONTENTS

By Way of an Introduction 7

1. Responsibility to God 9

2. All Is Not Cold That Glitters 15

3. The Fourth Power 27

4. The Finest Brainwashing System 41

5. Moneymaking Machines 48

6. «Loca) Monopolies- 56

7. The «Free Press» in The Chains of «Chains»

8. A Machine To Disconnect from Uncomfortable Realities 75

9. «The Medium Is The Massage» 95

10. The «Crisis of Credibility•> and Its Roots 104

11. Muckrakers and Ghosts - At Work 115

64

By Way of a Conclusion References 136

135

International Organization of Journalists, 1976

BY WAY OF AN INTRODUCTION

IT WAS, I THINK, UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who said that an American could live on bread and newspapers alone; he could spare everything else. That was a ninteenth-century joke, but even in today's electronic age, when it is estimated that the average American spends a total of 3,000 days, nine years of his or her life, looking at a TV screen, the demand for newspapers and magazines shows no signs of subsiding and circulations are continuing to climb.

An average American newspaper has 53 pages on a weekday and 178 on Sundays; a metropolitan Sunday paper may have as many as 400, an equivalent of 16 books of 300 pages each. In the Los Angeles area some Sundays garbage collectors pick up 2,500 tons of used newsprint. Yet with more pages than ever, the amount of information offered is less than half of what it used to be: newspaper space is increasingly devoted to advertising---their main source of revenue.

This book is an attempt to give the reader an idea of some aspects of the big, monopolised press in the United States. As any examination of the newspaper and magazine business would be incomplete without showing its relations with television, its competitor and partner, one chapter has been devoted to that aspect of mass media in the United States. Also, I felt a brief historical background of the subject would help gain a better insight into contemporary trends; finally, I have taken advantage of some personal impressions gained in the course of six years of journalistic duty in the United States.

RESPONSIBILITY TO GOD

1

T<

WARDS THE END OF 1942, WHEN THE BATTLES OF

World War II were raging in full swing in far-away Europe, two distinguished gentlemen met in a New York restaurant. Sipping bourbon on the rocks from tall glasses, they first reminisced about the time spent together at Yale, one of America's Ivy League universities. Both had made successful careers in the twenty years since then, though in different fields. Robert M. Hutchins had become Chancellor of the University of Chicago, patronised by the Rockefeller family. Henry Robinson Luce headed the vast magazine em'pire of Time Incorporated he had built up. It was Luce who had suggested the meeting, which quickly turned to business.

Luce asked Hutchins to undertake a serious, scholarly inquiry into "freedom of the press" in America. Bolstered with a promise of a check for $ 200,000, the suggestion was a tempting one for the Chicagoan, with his liberal reputation and conviction that even "the freest of countries" could improve its ``democracy'' from time to time. But he also had some misgivings.

Firstly, there was the timing: why such an offer at the height of the bloodiest war in human history?

Secondly, it seemed strange for such a conservative and fervently religious man as Hutchins knew Luce to be to approach a liberal.

However, the check, coupled with a promise of "complete freedom", overrode Hutchins's doubts, and by the beginning of 1944 he had got together a commission aglitter with such brilliant names as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, sociologist Harold D. Lasswell, philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, economist John M. Clark, lawyers Zechariah Chafee Jr. and John Dickinson, anthropologist Robert Redfield, and others. A hand-picked staff sifted through materials, prepared reports and interviewed media and cultural personalities about their ideas and opinions of American newspapers, magazines, radio, motion pictures and books (all of which were included in the

RESPONSIBILITY TO GOD 10

word ``press''). Every now and then the commission met in full session for two or three days to discuss its findings or hear testimony from leading representatives of the mass media.

The commission's work progressed against a background of major domestic and foreign events. At home the United States was embroiled in the presidential election campaign that culminated in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fourth term. In Europe the Nazi Reich was staggering under the blows of the Soviet Army and, after endless procrastination and delays, Anglo-American troops had finally landed on the beaches of Normandy and were slowly but surely advancing towards the western frontiers of Germany.

``Free Press" champion, Henry Luce, had no intention of being a passive onlooker of events. They, he felt, should be influenced by his propaganda effects. These included: TIME, with a domestic weekly circulation of 1,160,000, special Armed Forces editions for Asia and Europe, and editions for Canada, Mexico and South America, Sweden, Australia, Iraq, Egypt and India; LIFE, with a weekly circulation of 4,000,000 in the US and 317,000 abroad; FORTUNE, the magazine for businessmen, with a monthly circulation of 170,000; the RADIO MARCH OF TIME, with an estimated weekly audience of 18,000,000 Americans; the TIME VIEWS THE NEWS programme heard daily by a multimillion audience; the CINEMA MARCH OF TIME appearing once a month in 10,000 American and foreign theatres. Together with other, smaller Luce press publications they could reach out to at least a third of the total literate adult population of the country.

But having built up such a formidable empire for moulding public opinion, Luce had no intention of resting on his laurels. He wanted to continue to expand the propaganda machine that so smoothly carried out all his wishes, wishes based on his credo once formulated by him as "My own opinion is the majority." However, to forestall serious criticism of his dictatorial powers, Luce went out to neutralize it by suggesting for research such a jofty, dear to the heart of every respectable American, ``democratic'' topic as " freedom of the press." And by not stinting money on it, Luce v/as so to say placing the biggest and most expensive candle in the most conspicuous place at the altar. The very least he could expect was for the commission to show why it was so important for such 100-per cent Americans as he to have full freedom in the propaganda domain.

Profit and piousness blended easily in Luce's views on "press freedom." Circulations in the millions yielded fabulous profits, while

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RESPONSIBILITY TO GOD

enabling Luce to preach the brand of ``Christianity'' whose prophet he deemed himself to be.

Henry Robinson Luce was born in the family of a Protestant missionary who had spent many years in China. He was reared in the conviction that God had participated directly in America's founding and marked the American people as his chosen nation to finally lead to the regeneration of the world. Many years later, ascending every morning the thirty-six floors to his penthouse office of publisher and chief editor of Time Inc., Luce prayed silently in the solitary confinement of the elevator. The ritual was repeated as he travelled down at the day's end, and was concluded with a bedside prayer at night. Luce saw himself, and would have others see him, as God's chosen one in America, and America as God's chosen land ordered to spread ``freedom'' and ``prosperity'' around the world. For he fully believed, as one biographer has written, that "God had founded America as a global beacon of freedom . . -^^1^^'^^1^^)

That mystical brew used along with other demagogic smokescreens to justify American imperialism's nineteenth-century and subsequent forays into the Hawaian Islands, the Philippines, Cuba, Latin America and Asia, was the ferment on which Luce's ideas of "press freedom" rose. Christ's new-found apostle wanted, firstly, that the press recognise its responsibility to God and, secondly, that it be seen as an institution responsible only to God. One can readily imagine the advantages accruing to Luce and his fellowpress barons from being subordinate only to God and responsible only to God. And as he made no secret of his philosophy, he naturajly expected it to be reflected in the findings of Hutchins's commission.

In the summer of 1944, when the commission had already progressed substantially in its evaluation of the meaning of "press freedom", Luce's propaganda machine was gearing up for an anti-Roosevelt crusade. The President's policy, based on an understanding of the need to strengthen the anti-fascist coalition and collaborate closely with the Soviet Union, made the owner of Time Inc. very angry. All stops were pulled in an effort to discredit him. Countless magazine pictures of Roosevelt showed him looking old and feeble, plugging the idea of his inability to head the administration. Luce reporters wrote or hinted that Eleanor Roosevelt was "tainted with Communist subversion", which had perhaps rubbed off on FDR. And Luce's wife, Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce (later U. S. ambassador to Italy), campaigning for a second term, toured the country accusing Roosevelt of "lying us into the war.''

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But all that paled before Luce's hopes of steering events along a course entirely different than the one shaping up in 1944 and which was in keeping with the interests and aspirations of all peaceloving peoples. The basic positions were set forth in a long LIFE editorial article. It appeared under the byline of William C. Bullitt, one-time U. S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, writing from Rome as LIFE'S special correspondent. Why Bullitt? Fiercely anti-Soviet, Bullitt had had his eye on an important State Department position. In his efforts to win it he had launched a vile, personal intrigue against a senior State Department official, for which he was dumped from the diolomatic service by Roosevelt. Luce, enamoured by Bullitt's openly voiced regret at the imminent collapse of the Hitler Reich, picked him up.

Bullitt's article from the recently liberated Italian capital appeared under the title "The World From Rome.''^^2^^) What did it look like from there? "It is an old picture ... a picture of western Europe and Western civilization threatened by hordes of invaders from the East..." The apocalyptic vision was enhanced by Bullitt's suggestion that much of what he said had been gleaned from an interview with Pope Pius XII.

Thus, the Soviet soldiers liberating Europe from the brown plague were "hordes from the East." What else? They were all there - Bullitt's (and the Pope's and Luce's) most intimate hopes and fears: "A sad joke going the rounds in Rome gives the spirit of (the Roman's) hope: What is an optimist? A man who believes the third world war will begin in about 15 years between the Soviet Union and Western Europe backed by Great Britain and the U. S. What is a pessimist? A man who believes that Western Europe, Great Britain and the U. S. will not dare to fight.''

Humanity, craving for peace, was eagerly looking forward to the defeat of fascism, people were giving their lives for it, while the three ``optimists'' were already dreaming of a third world war. They had either picked up their "sad joke" in the garbage of Geobbels' propaganda, still hoping against hope to talk "western civilization" into turning against the "hordes from the East", or invented it themselves.

One should see this as an accompaniment, played by Luce's orchestra, to the work of Hutchins's commission. It offered a fine example of the uses to which Luce put his God-granted "freedom of the press.''

The orchestra was, however, sharply out of tune with the mood of the country, where 81 per cent of those questioned in an opinion

poll saw Americans and Russians settling their problems at the peace table. Ultra-reactionaries like Luce and Bullitt had other ideas. To them the chasm between the socialist and capitalist worlds was unbridgeable, therefore the West should either join hands with battered Nazi Germany and turn on the Soviet Union at once or "keep her at bay forever.''

Peeved by the prevailing mood, Luce geared his whole ``free'', and through him God-inspired, news and propaganda machine to reverse U. S. public opinion, weaken the anti-Hitler coalition and strengthen the hand of rabid anti-Communist reaction in the countries of "western civilization." He was thus laying the foundations of the Cold War ideology that was officially blessed two years later in the Fulton speech of his friend Winston Churchill, a regular contributor of articles and books for Time Inc., which had made the British Prime Minister an American millionaire.

By the late summer of 1944 the contours of the Hutchins commission's report began to take shape. Sitting in 17 full sessions, the commission had heard the testimony of 58 leading personalities of the newspaper---magazine-radio-motion picture world. Its staff had heard the views of another 225 persons and prepared and submitted 176 documents and analyses. Virtually every one of those who had volunteered to testify before the commission firmly believed that the U. S. press had always been free, was free, and would continue to be free throughout the foreseeable future. Fortified by such expert opinion, the scholarly commission members proceeded to compile their report. The eulogies to "press freedom" were praised by Luce, who nevertheless rejected the first draft as unresponsive to his main idea of responsibility of the press to God, and only to Him. Perhaps it was the absence of genuine theologists on the commission. Or perhaps the members shied from the idea of a God-- inspired press.

Luce also objected to the report's criticism, however muted, of press monopoly. And he was enraged by a proposal to "strengthen press freedom" through the creation of an independent agency to report annually on the press's performance. It would be privately endowed and given a ten-year trial to test its usefulness. The very thought of someone dictating to him threw Luce into a rage. Only God and he had the right to conduct the propaganda orchestra of Time Inc.. and to remove all doubts on that score he broke with the Hutchins commission.

Left without its prime benefactor, the commission, which by then had spent all of the $ 200,000 put up by Luce, lacked the money

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ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS

to complete its findings. No newspaper or magazine publisher, no film magnate or radio owner cared to do something that might offend Henry Luce. Time passed, the draft report gathered dust, and who knows if it would have ever seen the light of day had not William Benton, another Yale university pal of Hutchins', who by then owned the Encyclopedia Britannica, supplied the final $ 15,000.

Thanks to this, early in 1947 there appeared a booklet of 140 pages under the title "A Free and Responsible Press", with the subtitle, "A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines and Books." Listed as author was the Commission on Freedom of the Press, and as publisher, the University of Chicago Press.

Why, the reader may ask, has the author dwelt in such detail on this story? There are several reasons.

For all the tragicomic nuances in the epic that began at the close of 1942 over bourbon on the rocks in the New York restaurant, it developed into a very serious political and ideological event. For the protagonists were serious men. Some had ambitions of joining the cohort of ideologues of the ruling elite (Arthur Schlesinger, for example, subsequently became one of President Kennedy's closest advisers, Hutchins himself became president of the powerful Ford Foundation), others already felt themselves in that inner sanctum (Lasswell was the father of a doctrine of the mass media as an instrument of social governing, Niebuhr was author of a number of influential philosophical essays on foreign policy etc.). Having received the opportunity to research the "freedom of the press" and to perfect the concept, they refused to be guided by the theological philosophies of Luce and laid emphasis on what they saw as essential for the good of capitalist journalism. In other words, instead of fulfilling the social order of one press trust they made a social gift to all owners of the bourgeois press, to the ruling elite as a whole. That is why, in the flood of literature on "press freedom" that innundates America, Hutchins's report has been ranked highest by the pillars of American democracy and to this day remains a handbook of editors, publishers and professors of journalisrru It has been reprinted in Congressional publications. Like countless other books on the same subject, it has the task of preserving and passing on to future generations what is known in the United States as "the golden legend of a free and fearless press.''

2

IANY NEW WORLD LEGENDS TRACE BACK TO THE

1776-1783 War of Independence of the North American colonies against the British crown. And the "golden legend", too. has its roots in the events the Bicentennial of which are being lavishly celebrated throughout the U. S. in 1975 and 1976.

Although Henry Luce is no longer alive, his empire---greatly expanded since the Second World War, and America's most successful publishing concern - is doing its utmost to use the Bicentennial celebrations to drive home the notion that the United States is indeed God's own country. A resplendent imposing exhibition devoted to Luce and his empire at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington was conceived also as a hymn to "freedom of the press." it had many fine words to say about the Founding Fathers of America and their wisdom, which bestowed that great gift on posterity.

The Bicentennial observances have, understandably, stimulated heightened interest in the nation's early history. Democratic forces are not indifferent to the democratic traditions of the American revolution, nor are they indifferent to their fate. As for the legends--- well, there is no history without legends, just as there can be no genuine history based solely on legends.

My own journalistic assignments in the United States provided me with the opportunity to familiarise myself with some historical sources and materials relating to the early period of the American press. I read a lot in the Jefferson Hall of the Library of Congress. I also attended hearings of Senate and House committees on various problems of the mass, and monopolized, media. At them lawyers for the press reverently spoke the names of the Founding Fathers and quoted from memory 18th century orations---all invariably favouring the present generation of press owners, but taken out of context and cut short whenever the Founding Fathers expressed less flattering sentiments. At those hearings, references were often

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ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS

made to the Hutchins commission report, with its compact and succinct arguments in favour of the financial, legal and ideological interests of the big press barons.

Hutchins's report proclaims: "The owners and managers of the press determine which persons, which facts, which versions of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public ...''

``The moral and legal right of those who manage it to utter their opinions must remain intact;.this right stands for the valid kernel of individualism at the heart of all social life.''^^1^^) These sentiments, set forth on pages 16 and 17 of the initial Chicago edition of the report, are reproduced on pages 1110 and 1111 of Part 3 of the 1967 Senate hearings on "The Failing Newspaper Act" (it reproduces Hutchins's report in full).

To prove the claim - especially the moral claim - of the owners of the mass propaganda media to act as they will, Hutchins and his colleagues touch such a sensitive chord in Americans as their respect for precedent and tradition. And these, as interpreted by the commission were: "The press of those days (the end of the 18th century) consisted of hand-printed sheets issuing from little printing shops, regularly as newspapers, or irregularly as broadsides, pamphlets, or books. Presses were cheap; the journeyman printer could become a publisher and editor by borrowing the few dollars he needed to set up his shop and by hiring an assistant or two. With a limited number of people who could read, and with property qualifications for suffrage---less than 6 per cent of the adult population voted for the conventions held to ratify the Constitution--- there was no great discrepancy between the number of those who could read and were active citizens and those who could command the financial resources to engage in publication.''^^2^^) In fact, the report says a few lines lower, "the man whose opinions were not represented (in the press) could start a publication of his own.''

At the time of the Declaration of Independence in .1776, the 13 North American States had a population of around three million; it follows therefore from the above theory that 180,000 people could have had newspapers of their own. Theoretically, perhaps, but reality was quite another thing again.

In 1776, the North American States had 35 newspapers that appeared weekly in an aggregate circulation of 21,000. Contrary to the "golden legend", they did not become free on the Fourth of July, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, nor in 1781, when the first Constitution---the Articles of the Confederation---was ratified by the states, nor in 1787, when the Con-

stitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia under the chairmanship of George Washington from May to September to draw up the Constitution. James Madison is credited with being the ``father'' of the Constitution, or at least its principal author. When the draft reached Thomas Jefferson, then American ambassador in Paris, the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote several letters to Madison expressing, among other things, surprise at the omission of a bill of rights providing explicitly for freedom of religion and freedom of the press. The ``father'' of the Constitution did not respond. Neither did he support Convention delegates Pinckney and Gerry who, on September 14, 1787, three days before the end of the session, moved to insert a declaration in the Constitution "that the liberty of the press should be inviolably observed." The proposal was rejected by a majority of votes.

One could accept the majority opinion that the issue did not fall within the scope of the Constitutional Convention. But one could also imagine other motivations.

Some, if not most, of those attending the Constitutional Convention felt that democracy had to be kept in check. Declared William Livingston: "The people have ever been and ever will be unfit to retain the exercise of power in their own hands." Echoing him, Edmund Randolph said at the Convention that the evils from which the country suffered---the year before, the people had risen under Shays in Massachussetts---originated in "the turbulence and follies of democracy", and that the great danger lay in "the democratic parts of our constitutions." Hamilton demanded a permanent governmental body to "check the imprudence of democracy." And George Washington, summing up, urged the delegates of the Convention not to produce a document simply in order to "please the people.''^^3^^)

Thus, in their haste to consolidate those gains of the Revolution that benefitted the bourgeoisie, the republican system, and the inviolability of private property, the authors of the Constitution saw no cause for including elementary bourgeois-democratic freedoms in it.

For all that, the struggle for freedom of the press in America dates back to the end of the 17th century. The first American newspaper, PUBLICK OCCURRENCES, appeared in 1690 in Boston; it was suppressed by the governor of Massachussets after the first issue. One of the first regular newspapers, John Peter Zenger's NEW-YORK WEEKLY JOURNAL, was in the 1730s the target of fierce judicial persecution by the colonial authorities. Together with

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other press organs, it was accused of ``incitement'' to disobedience and subverting the authority of the British crown.

Some colonial newspapers found inspiration in the enlightenment ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke and even reprinted anti-- monarchy essays by such radical English liberals as Trenchard and Gordon. In the 18th century, the demands for press freedom were directed mainly against British colonial rule. They were confluent with the political thinking of the American bourgeoisie and planters smarting under colonial dependence, who encouraged philosophers, pamphleteers, journalists and newspapermen to justify the need for independence. The sharp tongues of the preachers of independence and the lofty ideals of freedom were expected to, and did, make British rule more intolerable than ever in the eyes of the people and lead them to the conclusion that an armed struggle to throw it off was inevitable.

But at the same time, as Bernard Bailyn notes, "the American writers (of the early and mid-18th century) were profoundly reasonable people. Their pamphlets convey scorn, anger, and indignation; but rarely blind hate, rarely panic fear. . . For the primary goal of the American Revolution . . . , was not the overthrow or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty.''^^4^^) And, in the circumstances, that primary goal could be achieved only by breaking away from Britain and promoting bourgeois relations, which, as U. S. historian D. Boorstin writes, reaffirmed the values of the British constitutional system.^^5^^)

Writing on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the American Revolution, historian V. Parrington declared that it remained in many respects a riddle for historians. Thus, he pointed out, only a minority of the population in the colonies responded" to the call to arms.

Nor is everything clear concerning the much-vaunted contributions of the press to the revolutionary cause. In a letter to Jefferson in 1815, John Adams wrote: "What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.''^^6^^)

Various sources indicate that for some time before independence was proclaimed in 1776, by and large, the press could not but prepare the public for the War of Independence, "the first successful colonial revolution in history", as U. S. Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker describes it.^^7^^) Yet it should be borne in mind that the ideological leaders of the American Revolution feared above all that

the war against the external enemy might develop into a social revolution. There was always the danger, writes one of Washington's biographers, J. Flexner, that the rebellion would involve the lower classes and turn equally against American as well as British proprietors.^^8^^)

Hence, to say the least, the low-keyed attitude of many newspaper owners to the War of Independence. Newspapers were printed in towns, and as most of them were in British hands they were, perhaps cautiously, pro-British. There were fewer papers in the areas controlled by Washington's armies, many took a wait-and-see attitude, and news about the fighting in the field was meagre, though they did not forget on occasion to stress the importance of "freedom of the press." The difficulties the colonists faced in the war against the British and their well-armed mercenaries are well-known. And yet, John Adams complained, the courage, feats and patriotism of the American army were seldom "properly described and published" in American newspapers.^^9^^) As for coverage of the first steps in government building and developing the republican system while the war was still on, let us see the evaluation of the press performance by none other than George Washington. "It is to be lamented," he declared, "that the Editors of the different Gazettes in the Union, do not more generally, and more correctly (instead of stuffing their papers with scurrility and nonsensical declamation, . . .) publish the debates in Congress on all great national questions.''^^10^^)

One way or another, the Founding Fathers attending the Constitutional Convention did not deem it necessary to specifically mention the press. Soon, however, movements for amendments to the Constitution began in all the states of the Union. They were strengthened by the French Revolution of 1789. As a consequence, in December 1791, the first ten Amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, went into effect. The First Amendment contains, in particular, a few words to the effect that Congress may not pass laws restricting "freedom of the press.''

Legal experts, sociologists and ideologues never fail to cite the First Amendment when they represent the American bourgeois press as independent, unselfish and concerned solely with the public interest. The Founding Fathers, however, failed to bolster that, or any other of the ``freedoms'' recorded in the Bill of Rights, with specific guarantees. This alone, note Professors Charles R. Adrian and Charles Press, make the proclaimed freedoms "vague absolutes.''^^11^^)

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that interpretations of "press freedom" differ widely in the works of the theoreticians and practi-

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tioners of U. S. journalism. They take the "vague absolutes" and fill them, like a vessel, with the contents of their choice. In much of this they follow the lead of the Founding Fathers who had undertaken to mould that vessel.

Here, for example, is what Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, founder of the Federalist Party and close associate of George Washington, wrote: "What signifies a declaration, that the liberty of the press shall be inviolably preserved? What is the liberty of the press? Who can give it any definition which would not leave the utmost latitude for evasion? I hold it to be impracticable; and from this I infer, that its security, whatever fine declarations may be inserted in any constitution respecting it, must altogether depend on public opinion, and on the general spirit of the people and of the government.''^^12^^)

Well said, isn't it? Spirit of the people, spirit of the government, public opinion . . . What better ``guarantees'' of "the liberty of the press''?

George Washington felt that it depended on newspapers whether public opinion would be enlightened or otherwise. "For myself," he wrote, "I entertain a high idea of the utility of periodical publications, insomuch that I could heartily desire, copies of... Magazines as well as common Gazettes, might be spread through every city, town and village in America. I consider such easy vehicles of knowledge, more happily calculated than any other, to preserve liberty, stimulate the industry and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free People."")

But what was occasion for filling the ``vessel'' with such weighty contents? It was an occasion of regret for the bleak prospects of AMERICAN MUSEUM, a magazine Washington thought highly of. This letter was an effort to console its editor Matthew Carey, while voicing his confidence in the importance of the printed word. One is reminded in this connection of Hutchins's report and its assertion that, in Washington's time, a few dollars were sufficient to launch a periodical. As for Washington, in one respect he was right: the press has done much to "stimulate the industry"; alas, it has hardly distinguished itself in respect of "meliorating the morals of an enlightened and free People.''

Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State, Vice President and, finally, third President of the United States, went even further in emphasizing the unique role of the press. "Were it left to me," he wrote in a letter to Edward Carrington, "to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a govern-

ment, l^should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.''^^14^^) "Our liberty," he wrote on another occasion, "depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.''^^15^^)

Washington's successor as President, John Adams, was no less enthusiastic. "There is not in any nation of the world," he declared, "so unlimited a freedom of the press as is now established in every State of America . . . "^^16^^)

Despite his passivity at the Philadelphia convention, James Madison, ``father'' of the Constitution and fourth President of the Republic, is also lauded as a staunch defender of "press freedom." It is recalled, for example, that he opposed the "newspaper tax" meant to pay for delivery by post-riders, etc.

Let us take a closer look at the press of those years, so lavishly acclaimed by the Founding Fathers - sometimes rhetorically, sometimes sincerely, sometimes with an eye on political payoff.

There was the patriotic, republican press, but there was also the press that pined for the British and dreamed of setting up a monarchy in America. From the outset advertisement occupied an important place in the American press to supplement sales revenues. The commercialisation of the press was facilitated by the development of industry and trade as well as by the growth of plantation farms. Mutually rendered services helped to bring the interests of newspaper proprietors and the bourgeois class closer. There was less and less need for writings like Thomas Paine's invectives against the monarchy. Private property considerations tended to push national concerns in the press to the background. Jefferson commented on the "mass of anti-civism which remains in our great trading towns . . . Though not 1/25 of the nation they command 3/4 of its public papers.''^^17^^) "The printers," he remarked on another occasion, "knew the taste of their customers, and cooked their dishes to their palates.''^^18^^)

In 1792 the United States was struck by one of its first financial crises. Yet, Jefferson complained, "notwithstanding the magnitude of this calamity, every newspaper almost is silent on it. . ,"^^19^^)

The silence was, if anything, even greater on the issue of abolishing the slave trade. The "free press" viewed the slavery of more than 900,000 Africans in North America quite favourably. Whatever did appear in print on the subject was, more likely than not, in support of slavery. One popular justification of slavery was that of the English philosopher John Locke, who saw it as the favourable fate of people who "by some act that deserves death" had forfeited their lives) and had been spared by the generosity of their cap-

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tors.^^20^^) Another argument was that slavery was a means of bringing the light of Christianity to the African heathens.

There was no Limit to the hypocrisy of the North American preachers of freedom. As subjects of the British King they had denounced his tyranny and thundered "give me freedom or give me death." But having won freedom for themselves they showed no intention of granting as much to their black slaves. Nor did this discrepancy were apparently no editors or journalists among them.

``We, the patrons of liberty," Samuel Cooke of Massachusetts escape the notice of thoughtful contemporaries. However, there declared in a sermon, "have dishonoured the Christian name, and degraded human nature nearly to a level with the beasts that perish. "21)

Quaker Benjamin Rush wrote in his pamphlet "On Slave-- Keeping", that it was "a vice which degrades human nature . . . The plant of liberty is of so tender a nature that it cannot thrive long in the neighbourhood of slavery.''^^22^^)

Baptist preacher John Allen had this to say of his compatriots in one of his sermons: "Blush ye pretended votaries of freedom! ye trifling patriots! who are making a vain parade of being advocates for the liberties of mankind, who are thus making a mockery of your profession by trampling on the sacred natural rights and privileges of Africans . .. ; continuing this lawless, cruel, inhuman, and abominable practice of enslaving your fellow creatures.''^^23^^)

Sermons, appeals and pamphlets sought to awaken the consciences of the slave owners, among whom were the Founding Fathers. The latter wrote and spoke most convincingly about all men being born equal and possessing an inalienable right to liberty and happiness---except for those born with black or red or yellow skins ,. . That aptitude for hypocrisy nourished the soil for racism to grow deep roots in, roots that have not been removed to this day.

Summing up the first fruits of independence in 1787, Benjamin Rush wrote that "nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed." It remained, he said, to perfect the new forms of government and to prepare the principles, morals and manners of the citizens for those forms of government after they were established and brought to perfection.

What was the contribution of the press to this? How did it help the emergent republican forms of government, the infant federal administration?

Belonging as they did to the well-to-do classes, the newspaper and magazine proprietors felt themselves fairly independent of the

new government, whose other weaknesses were aggravated by financial liabilities. Publishers felt free to print virtually whatever they pleased. From lauding the first President and his policies they switched to calling him ``traitor'', ``robber'', ``perjurer'' and other names.

``When I do attempt (to read newspapers) I find them more troublesome, than profitable," Washington wrote.^^21^^) Later, after retiring and settling at his Mount Vernon estate, he felt constrained to request the Secretary of War to keep him posted of state and political events, since "we get so many details in the Gazettes, and of such different complexions that it is impossible to know what credence to give any of them.''^^25^^)

Many times Washington complained that the newspapers kept attacking almost every measure of his government. If they did not desist, he said, "it will be impossible, I conceive, for any man living to manage the helm, or to keep the machine together." "We have some infamous Papers," he commented on another occasion, " calcu'latejd for disturbing, if not absolutely intended to disturb the peace of the community.''^^26^^)

Washington and his successors were especially vigorous in their condemnation of the inaccuracies, downright lies and groundless accusations in which the papers abounded. Not content with obtaining letters from the nation's leaders by dubious means and quoting them without permission, editors often deliberately distorted their contents. The domestic gazettes, as Washington once wrote, "are surcharged, and some of them indecently communicative of charges that stand in need of evidence for their support.''^^27^^)

The administration and the Congress were the target, not only of the emergent political opposition, but of many newspapers as well. Former English occupants of gubernatorial mansions found them accessible vehicles that could be employed to intervene in the infant republic's domestic affairs with the secret hope that it would collapse under the burden of its difficulties. With plentiful means at their disposal, they made common cause with the ``patriotic'' press, flooding it with counterfeit letters designed to present government figures and statesmen in the most unsavoury light. They also counted on setting various personalities against each other and splitting the political leadership by fomenting quarrels and discords. As Jefferson, then Vice President, wrote to Colonel Arthur Campbell in September 1797, the pro-British party was "swaying the government by their possession of the printing presses, which their wealth commands.''^^28^^)

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At the same time newspapers most consistent in supporting national independence were beset by financial difficulties. The NATIONAL GAZETTE, which Jefferson supported, was forced to close down. But those were not the only, nor the main problems that punctured the vessel of the "free press." It sprang its greatest leak when the political opposition, bent on replacing the Federalist party of Washington, Hamilton and Adams, began to gain strength.

In 1798 the Congress passed a law that stated, in part: "That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish ... any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress ... or the President . . . with intent to defame the said government... or to bring them . . . into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them . . . the hatred of the good people of the United States ... (he) shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.''^^29^^)

The Sedition Act, as Congress designated it, together with its companion Alien Act, pursued a variety of objectives.

On the one hand, it was designed to shield the President (John Adams at the time of enactment) and his associates from newspaper gossip. On the other, the act effectively reduced to naught all declarations about the sacred gift of "press freedom" so abundant till then. The same Adams who had said that "there is not in any nation of the world so unlimited a freedom of the press" was the man who initiated the law and sealed it with his signature. And Washington himself congratulated him from his Mount Vernon retreat. Finally, the administration hoped by intimidation to prevent the opposition from developing a force capable of coming to power.

The opposition of the time were mainly supporters of Jefferson, outspoken champion of petty-bourgeois agrarian democracy and states' rights. Initially they called themselves simply "anti-- federalists", then, inspired by the French revolution they began to speak of themselves as Republicans or Democrats. From the latter word the Democratic Party traces its name.

One of the first victims of the Sedition Act was Mathew Lyon, a congressman from Vermont who had published a letter criticizing the President in the VERMONT GAZETTE. While he was serving his sentence the citizens of Vermont collected $ 1,000 to pay his fine and later re-elected him to Congress. The publisher of the VERMONT GAZETTE was also punished.

Action was also taken against William Duane, editor of the Philadelphia AURORA, who claimed that President Adams was under

the influence of the British government and pursued policies favouring it. The AURORA had also levelled similar accusations against the Congress. The prosecution of Duane dragged on for some time, and he eventually got off easily. But another journalist, Thomas Cooper, who had lent his pen to the political opposition in a publication in the AURORA, was convicted, sent to prison for six months and fined $ 400.

James Callender, editor of the Richmond EXAMINER, and one-time close friend of Jefferson, suffered for his sharp attacks against Adams, the Federalist Party and the Alien and Sedition Acts, and was sentenced to nine months in jail and a fine of $ 200. Jefferson on assuming office pardoned Callender and offered him $ 50 toward the amount of the fine. But Callender, dissatisfied, demanded that he be made postmaster of Richmond. Denied his request, Callender embraced his former enemies, the Federalists and launched a series of scurrilous attacks against Jefferson. Judging by his case, already, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century the editors of American newspapers displayed a striking lack of principle or force of conviction. Philip Freneau, editor of the NATIONAL GAZETTE, mentioned before, who owed his journalistic career to Jefferson and for many years had shared his views, embittered by his financial failures executed a complete about face and towards the end of his life earned a living by vilifying Jefferson in every conceivable way.

The Sedition Act produced 24 arrests, more than 15 convictions, and 10 jail sentences. Although repealed by Jefferson, it represents, as Professor Edward P. Cheyney of the University of Pennsylvania wrote, "a thread in our national and state history that has ... been a continuous line of legislative, executive, or judicial deviation from the recognition of complete freedom of speech . . . "^^30^^) As one justification for such ``deviation'' Cheyney mentions "the need of protection of the administrators of the government" from criticism. But there were other reasons, which we shall take up later on.

If Jefferson expected to win the press over to his side by repealing the Sedition Act, he was deeply disappointed. Most newspapers, professing to fear that he might lead the country along Jacobinian lines, opposed his policies. As before, they strove to sow discord among the Republicans. "You witnessed in the earlier part of the administration," Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin, "the malignant and long-continued efforts which the Federalists exerted in their newspapers to sow discord between Mr. Madison and myself.''^^31^^)

Although Jefferson's comments regarding the press of his time

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bear the imprint of subjective evaluations and personal injury, they also get down to the very essence. "The Federalists having failed in destroying the freedom of the press by their gag-law (the Sedition Act)," he wrote, "seem to have attacked it in an opposite form, that is by pushing its licentiousness and its lying to such a degree of prostitution as to deprive it of all credit.''^^32^^)

It was impossible, Jefferson remarked, to believe anything the papers wrote, adding half-jokingly that it would be a good idea if the printers and editors divided the contents of their newspapers into four sections: truths, probabilities, possibilities and lies. In the letter to John Norvell containing that suggestion Jefferson again noted that the lies and licence of editors resulted in a devaluation of "freedom of the press": "It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood ... I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them . .. "^^33^^)

Jefferson did not, apparently, hold the newspapermen of his day in high esteem. "I deplore," he once commented, "... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and the mendacious spirit of those who write for them .. . These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste, and lessening its relish for sound food.''^^34^^)

Jefferson expressed the hope that in future the American press would overcome its faults and "public opinion in time would apply its own remedy to such perversion.''^^35^^) Holding that freedom of the press, as he understood it, had been prostituted by the publishers and newspapermen themselves, Jefferson hoped that this freedom would ultimately be realized.

His successor, James Madison, repeated, albeit in more restrained terms, many of the critical remarks about the press, notably its predilection for "interested falsehoods which fill our newspapers." And it was Madison who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, perceived the trait that was to become dominant in the American bourgeois press: the desire to monopolize thinking and public opinion.

Our brief excursion into the past of two hundred years could be continued, but it should be sufficient to draw the conclusion that, historically speaking, the "golden legend" rests on fairly shaky foundations. Nor were they solidified as the years and decades rolled over North America.

A

3

iFTER READING THE PRECEDING CHAPTER THE reader may well ask: If the Founders of the Union States were of such a low opinion of the American press, if they quite obviously considered it in many ways harmful to the building of the young republic, why were they so lavish in their tributes to "liberty of the press"? What, for the moment setting aside their idealism and revolutionary romanticism, moved them to make those tributes? Were there, in addition to subjective motivations, sound objective reasons for them to till the vessel of "vague absolutes" with pronouncements claimiing jthat freedom of the press was a bufwark or national independence, a guarantee of ethics and morals, etc.?

The forefathers of American capitalism fully realized the power of the printed word. They relied on it in many ways when it was necessary to rally public opinion in favour of the Constitution and other basic legislation, in support of external political moves, or to justify.them in the eyes of the elite that read the 20,000 or so copies of newspapers printed at the time. Washington and his successors readily acquiesced when good journalism helped to promote their policies. The First President, writes James E. Pollard, who studied the relationship between U. S. Presidents and the press, believed in "propagandizing through the press.''^^1^^)

From the outset the leaders of the Union States saw the press as an excellent medium for influencing public opinion, as a tool for moulding it in favourable directions. To preclude a repetition of such outpourings as Shays's rebellion, Jefferson recommended: "The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people, is to give them full information of their affairs thro' the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.''^^2^^)

Add to this the close ties between newspaper and magazine owners and the commercial and industrial interests mentioned be-

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fore and one can readily imagine the added incentive for the Founding Fathers to be on good terms with the press. It was Madison, after all, who said that the main thing was to avoid violating the rights of property. And it was Jefferson who spoke of a natural nobility that was nature's most precious gift.

When Jefferson declared that newspapers without a government were preferable to a government without newspapers, it was not, of course, just rhetoric. He was also seeking the good graces of the press, courting editors and journalists. It was doubtlessly a carefully weighed and thought-out approach prompted by political and economic considerations, by a desire to rally all sections, including the press organs, for the implementation of immediate and longterm plans. A song popular during the War of Independence offers some indication of the latter. The gist of it is: where is Rome, cradle of arts, proud ruler of the world, where is its glory? Gone, but to revive it Americans must fight like the iron Roman legions. Americans thus saw themselves as heirs of the Romans. The song went on to declare that Americans would establish an empire of their own that would inspire fear and submission in peoples beyond the ocean.^^3^^) The author of the verses was Joseph Warren, a national (hero of the North American states who died in the war. They suggest that already then some Americans dreamed of world domination.

The desire to subordinate the press to government interests (as conceived and upheld by the ruling class) can be traced all through the early and subsequent periods of U. S. history. But to camouflage the process and keep "press freedom" unsullied in the public eye an extremely broad and free interpretation of the First Amendment is offered. Speaking in 1974 on the occasion of the Bicentennial observances which had already begun, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stuart declared: "Newspapers, television networks, and magazines have sometimes been outrageously abusive, untruthful, arrogant, and hypocritical.''^^4^^) But this he readily forgives them. Why? The Founders, he says, gave "institutional autonomy to the press." "The publishing business is, in short, the only organized private business that is given explicit constitutional protection." Thus, the main idea is that the press is, allegedly, autonomous of the government, a claim widely preached in the United States.

The authors of the Hutchins Report, for example, suggest: "Our ancestors were justified in thinking that if they could prevent the government from interfering with the freedom of the press, that freedom would be effectively exercised.''^^5^^) This, they assure us, is

precisely what motivated the Founders when they formulated the First Amendment and the provision that Congress could not enact laws "abridging the freedom of the press." But it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that the Founders were fully aware of all the implications of their efforts. Certainly, Congress cannot enact such laws, but in keepirxj with the idea of ``balancing'' power, the Founders had stipulated the independence of the government (the executive power) and the Supreme Court, enabling them to take virtually any action they pleased with much less public notice.

In "The Opinionmakers," William Rivers, professor of journalism at Stanford University, writes: "It is no accident that the 'strong Presidents' revered by many historians and political scientists - Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt---are also the Presidents who have most adroitly manipulated information. Much of the history of American government pivots on the use of the press as an instrument of political power.''^^6^^)

But who in his right mind can claim that a manipulated press, a press that is an instrument in the hands of the President, is autonomous or independent?

Already the first President of the Republic was confronted with the need to manipulate the press since, as we have seen, not all papers agreed with his policies and some attacked him bitterly, with caustic and insulting words. In 1789, Alexander Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury, helped sponsor and finance a new newspaper, the GAZETTE OF THE UNITED STATES, with John Fenno as its editor. The main voice of the Federalist Party, it also became virtually an official organ of the administration.

Jefferson, when he was Secretary of State, could rely fully on the Philadelphia NATIONAL GAZETTE, whose editor, Philip Freneau, was on the payroll of the State Department as a clerk. The paper had been established in 1792 as a mouthpiece of anti-Federalist ideas to counterbalance Hamilton. After becoming President, when the capital was moved from Philadelphia to Washington, Jefferson asked Samuel Harrison Smith, a young businessman, to set up a newspaper that would be an organ of the White House. As an added attraction Smith was promised a generous share of the public printing. The upshot was the NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER, which quickly became "the dominant source of Presidental news... on which the editors of other American newspapers should rely.''^^7^^) Pollard justifies Jefferson's "open manipulation of the news" by the fact that, like Washington, he was the target of unbridled attacks of "defamers in the opposition press.''

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During the administration of Andrew Jackson (1829---1837). 57 journalists were on the government payroll, while the Washington UNITED STATES TELEGRAPH and GLOBE became virtually official administration mouthpieces. The GLOBE'S editor Francis P. Blair was the President's closest confidant who had a hand in decisionmaking on many important affairs of state. Blair was an able distributor of administration news to newspapers in many cities. He arranged the publication of editorial articles lauding Jackson's policies and then had them reprinted in the GLOBE as "expressions of public opinion." Douglas Cater considers that under Jackson presidential control over newspaper information approached its zenith. Some American historians are even more categorical. James Showier, for example, sees Jackson as the first President to govern with the help of the newspaper press.

Successive Presidents followed the traditions that formed in the first third of the nineteenth century. Their use of the press varied only in degree. As the country expanded, with its frontiers pushing farther and farther to the west, the number of newspapers grew. They also became more accessible. If at the turn of the 19th century a paper cost 6 to 11 cents, in 1833 the first penny newspaper appeared in the shape of the NEW YORK SUN with a circulation of 32.000. By 1850 there were 200 dailies and 2,300 weeklies with an aggregate circulation of more than a million. The rate and scope of expansion of the newspaper business made it more difficult for a federal government to keep the press in line.

The administration controlled the contents of so-called " Washington Letters" sent out by Washington newsmen to their papers. In the early 1840s the NEW YORK HERALD was the first out-of-town newspaper to open a bureau of its own in Washington. This was quickly followed by permanent offices of its competitors, the SUN and TRIBUNE.

By 1860 there were already 50 newsmen from other cities posted in Washington. It was Abraham Lincoln who departed from the practice of his predecessors, who had relied on one or several "party organs." He refused to bind himself by firm ties with any specific newspaper, seeking support for his policies among as many as possible.

The development of the telegraph and opening of the Associated Press news bureau in Washington presented the administration with much vaster information and propaganda opportunities. The Civil War and assassination of Lincoln spurred a sharp increase in interest in news emanating from official Washington. Editors exhorted

their Washington correspondents to come up faster than their competitors with newsworthy sensations and corruption exposures, especially in the wake of Senate investigations during the presidency of General Grant.

The first shoots of the present powerful government propaganda machinery and its growing contacts with the "free press" began to appear at the end of the 19th century, when American capitalism embarked on colonial expansion, necessitating the justification of U. S. imperialist claims. Public opinion was manipulated to endorse the plans and goals of the "big stick" policy, "open doors" diplomacy, etc. President William McKinley, who launched the imperialist war against Spain, accused the opposition of being unpatriotic. His cabinet even considered prosecuting the SPRINGFIELD REPUBLICAN, the NEW YORK EVENING POST, the BOSTON HERALD, and NATION magazine for treason for attacking his policy of annexations. At the same time he counted on the support of the more powerful press organs. It was under McKinley that the first of the White House press secretaries came into prominence. He was George Cortelyou, who proved a skilled hand at manipulating the press and, as Bruce Ladd writes, "established the custom of catering to the big press associations.''^^8^^) This custom was subsequently perfected by Cortelyou's successors, who made a point of reaching an ``understanding'' with the press associations, telegraph news agencies, major journals and, later, radio and television companies.

McKinley's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, did much to centralize the supply of government information to the press, especially in the initial years of his administration. A skilled demagogue, Roosevelt paid abundant lip service to "press freedom" while at the same time forbidding the heads of government agencies to give any information to newspapermen without his knowledge. He was the first President to set aside a special room in the White House for the press. This apparently insignificant move served far-reaching plans of having reporters always at hand who, in gratitude for the attention bestowed on them, would give allegience to the occupant of the White House.

However, as opposition criticism in the press of Roosevelt's foreign policies mounted and he was increasingly accused of war ``dreaming'', the White House gave the go-ahead to the Defence and State Departments to launch a counter-propaganda campaign. The Defence Department began by putting out pamphlets explaining the need for the United States to expand its army and navy. Military-inspired propaganda campaigns reached a crescendo

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when Congress had military budgets before it. a practice faithfully followed by all successive generations of professional propagandists in what is now the Pentagon.

The State Department also began to take a mounting interest in propaganda. Secretary of State John Hay (1898-1905) was the first head of the diplomatic service to regularly receive a select group of experienced and trusted correspondents for off-the-record explications of foreign policy and briefings on the latest recommendations received by the State Department. His successor Elihu Root continued the practice, and Knox, who succeeded him in 1909, set up an information office headed by F. Patching, whose functions included, among other things, "the collection^of information ot public interest that can be supplied to the press.''

In 1915, Secretary of State Robert Lansing began to hold regular open press conferences for all correspondents.

A consequence of the administration's mounting concern with foreign policy was Washington's emergence, in the words of O. Gramling, as "the news centre of America" "which was one of the notable journalistic phenomena in the first decade of the twentieth

century.''^^9^^)

President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) justified extensive government news activity by its national importance. To him belongs the statement that "a large part of the success of public affairs depends on the newspapermen. . . . because the news is the atmosphere of public affairs.''^^10^^) These words were most vividly confirmed by the unprecedented propaganda campaign at home and abroad launched during World War I by the Committee on Public Information se,t up by Wilson and headed by George Creel. Speaking of its tasks, Creel wrote many years later that he had urged "a vast publicity operation that would weld our people into an understanding and determined whole.''^^11^^) The subtle means of fanning war psychosis, the camouflaging of U. S. imperialist pretensions with false slogans calling for a world "secure for democracy" hammered home by Creel's committee became he forerunner of the all-out propaganda campaigns orchestrated by the U. S. government at the height of the Cold War to justify the arms race unleashed by U. S. imperialism so soon after the Second World War and interference in the affairs of other countries.

The appearance of the world's first socialist state, the revolutionizing impact on people all over the world of the ideals of socialism as embodied in the building of the new society in Soviet Russia, and the, ;truth about the new worker-peasant republic that reached

people all over the world forced the bourgeoisie of all countries to step up their propaganda activity. Anti-Sovietism and anti-- Communism became the mainstay of imperialist propaganda.

The enemies of socialism were infuriated by the open diplomacy proclaimed by the Soviet state, by Soviet Russia's anti-imperialist propaganda aimed at exposing and foiling the plans of bourgeois governments. The imperialist powers were forced to seek ways of adjusting to the new course of world events.

In the early 20s, the managers of the U. S. government's propaganda and information services began to base their activities on the plrmciple/that the interpretation of U. S. foreign policy for the American people should be the exclusive prerogative of U. S. sources. In a memorandum issued in 1921, Henry Suydam, chief of the State Department's press office, recommended that "information about American foreign policy should reach our own public through an American source not less effective and far more straight forward than ... in Europe.''^^12^^) One of the purposes of this peculiar doctrine, which I would call "propagandistic isolationism", was to shield the American public from the influence of the Soviet government's peaceful foreign policy. But there were other considerations as well. The aggravation of imperialist contradictions prompted the U. S. government to take steps to make the interpretation of American foreign policy more authentic and convincing in the eyes of its own people than the interpretations supplied by the propaganda media of other bourgeois countries.

The weakening of imperialism's world positions since the Second World War, the deepening of its general crisis, the need to adapt to a situation in which the formation of the socialist world system and growth of its might were becoming the decisive factors of historic development, confronted imperialist propaganda with even more difficult tasks. In the 60s the concept of "propagandistic isolationism" was expanded. Where formerly it had been restricted to the interpretation of American foreign policy, now it came to include international issues, and not only their interpretation, but coverage as well. The development and perfection of mass communication techniques, their mounting impact on public opinion, faced the U. S. government's propaganda services with the task of keeping ahead of foreign news media, especially of the socialist countries, in the interpretation of international events. W. Chittick writes in his study of the State Department's propaganda services: "The widespread use of mass communications as an instrument of foreign policy (has) compelled governments to perfect their own domestic information

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programmes. No nation can afford its domestic public to receive its first and most complete information from abroad.''^^13^^)

Whenever U. S. government services do not keep ahead of foreign news media or when American media rely on reports based on foreign press releases, U. S. official propaganda strives to counter any unfavourable information that may reach the public.

In the 60s and 70s the U. S. administration's propaganda apparatus was largely busy assuring that the mass media support the ``legitimacy'' and ``justice'' of the aggressive policy in Vietnam.

One of the purposes of American propaganda services at the time was to counter the effects of criticism of Washington's Vietnam policy by some capitalist countries on American public opinion. Thus, in 1965 the press launched an extensive administrationinspired anti-French campaign because of the French government's negative view of the escalation of the war. Fuel to the campaign was added when France opted out of the NATO military structure, a decision that undermined arguments about the need to strengthen that aggressive bloc.

There was one more factor behind the government's homeoriented propaganda of its foreign policy. Traditionally, the two main bourgeois parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, support ``bipartisan'' or ``nonpartisan'' foreign policies. In periods of acute crises, however---as especially vividly demonstrated by the bankrupt strategy in Vietnam---a tactical differentiation of various forces within the ruling class takes place, with the dividing line passing not so much between the parties as between liberals and conservatives, between the ``doves'' and ``hawks'' in both parties. Criticism of the administration's external and military policies, whether from conservative or liberal positions, moves it to step up its propaganda targeted on the American public, adducing assorted arguments in its efforts to win over different political groups.

Nor was the liaison between the federal government and the "independent press" restricted to the foreign policy domain. Domestic problems also formed an important arena of common interests.

The enormous growth of federal bureaucratic government fed mass discontent and protests among the working people, the small and medium bourgeoisie. That growth made itself felt tangibly in rising taxes needed to finance imperialist plans and maintain the inflated bureaucratic machinery. To justify its own growth, the administration resorted to propaganda in an effort to represent the state machinery as an embodiment and development of ``democracy'', as a system of agencies concerned with the common weal.

Around the turn of the century U. S. big business began to embrace the doctrine and practices of "public relations." And just as the business and financial tycoons realised the importance of favourably moulding public opinion rather than ignoring it as a social and political factor, so the officers of the federal executive arm realised the importance of a special machinery of press offices in the yarious departments and agencies as a kind of bridge between the administration and the people.

The need for well-organized propaganda and publicity in big business, as in the administration, was evident. It was underscored by the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century a number of press organs were controlled by liberal bourgeois ``reformers'' and publishers. They not only hoped to "save democracy" but saw sensationalism as a sure way of expanding readership and, accordingly, boosting profits. They exposed the malpractices of monopolies whose expansion threatened the independence and very existence of small and medium capitalists, and corruption in the party machines and in government. That trend in U. S. journalism got to be known as "muckraking." It owed its appearance to a societal crisis that racked the United States, a crisis which the muckrakers helped deepen. President Theodore Roosevelt---an experienced demagogue---saw the solution in an anti-trust crusade under the banner of "saving democracy." The appearance in that period of press agents and pressrooms in virtually all federal departments and agencies in any way involved in the solution of socio-political problems had the purpose of presenting their activities in a favourable light and neutralizing ``muckraker'' criticism.

In 1913, the U. S. Congress, fearing that the rapid growth of the administration's propaganda machine would strengthen the executive arm to the detriment of the legislative, passed a bill that made it illegal for government departments or agencies to pay public relations officers out of funds not specifically allocated for the purpose.

The law remained a dead letter, and under various designations - information specialist, public relations expert, communications officer, press secretary---Washington officialdom continued to expand its propaganda ranks and build up its influence and prestige.

``The line of descent" of the "intricate network of government information bureaus," notes Bruce Cotton, "runs back to the needs of the politician rather than of the press.''^^14^^)

In the first two decades of this century the element of partisan-

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ship bodied forth even more clearly, with the party in power striving to use the government propaganda machinery to consolidate its positions and overcome opposition to its domestic policies. The amount of information from Washington in newspapers steadily increased. Many of them set up permanent bureaus with the purpose of providing continuous, detailed coverage of the administration, the Congress, the Supreme Court. But as such a bureau was typically staffed with one reporter, who found it physically impossible to make the rounds of all newsworthy government agencies in a week of footwork, he was increasingly ``assisted'' by "news officers" or "publication officers" who supplied press releases in the shape of virtually ready-for-publication articles. Many of them in fact reached the pages of the "independent press" wholly unadulterated, leaving the reader utterly unaware of the true identity of the author.

One important consequence of the efficiency of the government's propaganda machine was the appearance in the 1920s of special ``newsletters'' catering to banks, companies and businessmen. Some enterprising Washington newsmen were quick to realise that the business world, frequently unable to gauge the administration's real intentions behind the propaganda barrage in the press, would be interested in their produce. Such ``newsletters'' as the Banker's Information Service, Standard Statistics, Kipplinger Service, the Tax Letter, the Farm Letter, earned themselves a reputation among businessmen and financiers with their analyses of administration economic, financial, tax, commercial, building and other policies.

The circumstances accompanying the appearance and growth of Washington ``newsletters'' as a specific type of journalism accentuate the propaganda purposes of government press services. Like the produce of Washington correspondents of the "business press", "commercial press", and so-called trade magazines and bulletins, the ``newsletters'' are usually devoid of the propaganda charge. The administration appreciated the value of the "business press" and took a differentiated approach to it. "Throughout the presidencies o(f Mr. Harding, Mr. Coolidge, Mr. Hoover and Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt," writes Homer J. Dodge, "frequent meetings took place in addition to regular press conferences between the correspondents and editors of the business press and the incumbent President. When important news issues arose special conferences were arranged with cabinet members and other high officials.''^^15^^) The administration used the "business press" to push its economic policies, especially in time of war, as a lever for mobilising industrial resources and gearing industry to wartime needs.

The differentiated approach of agencies of the executive branch to the various components of the bourgeois mass media underscores the propaganda purposes of administration dealings with them.

A major impulse to the further expansion of domestic propaganda was provided by the reform programmes proposed in the 30s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the purpose of extricating the country from the Great Depression of 1929-1933. To overcome the economic chaos and neutralize mounting mass discontent, Roosevelt was compelled considerably to expand state-monopoly regulation of the economy, which to a degree infringed on corporate interests. In the circumstances, the administration found it useful to appeal more extensively to public opinion through the press and radio, thus sowing the seeds of the rapid growth of the executive power's propaganda machine in the 30s and 40s. In 1945, the Truman administration inherited from its predecessor a propaganda apparatus staffed with 2,500 employees (not counting the armed services).

As m the 20s, after the Second World War Congress maide repeated efforts, if not to halt, at least to curb the rapid growth of domestic government propaganda. In this the lawmakers were moved not by considerations of principle, being highly propagandaminded themselves, but rather by fears that their own voices would be muted in the mass media.

In 1947, a House of Representatives subcommittee was set up to investigate publicity and propaganda by executive agencies. Reporting back to the House, subcommittee chairman Forrest Harness said that "the federal government maintained the world's most costly public relations machine which flooded newspaper offices with a deluge of press releases. Obviously, some of that material contained useful information, but mostly it was sheer propaganda designed to influence public opinion and bring pressure to bear on the Congress.''^^16^^) The subcommittee estimated that the administration was spending an average $ 75 million per year on propaganda. The legislators' attempts to cut those expenditures failed. A similar fate befell other House and Senate efforts to slash the budgets of federal propaganda services in the 50s.

The propaganda machine continued to grow under Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. By the early 70s it had a staff of more than 10,000 employees, not counting the USIA and Voice of America.^^17^^)

Nor do the executive branches of the 50 states and thousands of municipalities lag behind the federal government in their predilec-

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tion for propaganda and publicity. Most newspaper, magazine, radio and television owners readily make their outlets available to Washington officialdom and local government to promote their foreign and domestic policies and mould public opinion, true, reserving the right to express their own judgements concerning specifics or methods of achieving the indicated objectives. Friction and misunderstandings sometimes develop between the press and the authorities, though never so great as to jeopardise the alliance based on the fact that, as columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop wrote, "the reporter and the man in government are natural allies."")

In his autobiography, "Six Crises", Richard Nixon tells of the close contacts that existed between President Eisenhower and various newspaper owners, especially the publishers of the CHICAGO TRIBUNE. Former White House secretary Pierre Salinger writes in his memoirs of President Kennedy's decision to meet with the owners of the major newspapers of each of the 50 states. The plan was cut short by the Dallas assassination, but Kennedy had by then received delegations of newspaper owners from 25 states in the White House. "Communication has developed into a massive and complex industry in Washington," writes Douglass Cater, lecturer, editor, and onetime Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs to President Johnson. "... Government bureaucracy is cross-hatched by the press bureaucracy .. . Together (the reporters) constitute, in effect, a separate and quasi-official branch of government in Washington . . . "^^13^^)

To Cater belongs the description of the American capitalist press as the "fourth branch of government", and in a book under that title he demonstrates that this in fact is what the mass media are alongside the legislative, executive and judicial branches. The press corps, according to Cater, operates in collaboration with the administration, the Congress and the Supreme Court. Nor have Cater's views been seriously challenged by any of the three legitimate branches of government, or by the "fourth estate" itself. "The press earns its name the fourth branch of government," writes Ben Bagdikian in "The Newsman's Scope", put out by the Ford Foundation, "because it influences the knowledge and emotions of the electorate.'^)

The Washington press corps is most extensively used by the government to promote current policy and realize strategic plans. Indicative in this connection are the facts that surfaced in June 1971 when the NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST and other newspapers were brought to court for publishing the secret Pentagon

Papers about the preparations for, and escalation of, the war in Vietnam. The newspaper owners permitted their Washington correspondents to testify under oath about the regular practice of leaking secret government information to the press. It was revealed that Presidents, secretaries of state, undersecretaries, assistants, presidential advisers and other officials give correspondents secret diplomatic, military and other information and permit the quotation, in part or in full, of memoranda concerning confidential negotiations with foreign governments.

Max Frankel, Washington bureau chief of THE NEW YORK TIMES, declared in his testimony: "The press obtains significant information bearing on foreign policy only because it has managed to make itself a party to confidential materials, and of value in transmitting these materials to other branches and offices of government as well as to the public at large. That is why the press has been wisely and correctly called the Fourth Branch of Government.''^^21^^) Presidents, Frankel says, supply the Washington press corps with confidential information "for the purposes of frightening an adversary nation, wooing a friendly electorate, protecting their reputations.''

Commenting on the Washington newsmen's testimony, WASHINGTON POST editor Philip L. Geyelin noted that the press "are playing a game. We can't be two-faced about it. We take classified information on the Government's terms all the time . . . We can't pretend that we are not constantly in this arbitrary relationship with the Government... "^^22^^)

In other words, the press fully cooperates with the propaganda machinery of the executive branch, helping it to carry out administration policies and manipulate public opinion. The administration, if need be, can cite "public support" for those policies.

In the course of the last 30 years the theories and practices of government-sponsored propaganda have spread from the United States to the ideological arsenals of its partners in military and political blocs, as well as to neutral capitalist states. In some cases it has been outright copying, in others the devices have been modified and adapted to the country concerned. But the ultimate results of the process have been fairly uniform. In every case government pressure has increased over the mass media, often functioning in exactly the same ways as the "fourth power" in the United States.

In the light of these developments it was remarkable, to say the least, to read of the claims of Western delegates at the second stage of the European Security and Cooperation Conference in Gene-

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va that government agencies in their countries have no influence over the mass media and would remain faithful to that tradition. The fact of the matter is that the contemporary history of the United States and other capitalist countries totally refutes those claims, and this could be confirmed by any impartial student of the subject in Great Britain, France, the FRG or other countries. Quite the reverse is true, as all the facts reveal: government agencies in capitalist countries are exercising an ever mounting influence over the "free press" in the "free society.''

AREA TWENTY BLOCKS LONG BY FOUR BLOCKS wide along New York's Madison Avenue houses a host of communications centres that spread their produce all across America and many parts of the rest of the world. The headquarters of the three national broadcasting networks, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and American Broadcasting Company (ABC) stand almost side by side. Here are both major services, Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI), which each feed news and comment to thousands of newspapers and hundreds of radio and television stations. New York newspapers and national magazines with circulations running into the millions, together with 90 per cent of the great book-publishing houses of America, occupy spacious, lavishly furnished offices in the busiest part of Manhattan. Madison Avenue houses hundreds and thousands of advertising and publicity agencies serving big business in its constant drive to use the newspapers, magazines, radio and television screens. All that has made Madison Avenue a by-name for the advertisement and propaganda business.

Hundreds of thousands of people operate what Theodore White called "the most complicated switchboard of words, phrases and ideas", and "the largest megaphone and finest brainwashing system the world has ever known.''^^1^^)

The U. S. ruling class attaches ever greater importance to the mass media as a valuable instrument for governing the people. It is used to the hilt by both main bourgeois parties---Democratic and Republican---in election campaigns and by the winning party to govern the country. This extensive reliance on the media is described by some as part of a "new politics", the other parts of which are opinion polls to keep tabs on public sentiment and demand, and the use of computers in decision-making processes.

In view of the fact that the "information machines" are privately

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owned,*) American politicians had, so to say, to design the kind of relations between the administration and the "free press" which look like a ``democratic'' and ``independent'' system to the outsider but in effect involve the news and propaganda outlets in the business of government, and as an integral part of it; moreover, less and less efforts are made to conceal or camouflage such integration of the government and the media.

In some periods, when the leadership of the state-monopoly structure urgently needs to mobilize diplomatic or domestic resources, it tightens its control over the mass media. But at a time when political, social and economic contradictions are mounting and splitting the ruling elite, such controls encounter the resistance, sometimes greater, sometimes less, of the press monopolies linked with those business circles which oppose some aspects of the White House's foreign or internal policies.

According to the bourgeois political doctrine of ``consensus'', the federal government speaks for, and promotes, national interests. It is the better equipped to uphold them the greater the public `` consensus'' on the key issues of war and peace, economics and politics. To achieve such ``consensus'', the executive branch of government resorts to various pressure means, one of which are the news media, which as a rule readily give it their assistance. A breakdown of ``consensus'' in some sections of the media underscores, in the eyes of administration leaders, the importance of ably guiding the "free press." To this end special propaganda strategies and tactics are worked out, and ways and means are sought of more effectively espousing administration policies through the media.

American monopoly capitalists have always sought to influence intellectual life, and not only at home but in other countries as well. With all the major newspapers, magazines, book-publishing houses, and motion-picture studios churning out billions of words, thousands of books, and hundreds of feature films and documentaries, with thousands of radio and hundreds of television stations broadcasting virtually around the clock, one can easily picture the opportunities the financial and industrial oligarchies have for keeping various sections of the public under their ideological guidance and influence.

Americans, it has been estimated, spend their free time in the following ways (millions of person-hours a year): films, 160; radio, 1,500; outdoors, 3,000; reading, 4,000; television, 6,000; miscellaneous, S.OOO.^^2^^)

These statistics explain why the ruling class sees the news media as the most effective instrument for ideologically influencing the public in general, and the working class in particular.

The monopoly bourgeoisie uses the fast scientific and technological advances in communications to improve, expand the range, and build up the impact of the mass media for the purpose of increasingly swaying various sections of the people.

This and other developments have made it possible for the government to assert its ``right'', unrecorded in the Constitution or any other legislative act, to interfere forcibly and unceremoniously in the intellectual sphere of life. All this signifies a general trend towards the erosion and liquidation of the norms of bourgeois democracy in the period of imperialism; it is also an indication of the ruling circles' fear of the strength and attraction of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism; hence the need to erect various ideological barriers, especially those based on anti-communism.

Looking back on the development of state-monopoly control in the United States, one can see how, following the concentration of the main levers for regulating the industry, finances and commerce in the hands of the government, the prerequisites formed for Washington to become the nation's real political centre; it became that centre during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Thus, many American historians, economists, philosophers and political scientists felt that the process of centralization of federal power had reached its logical conclusion. For, interpretations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights suggested, society's intellectual life, the sphere of ``ideas'' and their dissemination, would remain `` independent'' and ``immune'' from government encroachments.

However, imperialist realities in the wake of the Second World War left little of the ``inviolability'' of those spheres. To be sure, the remnants of that erstwhile ``immunity'' are still the pride of some bourgeois polemists, but gone is the old confidence that one could continue to rely on them or that they would never be violated. State regulation, economic stimulation, administrative supervision and control, the tremendous growth of the bureaucratic machinery, the insatiable appetites of the military---these and many other factors have led the government increasingly to assume rights and prerogatives in such wide-ranging fields as schools and higher educa-

*) That is, those operating within the United States and for domestic consumption. Propaganda abroad is beamed through both privately owned media and a large government arsenal, which includes, among other vehicles, the Voice of America. Also, we might mention that all the executive departments issue information magazines and bulletins for intergovernmental circulation.

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tion, the natural and social sciences, the press, radio, television, films, literature, art, the church, labour arbitration, court practices, the activities of public associations and philanthropic foundations, and so on, and so forth. The imperialist state's ideological activities are increasingly diversified and purposeful. They serve not only specific government policies but concentrate more and more on assuring the continued reproduction of bourgeois mores in the society, thereby, be it noted, reaffirming the fact that its foundations are growing weaker.

From the latter 40s and into the late 60s U. S. imperialism harboured ambitious plans of world domination. The priorities of government ideological activities called for programmes designed to sway other nations and peoples. But when, in the mid-1960s, it became apparent that American society was divided as never before by the war in Southeast Asia, state-monopoly capitalism began to concentrate its ideological activities on the home ``front''. This does not mean that external ideological campaigns, or direct psychological subversion, for that matter, lost their value in the eyes of the ruling class, or any of their financial support. They are as alive as ever. But fears about the state of the socio-economic system's home front force the ruling elite to give more attention to ideological work and propaganda at home.

With the ideological struggle between the two systems continuing unabated, the imperialist states are concerned as never before with consolidation of their rear echelons. Imperialist positions are being steadily eroded in the historic competition between socialism and capitalism, and this prompts it to rally all its economic and financial resources, all its political and ideological reserves. Everything is done to keep the system from splitting at its seams. And plans for further mobilizing the vehicles for moulding public opinion---the press, radio, television, motion pictures---occupy a prominent place in the imperialist bourgeoisie's attempts to consolidate its forces. Their task is to mislead people, to cultivate the idea that life under capitalism falls hardly short of paradise, and to slander socialism.

In the 70s, the ruling class of the main imperialist power was confronted with an unprecedented national crisis. It had festered for many years within the capitalist system, and when it erupted into the open it engulfed all spheres of life: economic, social, political, military, ideological, cultural. The consequences of the failure of the United States' military plans in Indochina, the economic crises of 1969-1971 and 1974-1975, runaway inflation, unemployment

which in the summer of 1975 stood at 9 per cent, the dramatic weakening of the dollar, the crisis of the cities, the growing alienation of the younger generation, soaring crime rates---these and other problems intertwined in a tight knot of contradictions. The ruling circles were forced to resort to extraordinary measures in an effort to defuse the situation.

As always at times of mounting social and political crises, the ruling classes combined persecution of dissidents, police and legal harassment, and FBI and CIA surveillance and invasions of privacy on a hitherto unprecendented scale, with a policy of manoeuvring and adjustment, resorting increasingly to methods of ideological coercion to mute mass discontent. Speaking of such methods of bourgeois ``democracy'', Lenin wrote: "In this era of printing and parliamentarism it is IMPOSSIBLE to gain the following of the masses without a widely ramified, systematically managed, wellequipped system of flattery, lies, fraud, juggling with fashionable and popular catchwords, and promising all manner of reforms and blessing to the workers right and left. . . "^^3^^)

The government sees the press, radio and television as the most effective of all the means of ideological coercion. Newspapers daily go out to 86 per cent of the population, and 98 per cent listen to radio or watch television.^^4^^) There is nothing that can compete with the press, radio and television in ability to reach out literally to all sections of the population. They are also above competition in the speed with which they can transmit and spread news and ``sell'' ideas, notions, likes and dislikes, sympathy or hostility, acceptance or prejudice.

Government agencies are on the lookout for studies of propaganda possibilities and methods carried out by bourgeois scientists, especially sociologists who see propaganda as a means of social control over the masses. In line with this view, bourgeois theoreticians and practitioners have been searching for new ways and means of influencing people's minds, with special emphasis on the irrational and subconscious of the individual and the mob.

There are quite a few people in the U. S. government who indignantly declare that it does not engage in propaganda and that government departments and agencies are in fact explicitly prohibited from doing so. But does it really matter whether Washington propagandists call their activities "public relations", "public affairs", ``information'', or whatever? The essence is the same. All the more so as even within the ruling class few doubt that domestic propaganda has become an inalienable tool of federal power. What

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munities. Despite their limited circulations, their influence has been growing, thanks to greater coverage of political, economic and public issues. There were almost 10,000 magazines and bulletins, plus as many smaller periodicals. One hundred leading magazines had a total circulation of 210 million.

At the beginning of 1973 there were 924 commercial and public television stations and 6,653 commercial radio stations.^^8^^) In addition, thousands of small papers, magazines, bulletins and sheets are published by universities, colleges, trade unions, religious and political groups, the Armed Forces, and by ethnic groups in their native languages. American politicians view this vast mechanism as part of the Establishment. Its huge flywheels and small sprockets are all designed to assure the uninterrupted circulation of economic, financial and technical information in business and commercial spheres and the dissemination of the political, philosophical and social ideas of the bourgeoisie in all sections of the society.

better testimony than that of former Secretary of State Christian Herter who, as Congressman from Massachusetts, complained: • "Our federal bureaucracy revealed itself as the most powerful and potentially dangerous lobby of all. It fought, bureau by bureau, every Congressional move to curb its innate desire to expand. Backed by its vast tax-supported PROPAGANDA MACHINE... "5) (My italics).

Judging by Herter's statement, the mass media have become an arena of the struggle going on between different camps within the American imperialist bourgeoisie. That struggle is fed by tactical differences between different circles, and especially between two main lines: the line of extreme reaction and the most aggressive imperialist circles, which count mainly on force and call for an all-out offensive against socialism and a "tightening of screws" at home; and the liberal-moderates, whose platforms reflect the processes of capitalist adaption to present-day objective realities and who see the need to accept detente, peaceful coexistence and cooperation between the states belonging to the two social systems. Representatives of both trends pursue the same strategic goal of perpetuating monopoly power. But tactical differences can also run deep. It is, Lenin stressed, "by no means a matter of indifference to us whether we shall deal with those people from the bourgeois camp who are inclined to settle the problem by war, or with those who are inclined towards pacifism, even the worst kind of pacifism, which from the communist viewpoint will not stand the slightest criticism.''^^6^^)

The mass media are not only a forum in which representatives of the two lines engage in polemical confrontation and mutual recrimination. They are also the object of an acute struggle for influence between various groupings of the rulling class.

What does a closer scrutiny of that ``object'' reveal? What are the vital statistics and main features of the "finest brainwashing machine''?

The U. S. monopoly mass media as we know them today finally took shape in all their diversity by the beginning of the 1970s. The country is saturated with "information machines", and in that respect the United States by far surpasses anything like it in other capitalist countries.

In 1973, the United States had 1,774 English-language dailies with a net paid circulation of 63,147,000; there were also 634 Sunday newspapers with a net circulation of 51,717,000.^^7^^) Nine thousand weekly papers appeared in city boroughs, suburbs and small com-

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EVERY COMPONENT OF THE COMPLEX OF CAPITAlist moss communications is a major business. The annual revenues of the daily newspapers are around $ 10 billion ($ 7.5 billion in advertising and $ 2.5 billion in sales).^^1^^) In the early seventies newspapers ranked ninth among all manufacturing industries in number of employees (357,000, including 37,000 journalists).^^2^^) Magazines are a $ 2.5 billion industry, radio yearly draws $ 1.6 billion, and television more than $ 5 billion.

Although mounting competition has led to some closures, on the whole the newspaper-magazine and radio-television monopolies have strengthened their economic and financial position in the last few years. In fact, a "new era of prosperity" is being hailed. During the 1950s and 1960s, newsprint consumption nearly doubled, while advertising, which accounts for three-quarters of newspaper and magazine revenues, quadrupled.^^3^^)

Arthur Hanson, general counsel of the American Publishers Association,*) whom I heard testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly conducting hearings on problems of the mass media, declared that an independent press had a vital role to play by creating the economic, social and political conditions of a democratic society. Actually, of course, the American "free press" serves its owners, in the first place, to multiply their wealth.

Another man that testified at the hearings was Philip Hochstein, former executive editor of Newhouse Newspapers Inc., where he had worked for several decades. Discussing the functions of the American bourgeois press, he said: "There was a time when the newspaper was primarily an organ of news and opinion with a great deal of advertising matter. I feel that today, to a very large degree across our country, the newspaper has become primarily a

medium of merchandising with a considerable amount of news, opinion, and information.''^^4^^) And to clear any doubts anyone might entertain about what he meant, Hochstein added that the press owners regarded their newspapers (and magazines) as " moneymaking machines.''^^5^^)

A similar characterisation could be discerned in the testimony of Paul Dixon, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), who said at the hearings that it was his belief that "newspaper publication is a matter of great commercial importance as well as a strong social influence.''^^6^^) In both cases men who should know ranked money and business as the prime functions of newspaper publishing.

Of course, the owners themselves prefer the public to know as little as possible about the real state of affairs. All industrial corporations and public organizations are required to submit profit returns to the Federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). But the newspapers are exempt, pleading the First Amendment ("vague absolutes" and "institutional autonomy" come in especially handy here) to claim such a prize privilege as confidentiality of financial returns. As long as the publishers choose to keep their books closed no one can make them do otherwise.

The FTC together with SEC publishes quarterly financial reports on industrial corporations. And again the newspapers are exempt. In response to a query by Senator Philip Hart, chairman of the Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, why newspapers are not included in the FTC's financial reporting programme, Commission chairman Dixon replied: "It is not clear from the history of the program why the newspaper industry was not included ... I often wonder if that is the whole story. I was not there. I kind of suspect nobody wanted the newspapers mad at them.''^^7^^) Dixon ``confessed'' that he had no idea of the exact profits of newspapers. And the `` confession'' comes from the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission who would seem in duty bound to know such things!

``Who does this committee talk to to get that information? You? The Bureau of the Budget?... We are talking about government agencies. Where can we get an answer to that?" Senator Hart stormed. But it was a cry in the wilderness.

If an influential senator was unable to get such information, is it surprising that economists, lawyers, and political writers studying the newspaper industry find it even harder, no to say impossible? The papers often raise terrific rows when they think information is

*) Its membership comprises the owners of more than c thousand dailies accounting for 90 per cent of the national newspaper circulation.

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being withheld from them. Any delay or refusal arouses a storm of righteous - sincere or sham - indignation, with accusations of violating the "freedom of information." But when they themselves are asked to furnish information they execute a complete about-face.

Nevertheless some information has reached the public, and it suggests that the U. S. newspaper industry is one of the most profitable in the field. Researches for the International Typographical Union estimate that an average newspaper's rate of profit is 14 per cent. According to a group of experts appointed by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence set up by President Lyndon Johnson in the latter 60s, it is more than 13 per cent, or considerably higher than in the automobile, iron and steel, or aviation industries. Assessments carried out by one of the famous "think tanks", the Rand Corporation, indicated that net profit in the newspaper industry was 76 per cent higher than the national average for all industries.^^0^^)

At the end of the 60s, a small town newspaper with a circulation of 50,000 netted its owner an annual profit of $ 800,000. The Sulzberger-Ochs families netted more than $ 10,000.000 from THE NEW YORK TIMES, and the Chandler family's LOS ANGELES TIMES earned it more than $ 20,000,000. So isn't Philip Hochstein right when he compares newspapers with moneymaking machines?

Besides, newspaper publishers enjoy other boons and privileges. Thus, when a temporary price-freeze was introduced in 1971---1972 in an attempt to stem inflation, newspapers and magazines were exempted. The owners of the "moneymaking machines", "millionaire cry-baby publishers", as some small proprietors call them, alleged that they were losing money, and that was sufficient for the Republican administration and the Congress controlled by the Democrats to exempt them.

Although exact data are scarce, especially of late, there are indications that the federal government makes it possible for the newspaper tycoons to add tens, if not hundreds of million of dollars to their incomes through another device: low mail rates. Economist Theodore J. Kreps estimates that for every dollar paid by the press monopolies to the post office for carrying newspapers and magazines the post office spends four or five dollars more of the taxpayers' money. Over the twenty years spanning the 40s and 50s the subsidy to press monopolies may have totalled a billion dollars.^^9^^) Since no radical reforms have been enacted since, it is safe to assume that the 60s and 70s were.at least as bountiful for the newspaper and magazine industry. The authorities' generosity has

resulted in a chronic deficit for the post office. It is obviously contrary to the best interests of the public, but what can one do when the "millionaire cry-babies" shed such bitter tears? Legislation to correct the situation was initiated in Congress, counter-arguments were of course cited, and each time the press lobby managed to talk the legislators into leaving well enough alone.

Raymond B. Nixon, professor at the school of journalism and mass communications of the University of Minnesota, exhorted the legislators that the existing system of protecting the sanctity of vested interests in the newspaper business was "essential to our very survival in a rapidly changing world"! Public opinion, he emphasized, should uphold the rights and status of the media owners, who would reciprocate with higher standards of journalism and social responsibility. Concerning the latter, Professor Nixon felt satisfied with the existing state of affairs, feeling that in the last forty years editors and publishers had grown "more conscious than ever before of their broad social responsibilities" as reflected in the "growing emphasis . . ." upon the term "the public's right to known." Fortified with such high esteem for the press barons, Professor Nixon went on to support their pleas to the Senate to enact legislation that would exempt newspapers from the antitrust laws. Evidently convinced by his eloquence - or perhaps by the interests behind it---in 1970 Congress passed just such a law under the demagogic title, "The Newspaper Preservation Act.''

It is worth dwelling on Professor Nixon's claim that the newspaper monopolies are "more conscious than ever before of their broad social, responsibilities.''

Every American journalist knows that his newspaper's stand on many issues is determined by the advertisement department, which is closely linked with business circles and well aware of their positions, opinions and interests. The papers and magazines that print advertisements for Lockheed, Boeing or Remington Arms, with colourful pictures of bombers, missiles or tanks, support and reflect the interests of the military-industrial complex. Recipients of orders from Prudential, Metropolitan Life or Hancock suppress material exposing the truly gangster methods of those giants of the insurance business. The newspapers know of the low caloric content, frequently questionable quality, and inflated prices of many foods, but they remain silent for the sake of millions grossed from advertisements placed by General Foods, Kellog's, Nabisco, General Mills and other wholesalers.

Small newspaper proprietors and owners of newspaper empires

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are equally eager to gratify their advertisers and follow their lead. Henry Luce prayed not only to God but to advertisers as well. Addressing the American Association of Advertising Agencies, he said: "Yours is the only court in the land to which I hold myself accountable. My only law is the concordat between advertiser and editor... This is the very essence of democracy... Whether LIFE will endure depends upon you, the Appropriations Committee of the American Press ... I offer you, as advertisers, an opportunity to share with us, as editor-publishers, in the responsibility for producing LIFE. . . It is my firm belief that advertisers not only have the right, but the duty to become inextricably involved with the ethical and cultural standards of the American press.''^^10^^)

Thus, the very essence of American ``democracy'', as seen by a millionaire publisher is, first and foremost, reverence and obedience to the almighty dollar. What is the value of "social responsibility" based on a "concordat between advertiser and editor''?

Our press, wrote James Russel Wiggins, chief editor of the WASHINGTON POST, is determined to maintain the status quo, institutions and order of things as they are in the United States. It would be very dangerous to have a press that would not identify itself with the system.^^11^^)

Big business is constantly on the lookout to make sure that newspapers keep plugging the boons of free enterprise or, in other words, extolling monopoly power. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), where the biggest business tycoons get together, attaches prime importance to the press. The purpose of its Industrial Press Service, as candidly stated by its spokesman, is to drive home NAM policies and views.

In February 1975, the READER'S DIGEST, with a circulation of over 18 million, launched a series of articles under the heading "Our Economic System: You Make It Work." Its objective is to represent private enterprise and capitalism as the prime achievement of the American Revolution of 1776. The costs of preparing and publishing the series - $1.5 million - are absorbed by The Business Roundtable, an organization, according to the DIGEST, "of 150 outstanding executives from leading American companies who are primarily interested in presenting education and information on the role of U. S. business both here and abroad.''^^12^^)

Newspaper owners invest the fabulous profits gleaned from the "free press" in oil, mining, transport, real estate, banking and television. This gives them added incentive to defend and strengthen capitalism. Since the U. S. state-monopoly system offers them the

most favourable opportunities for getting richer and richer, they are, quite naturally, its most loyal defenders. As a group the owners of the mass media belong to the most conservative section of American business, and they are the most vigorous defenders of the capitalist status quo. They give very rarely, very hesitatingly and unwillingly their blessing to the bourgeois reforms the ruling class is forced to carry out fom time to time in pursuing its policy of social manoeuvring.

The political role of the capitalist mass media in the United States is determined by their links with the major monopoly groups and their own substantial business interests. The capitalist press of America, writes James Aronson, a student of the press, imposes "strictures on reporters and rewrite men which result in weighting stories ... in favour of the status quo, and tipping the scales against those who advocate political and social change . . . The national interest is interpreted ... by the managers of the syndicates and the owners of the newspapers . . . businessmen who identify themselves, because of their conglomerate financial concerns, with national policies which protect these financial concerns, including investment in huge war manufacturing plants.''^^13^^)

Scientific and technological progress has made for high standards of printing techniques, swift transmission of news over vast distances, more television channels, reaching out to tens of millions of American homes; all this has greatly increased the mass media's ability to exercise political influence. "Today," write Professors Adrian and Press, "mass communication is the key to political success.''^^14^^)

Faced with the growing influence of the press, radio and television on all sections of the society, some American mass communications experts fall into extremes regarding the extent of that influence. An example is Nicholas Johnson, a former member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). "We," he writes, "have moved from an age when political and economic power were measured in land, or capital, or labour, to an age in which power is measured largely by access to information and people, the man or institution which has the greatest political, military or economic power today is the one with access to the greatest amount of relevant information in the most usable form in the quickest time.''^^15^^)

Obviously, that point of view does not stand up to genuinely scientific scrutiny. For in the United States it is the monopoly groupings, the conglomerates, the banking oligarchies, the military-- industrial complex that possess the greatest political, military and

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economic power. In their hands the mass media are but one of many important levers for strengthening monopoly power.

Any analysis of the whole complex of mass communications in the hands of the monopoly bourgeoisie must take into account its political diversity. There are liberal press organs, some of which espouse radical platforms, there are numerous conservative newspapers and magazines, and there are press outlets for ultraconservative and reactionary, as well as ultra-left views.

At first glance many major newspapers and magazines appear to belong to no definite part of the political spectrum, lending their pages equally, and often simultaneously, to liberal as well as conservative columnists. And in their editorial comments, coverage, and reporting they may be liberal on some issues and conservative on others. After the death of its founder Henry Luce, Time Inc., for example, moved away from its extreme reactionary positions. As Editor-in-Chief Medley Donovan reported to the annual meeting of stockholders in April 1970, the company's publications and five radio and TV stations would favour both "Modern Conservatives" and "Sensible Liberals.''^^16^^)

Still, bourgeois researchers agree that by and large the scales of the U. S. press are tipped towards conservatism. Here is a typical example. In the 1968 elections liberal Democrats won in 79 Congressional districts, not one of which has a newspaper that could be called liberal by any stretch of imagination. Commenting on that and similar facts, such an authority on the American press as the COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW stressed that "the absence of liberal papers among liberal Americans is one of the astonishing facts of media life.''^^17^^)

The average American paper, CJR says, is completely conservative and has no place for "a broader spectrum" of opinion. Even THE NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST, frequently branded by administration officials as "bulwarks of liberalism", are, the magazine notes, in fact "more conservative on many issues than their readers, and only appear to be far-out in comparison with their 1,748 daily siblings.''

Robert Brown, writing in EDITOR AND PUBLISHER, expresses the view that the U. S. news media are predominantly conservative.^^18^^)

``The news media as a class," writes Alfred Balk, "by all available indices, have always tended towards the conservative." "And," he goes on, "there seems to be no reason to assume any large disparity in the political profiles of management in the two media ( publishing and broadcasting).''^^19^^)

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Let us cite one more statement, by Theodore Kreps. In an article for the book, "The Structure of American Industry", he wrote: "As big businessmen, newspaper publishers hold the same views as their advertisers tend to hold. Each reinforces the social philosophy of the other. . . Both belong to the same ideological fraternity. They already see eye to eye on economic, social, and political issues. Both dislike, deemphasize and suppress the same types of news and views." "As a result, newspapers instead of being defenders of competition in ideas, alert to give full play to all aspects of the truth (including those unfavourable to merchants and manufacturers) now shrewdly merchandise the opinions and news both consider sound.''^^20^^)

His analysis of the newspaper industry and its market leads Kreps to the conclusion: "The daily newspaper industry ...seems hardy capable of being restructured to provide either a free, a workably competitive, or a publicly accountable, responsible press.''^^21^^) The same idea was voiced even more forcefully by Eugene Cervi, editor and publisher of the ROCKY MOUNTAIN JOURNAL, a small Denver suburban newspaper. "The Constitutional writers," he stated, "never intended to issue licenses to printing money and to institute unmitigated privilege.''^^22^^)

But that is just what the press barons have as a spinoff of their alliance with big business and state-monopoly power. Nor do they care in return to cater to "the public's right to know" or display "social responsibility", as Professor Raymond Nixon would have us believe.

Alber.t Einstein, the great physicist, who spent the last years of his life in the United States, and who had a keen perception of social and public processes, was asked, in a questionnaire from a Pennsylvania college newspaper, CHEYNEY RECORD, in October 1948, about his views on bourgeois democracy and its ability lo resolve societal problems. In his generally negative reply, Einstein revealed an especially pessimistic view of the mass media in bourgeois democracy. "Those in economic and political power," he wrote, "possess the means for molding public opinion to serve their own class interests.''^^23^^) That was, in effect, a characterisation of the American capitalist press, films, radio, book publishing. In the years since then nothing has changed there which could justify or prompt any change in the world-famous scientist's judgement.

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6

two or more papers owned by different publishers, and half of those were semi-merged in the sense that they combined their advertising, sales, production, and distribution functions.^^2^^) In the last few years the number of cities with competing papers has dwindled still further. As a consequence, the entrenchment of "local monopolies" in the newspaper business is almost complete.

Let us make an armchair tour of some American cities and take a closer look at their "local monopolies.''

Milwaukee. Population more than 700,000. Located in the state of Wisconsin, on the west shore of Lake Michigan, one of the five Great Lakes lying between the United States and Canada. Famous for two nationally competing brands of beer produced here; Schlitz and Pabst. On the corner of Fourth and State Streets stands a resplendent mansion housing the headquarters of the Milwaukee Journal Company. Formerly it had published the evening MILWAUKEE JOURNAL. In the 60s, the Hearst concern decided to sell its morning MILWAUKEE SENTINEL Not that the impending sale was publicly announced. On the contrary, no one was aware that the Hearsts had decided to pull out of Milwaukee. No one, that is, but the Journal Company, which duly purchased the SENTINEL for an undisclosed sum. Shortly afterwards the company acquired a powerful radio station, and a little later a television station. Having achieved monopoly status in the main industrial area of the state of Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Journal Co. has a free hand in the local sphere of information. In Milwaukee, Federal Judge Myron Gordon of Wisconsin's eastern district declared: "You now read the news the Journal Company chooses to print. We now read the advertisements the advertiser chooses to run. Advertisers now pay the rate that he chooses to charge. Without competition or even the threat of competition he is an absolute monarch.''^^3^^)

When I was in Milwaukee a local resident joked that one could choose between the pungent, frothy Pabst and milder Schlitz; there was nothing to choose between the SENTINEL and the JOURNAL. Addressing the Senate Subcommittee, Milwaukee Mayor Henry W, Maier described the situation as one of "a monopoly press which controls the free expression of opinions and facts." "One of the earmarks of the monopoly in Milwaukee," he said, "is the fact that there is no editorial competition between the two voices of the Journal Co.''^^4^^) "The growth of the monopoly press in this Nation," Maier went on, "is a subversion of the First Amendment. When the Constitution was written, if you did not like the newspaper you were reading you had a chance (but no more than a chance, as

HE STRUCTURE OF THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY IN the United States has some peculiarities that distinguish it from its counterparts in other capitalist countries. There are no truly national dailies in the U. S. THE NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL and CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR could in a sense be called national papers. The first two appear in New York, with circulations of 910,000 and 1,350,000, respectively, the latter comes out in Boston with a circulation of 196,000. All three have subscribers in many parts of the country who regard the TIMES as the best news source (especially foreign news), the WALL STREET JOURNAL as a mouthpiece of the nation's main financial centre, and the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR as the most enlightened religious publication. But in a nation of more than 200 million the circulations of these papers can hardly make them nationally available. Especially when the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, for example, has a circulation of 2,120,000. Besides, none of the three have editions in other cities, and extensive distribution outside their home states is virtually precluded. Attempts undertaken by THE NEW YORK TIMES in the 60s to make inroads on the West Coast by establishing a Los Angeles edition with a circulation of 70,000 were short-lived and had to be aborted under pressure of a virtual advertisement boycott by California businesses.

Local newspapers are entrenched in states and cities, and they do their best to keep outsiders away from their sources of income. As they jockeyed for monopoly positions in their communities weaker competitors were squeezed out, creating a system of "local monopoly" characteristic of the American press. Local monopoly is especially important in the daily press, which employs 90 per cent of the workforce in the newspaper industry and accounts for 90 per cent of its revenues.^^1^^) Of the 1,589 American cities which had daily newspapers at the beginning of the 70s, only 45, or 3 per cent, had

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the facts presented above indicate - V. P.) of starting another one. Nowadays only entrenched interests can possibly find the funds to start a newspaper and even then the going is impossible if you try to invade monopoly territory.''^^5^^)

How do the local monopolies run their newspaper business? The Mayor of Milwaukee again: "The commercial monopolies are playing up the sensational and the trivial, generating conflict, presenting government and social issues as entertainment, and following business-as-usual policies in a time of great domestic turmoil in our cities.''^^6^^)

From Milwaukee south, to Tucson, Arizona. In ihe 30s it was a town of 30,000 with two newspapers, the ARIZONA DAILY STAR, published by William Matthews, a strong Democrat, and the TUCSON DAILY CITIZEN, owned by Republican William Johnson. In 1936, William Small, a local businessman, purchased the DAILY CITIZEN. Under a joint operating agreement with Matthews, both papers were printed in the same printshop, jointly distributed and ran a joint advertisement service. The only difference was in their "editorial voices", as they say in America.

As Tucson expanded (350,000 people by the end of the 60s) Small's hands began to itch for control over the other paper, and in 1965 he forced Matthews to sell it. The profitableness of the paper can be judged by the fact that Small put up $ 10 million to outbid an outsider, Brush Moore Co. To handle both papers he established his own company, Tucson Newspapers, Incorporated (TNI), which, according to Tucson Mayor James Corbett, makes $ 2 million profit a year, or a 20-per cent gross profit. Not content with that, Small pays himself $ 250,000 a year as TNI president. Small's "local monopoly" makes it possible for him to dictate advertisement rates. According to testimony by a Tucson department store owner, Louis Cohn, TNI charged him $ 4.37 per inch of newspaper space. At the same time, in Lansing, Michigan, Cohn paid $ 2.42 per inch. Moreover, Small raises advertisement rates 10 to 15 per cent every year.

Small, according to Mayor Corbett, exercises dictatorial power over editorial policies, he can "control and manage the news" and, not satisfied with "editorial monopoly", hi_s "Philosophical approach" aims at "the control of man's mind."0 Small successfully manoeuvred to persuade the City Council to kill an urban renewal programme and opposed a programme aimed at attracting new industries to the Tucson area to relieve unemployment. So much for Tucson.

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Our next stop is Wilmington, the largest city in the State of Delaware on the East Coast. It was there that, at the beginning of the 19th century, the Du Pont family began to take root, starting with the gunpowder business. As the clan and its wealth grew family squabbles and scandals broke out into the open. The goings on of various male members of the family in red-light districts were juicy topics for the press. At the beginning of this century, Alfred Du Pont divorced his first wife and married a cousin. His flamboyant announcement in the WILMINGTON MORNING NEWS was couched in terms that shocked the family. When Alfred returned from his honeymoon his brother Coleman, who had senatorial and even presidential ambitions, declared on behalf of the clan that Alfred should get out of the family company. Coleman's ally Henry Du Pont bought the WILMINGTON EVENING JOURNAL to draw a "demarcation line" between the rival factions, in response, Alfred, with about one-fifth of the clan's fortune on his side, acquired the MORNING NEWS and started a new bank. A sharp rivalry began between the two newspapers.

Then came World War I, which enriched most of the Du Ponts tremendously and made E. I. du Pont Nemours one of the largest U. S. chemical and ammunition concerns. Alfred, however, who had married a third time and squandered all he had, went bankrupt in the postwar depression. With a personal debt of $ 10 million, he was forced to sell the MORNING NEWS to his family enemies, thus ending the confrontations in the newspapers, which became the household organs of the victorious faction.

To manage the newspapers a new company, News-Journal Newspapers, was established as a subsidiary of Christiana Securities Company, a holding company in turn a subsidiary of E. I. du Pont de Nemours. Incidentally, Christiana is probably the richest investment trust in the United States, with assets of more than $ 3 billion. A merger between Christiana and Du Pont is pending.

News-Journal Newspapers were for a long time headed by Robert Carpenter, a member of the Du Pont clan and a director of Christiana. His instructions to the papers were clearcut and unequivocal: they were to "become an organ of the conservative couse." "I believe," he declared, "it is a grave error for a subsidiary of Du Pont to follow the philosophy of the ultra-liberal whose objectives are destruction of capitalistic systems.''^^8^^) The extent of Carpenter's conservatism can be judged by the fact that among the enemies of "private enterprise and the capitalistic system" he listed the late President John Kennedy and his associates.

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In 1973, the Christiana board of directors appointed David Dawson, one of its vice-presidents, Chairman of the board of NewsJournal Newspapers. A chemical engineer by education and a businessman by experience who made a milionaire managerial career with the Du Fonts, he at once got down to work ``correcting'' editorial "errors." Suspecting the editors and journalists of `` slanted'' or ``negative'' news coverage, he demanded an end firstly to stories that fomented controversy or reflected badly on bourgeois values and institutions, secondly, to stories spotlighting corruption, and thirdly, to ``investigative'' or "reflective reporting." In the fall of 1974, Dawson forced John Craig, executive editor of the papers, and three other editors to retire and fired three other reporters and editors.

There were public protests in the city and the state, with demands to reinstate the men. In vain. The Wilmington illustration of "freedom of the press" culminated in the appointment of a new executive editor of News-Journal Newspapers, with responsibilities for both the MORNING NEWS and the EVENING JOURNAL He was Norman E. Isaacs, former executive editor of the Louisville, Kentucky, "local monopoly" comprising the COURIER-JOURNAL and LOUISVILLE TIMES.

To be sure, not all "local monopolies" are oi the same kind as Milwaukee's, Tucson's, or Wilmington's, but they are typical. In some places the "local monopoly" is a composite of two concerns that have decided to call a halt to competition and enter a marriage of convenience.

Take San Francisco, gem of the West Coast, about which there is a song, "I left my heart in San Francisco." The rivals there were the NEWS-CALL BULLETIN and EXAMINER, owned by the Hearst family, on the one hand, and the CHRONICLE, KRON-TV and KRON-FM stations controlled by the de Young Thieriot family's Chronicle Publishing Co. The de Young's circulation was greater than the Hearst's, which doubtlessly put the CHRONICLE at an advantage. On the other hand, Hearst could always provide a financial shot in the arm for their faltering San Francisco papers from other cities, where they had newspapers, radio and television stations, and publishing houses. De Young Thieriot had no illusions about easing Hearst out of San Francisco, where the latter "left his heart" especially willingly as it was there where the Hearsts had built their multimillion dollar fortune.

But then, in October 1964, Hearst and de Young Thieriot concluded a secret deal whereby the former halted publication of the

NEWS-CALL BULLETIN and the latter agreed to a condominium based on equal sharing of revenues accruing from the two remaining papers, and joint printing, marketing, and advertising operations.

As the deal was in clear violation of the anti-trust laws, and Congress had not yet passed the law exempting newspapers from it, the stockholders kept the deal a close-guarded secret, while vigorously lobbying the Justice Department. Fully aware that President Johnson favoured both San Francisco publishers for their support of his policies, especially the dirty war in Vietnam, department officials indicated that they would not start anti-trust proceedings against Hearst or de Young Thieriot. Reassured, both families, acting as in a Hollywood thriller, sent their lawyers to neighbouring Nevada, renowned for its gambling houses in Las Vegas and Reno and virtual absence of laws restricting business. Notably, Nevada has neither corporate nor personal income state taxes. In September 1965, the lawyers arrived at Carson City, the state capital, where thjay met in the Governor's offices to seal a deal setting up a corporation with the mysterious name Central State Enterprise, Inc. Its officers were listed as Robert Raymer, John E. Schaeffer, Charles W. Kenady, R. Barry Churton, J. Raymond Healy and James Murad.^^9^^) They all declared their address as 701 Crocker Building, San Francisco 94104. Though creatures of Hearst and de Young Thieriot, the lawyers were selected for absence of any past links with either family; the address was invented with the same purpose of keeping the real protagonists out of the picture.

There was good reason for all that secrecy. One of the three papers was to be closed, together with several printshops, creating redundancies for 550 printshop workers and reporters. Disclosures could create difficulties and cause complications. However, THE NEW YORK TIMES broke the story. Forewarned, Hearst and de Young Thieriot to save face hurriedly amended the incorporation papers to change the name from Central State Enterprise's to the San Francisco Newspaper Printing Co., Inc. That was on September 13, 1965. But two more years passed before the real directors were put on the incorporation papers: Charles de Young Thieriot, millionaire Executive Editor of the CHRONICLE Scott Newhall, Randolph A. Hearst, George Hearst, Jr., and EXAMINER Publisher Charles Gould. The families evenly divided all 200 shares of the company which, under the contract, was set up "to have perpetual existence." In other words, the deal perpetuates the San Francisco newspaper monopoly for the two families.

In their attempts to justify the ``marriage'', both families sought to

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show that it was ``forced'' by serious financial difficulties and losses suffered by the newspapers. But an independent investigation carried out by San Francisco journalists revealed that the CHRONICLE'S earned surplus had increased from $ 9.2 million in 1962 to $ 14.5 million in 1965. A similar picture emerged for Hearst's holdings, though by manipulating their books they sought to show that they were operating at a loss.

As in other such cases, after the merger the San Francisco press barons began raising advertisement rates and took a firmer stand in dealing with their employees and the unions. Profit was the prime motive that induced Hearst and de Young Thieriot to set aside years of competition and fling themselves into each other's arms. That too, is the motive behind other strategic and tactical decisions of the monopoly press in San Francisco.

The Superchron conglomerate, as the merged media came to be known, defends and promotes the interests of big business, and thereby its own interests. It takes sides with the Southern Pacific Railroad company, the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Co., the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and other utilities when they hike transport fares, telephone rates, or the cost of gas and electricity. For years Superchron blocked the building of a municipal power system in order to preserve the Pacific Gas and Electric monopoly in the San Francisco area. The press monopolies have been especially vociferous in support of California's agrobusiness, which combines the latest in technology with feudal exploitation of migrant farm workers, especially the Mexican-American Chicanes.

When, under public pressure, San Francisco introduced a new city gross receipts tax, Superchron left no stone unturned to win exemption for its newspapers. It lost its appeal the first time, six to five, before the Board of Supervisors. CHRONICLE executive editor Scott Newhall then offered Jack Ertola, one of the supervisors who had voted for the tax, to throw Superchron's support behind him in the next mayoral elections if he changed his vote. Ertola agreed, and the second time around the ``poor'' publisher's appeal squeaked through by a majority of one. The decision was vetoed by San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto, himself an antitrust lawyer. Superchron's attempts to make him change his mind failed. So Newhall put two reporters to work to find materials that could compromise Alioto. No sooner said than done. Alioto is of Italian extraction. There are no facts, but already rumours are rife about Alioto's Mafia connections. Alioto has political ambitions, he is considering the governorship of California or a senatorial seat in Washington.

Newhall offers to call off the ``investigation'' and put an end to the rumours of Alioto's connections with the Mafia if he agrees not to veto the appeal the next time. Alioto stands firm, and Superchron, with no facts at all, adds fuel to the rumours spreading to newspapers in other cities and national magazines.

Whoever dares to go against the Superchron machine is courting trouble. So it was with Mayor Alioto, so it was with TV cameraman Al Kihn who had worked for eight years at the KRON studios. Like all TV stations, KRON had to renew its licence with the Federal Communications Commission. Kihn, disgusted with the way KRON operated against public interests, testified accordingly before the commission. Superchron put private detectives to work on Kihn, in an effort to compromise him in some'way; they sifted through his biography for ``immoral'' acts; and they had him blacklisted so that no TV station in California or other states would hire him.

The San Francisco "local monopoly" includes a newspaper which at the same time belongs to another type of monopoly conglomerate: the newspaper syndicate, or "chain." What is a newspaper ``chain''?

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tion was between Hearst and Pulitzer. On the other hand, by fanning war hysteria the jingo press prepared public opinion for the occupation of Cuba. Their efforts played into the hands of the warmongers and helped justify the aggression in the eyes of the public with claims that it was no longer possible to tolerate Spain's oppression of Cuba.

The sensationalism and lack of any moral restraints of Hearst's publications has come to be known as "yellow journalism." But Pulitzer's newspapers were not to be outdone by Hearst, and they also merited themselves the dubious distinction. Characteristic of "yellow journalism" was its relish of crime and violence, its adulation of the cult of cruelty and gore. These traits, inherited by today's "big press" and elevated to new heights, took shape at the turn of the century.

In April 1901, Governor Goebel of Kentucky was assassinated. Ambrose Bierce, one of Hearst's leading newspapermen, responded in the NEW YORK EVENING JOURNAL with the quatrain:

The bullet that pierced'Goebel's breast Can not be found in all the West; Good reason, it is speeding here To stretch McKinley on his bier.^^1^^)

Seven months and several equally inflammatory editorials after that doggerel President William McKinley was assassinated. At the time it was widely claimed that his assassin had been influenced by the Hearst press, which had attacked the President for many faults, among them his laxity in ``liberating'' Cuba. What an irony of fate! In November 1963, the reactionary newspapers of Dallas accused President John Kennedy of being "soft on Communist Cuba," and again shots rang out which ended the life of an American President.

After the assassination of McKinley, the BROOKLYN EAGLE wrote: "The journalism of anarchy shares responsibility for the attack on President McKinley. It did not mean that he should have been shot. It only wanted to sell more papers . . ,"^^2^^) After the Kennedy assassination the mood was different. A number of public figures openly declared that the objective of the reactionary Dallas press was to remove Kennedy from the political scene. The "free press" had advanced considerably in the intervening decades . . .

There was a time at the turn of the century when Hearst's newspapers were barred from clubs, libraries and reading rooms (be it

7

OF THE PUBLISHERS WHO EMBARKED ON THE newspaper business in the latter years of the 19th century are respectfully referred to in America as the "giants." The leading figures in that category were William Randolph Hearst, Edward Scripps ;and Joseph Pulitzer. For them one newspaper was not enough. Their ambitions were much greater. They acquired newspapers in other cities, establishing their respective "chains." They wanted to become multimillionaires, but wealth alone was not enough: they also sought power, and the ``chains'' were excellent levers for influencing statesmen and politicians. The ideology and philosophy of the publisher were the law for all his papers. Thus the Hearst press leaned to conservatism, Pulitzer and Scripps publications boasted liberalism and populism.

The ``giants'' recorted to different methods in pursuit of their different goals. In Chicago, Hearst's EXAMINER engaged in vicious campaigns against Colonel Robert McCormick's TRIBUNE. Ideological allies, they were at each other's throats because of greed. The rivals equipped themselves with private armies, recruited in the Chicago underworld, which murdered reporters and destroyed newspapers on sale.

In New York, Hearst's war against Pulitzer was more ``gentlemanly'' and restricted to sniping between his JOURNAL and Pulitzer's WORLD. Their ``gentlemanly'' war, however, was instrumental in encouraging the United States' imperialist war against Spain. The JOURNAL and the WORLD in every possible way exploited a situation in which the most reactionary imperialist circles were urging tKe occupation of Cuba under the pretext of liberating it from Spanish rule. Hearst and Pulitzer supplemented fact with lurid imagination to sensationalise reports from Cuba in their papers. This has given cause to some American historians to describe the Spanish-American war as the byproduct of the newspaper circula-

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noted that the Dallas press did not share that fate). Hearst was denounced as a murderer, anarchist, and scoundrel. But by 1908 the "scoundrel`s'' ratings had climbed so high that it looked for a time that he might become the choice of the Democratic Party - the party of Jefferson - to run for President. When William Taft, the prospective Republican nominee, heard of it he wavered and wrote Elihu Root that Theodore Roosevelt was the only Republican sure to defeat "such a dealer in filth as this hideous product of yellow journalism . . . (this) immoral monstrosity.''^^3^^)

Where Hearst had set up his empire of 26 newspapers and 13 magazines by robber-baron methods. Edward Scripps adopted a different strategy, parading as liberal and requiring his newspapers to "talk up for the common man." He had 25 of them. Pulitzer, who in the latter 19th century threw his lot in with the Democratic Party, operated along similar lines. Grover Cleveland, speaking in 1908 at a banquet to mark the 25th anniversary of Pulitzer's acquisition of the NEW YORK WORLD, remarked that he owed his victories in the 1884 and 1892 presidential elections in large measure to the Pulitzer press.

But the papers that began by "talking up for rhe common man" underwent metamorphoses of the type described in a play called "The Fourth Estate" written in 1911 by a young man named Joseph Medill Paterson who hat embarked on a newspaper career with the backing of his cousin, Colonel Robert McCormick. "Newspapers start," one of the protagonists reflects, "when their owners are poor, and take the part of the people, and so they build up a large circulation, and, as a result, advertising. That makes them rich, and they begin most naturally, to associate with other rich men - they play golf with one, and drink whisky with another, and their son marries the daughter of a third. They forget all about the people . . .''

Paterson himself was destined to follow that course. True, he wasn't all that poor when he came eight years later to New York to start the daily NEWS: he had the McCormick fortune behind him. But in New York he started from scratch, waging a hard, uphill struggle against a group of powerful newspapers. Following Scripps's cue, he chose to appeal to "the common man.''

The NEWS soon won the highest circulation in the United States. Paterson became a millionaire in his own right and got together with cousin McCormick to form the chain known as the Chicago Tribune Group. The gutter NEWS surpassed the CHICAGO TRIBUNE as a reactionary mouthpiece, and the whole ``chain'', with a daily circulation of 3.6 million and revenues of $ 480 million in 1972, is

not only the most widely circulated but also the most reactionary ``chain'' in America.

The Scripps heirs merged with the Howard concern to form the Scripps-Howard chain. Hearst remained on his own until the 60s. During the Great Depression of the 30s he sold off some papers and merged others. Some newspapers were forced to close down not so much to save money as because of political competition. The latter is illustrated by a few examples.

In December 1941, one day before the attack on Pearl Harbour, Hearst, as ususal, had his signed column on the front pages of his (at the time) 13 newspapers. In it he spoke of Japan as the United States' most reliable and natural ally in Asia. The very Japan that since the 30s had taken the road of bloody aggression in Asia and the Pacific Ocean.

Together with Luce, McCormick and Cardinal Spellman, the Hearsts in the 40s and 50s praised Senator Joe McCarthy, pretender to the role of a New World fuehrer and "saviour of Americans from communism.''

The standards of journalism in news coverage and comment that Hearst required of his editors were primitive. He once boasted that his chain pitched its papers to the fourteen-year-old mind. He would allow no mention to be made of names, sports teams or even countries he disliked. Put off by extreme reactionary political views, bias and other anachronisms, Americans stopped buying his papers in growing numbers. The ``chain'' dwindled until by the early 70s Hearst's heirs had only eight newspapers; true by divesting themselves of the rest they were able to acquire a number of profitable radio and television stations (e. g. they bought a half interest in a Pittsburgh television station for $ 10 million) as well as magazines and publishing houses that yield the family an aggregate annual income of around $ 200 million.

There are more than 50 newspapers in the ``chain'' owned by the Gannett family. It began with four small newspapers in upstate New York acquired in 1923. For a while Gannett confined its operations to the East Coast, before venturing southward with an acquisition of papers in Florida. In the 70s Gannett paid $ 20 million for the EL PASO TIMES in southwestern Texas, and finally crossed the Pacific to Hawaii to pay $ 34 million for a 55 per cent share in the largest newspaper of the state, the HONOLULU STAR BULLETIN, and a controlling interest in the HONOLULU ADVERTISER. Gannett also owns radio and TV stations in various cities, earning a total of around $ 250 million a year.

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The first link in the Chandler chain was the LOS ANGELES TIMES. Following the acquisition of several other papers in California, Chandler turned east to invest in the LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY. and south to pick up the DALLAS TIMES HERALD in Texas. The Chandlers' family business, the Times Mirror Co., has also acquired or founded several dozen publishing companies and magazines, building up its corporate revenues to $ 500 million in the early 70s for a profit of $ 186 million. Former President Richard Nixon says, incidentally, that he owes his career to Chandlers, who supported him in 1946 when he first ran for the House of Representatives.

Walter B. Kerr, explaining the ease with which newspaper ``chains'' grow, wrote in the SATURDAY REVIEW: "Chain owners know the business and the tricks of the trade. They are allowed by tax laws to use retained earnings to finance new acquisitions.''^^4^^) What are "retained earnings"? They are earnings on which there is a corporate tax but no income tax because they are to be set aside for ``business'' purposes. Many American lawyers maintain that acquisition of newspapers cannot be regarded as ``business'' expenses, but the vagueness of the law enables the ``chains'' to find loopholes through which they can extend across the country.

Another tax loophole for the newspaper tycoons is offered by depreciation and "writing off" old equipment (though it may not actually have been replaced). Retained earnings and depreciation schedules and replacement, writes Robert Bishop, a member of the journalism faculty at the University of Michigan, play an important role in the growth of chains.^^5^^)

After describing the activities of the Hearsts, Chandlers, Gannetts, and other chain owners, the authors of a brief called " Federal Responsibility for a Free and Competitive Press", prepared and published by the International Typographical Union, ask whether that was what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment. "In their passion for bigness and profits, for domination and control, for monopoly and absentee ownership, the giant communications companies are a clear threat to a free and responsible press. The First Amendment was never intended to give newspaper owners a vested right to limit competition and acquire excessive domination over the press.''^^6^^) That may not have been the intention of the First Amendment, but by invoking it the press barons won their monopoly positions, reducing any semblance of a "free and responsible press" to naught.

In 1913, thirteen chains owned 62 newspapers, or three per cent of a total of 2,400 dailies appearing at the time. In 1969, one

hundred and fifty-nine chains owned 828 newspapers, or 47 per cent of the total. Ten of the largest chains made a profit of $ 2.2 billion in 1971, or one-quarter of the total for the whole newspaper business. Ben Bagdikian estimates that members of about 40 million American households "theoretically have their printed diet controlled by 35 chains or, possibly, 35 men.''^^7^^)

Our account of newspaper chains would be incomplete without mention of the phenomenon of Samuel Irving Newhouse. Born in 1896, the eldest of eight children in an immigrant family, he went to work straight from school as a lawyer's clerk. Sam was a clever boy, and when his employer acquired the ailing Bayonne, New Jersey. TIMES, he was entrusted with its management. Though a tender sixteen, Sam's business talents and ability to "make money" were already there. He solicited advertisements from local businessmen, enlisted new subscribers and organized distribution. The paper began to make profit. For his services Newhouse was made co-owner of the ``rescued'' newspaper.

While conducting business Newhouse studied law and was later admitted to the bar. But he lost his very first case and decided to stick to publishing.

Newhouse saved and borrowed enough money to buy the STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE, which was on the verge of financial collapse, and managed to reverse its fortunes. That was in 1922, and it marked the beginning of a spectacular newspaper career. Since then Newhouse never had to borrow money, whether from relatives or from banks. He liked to make his purchases cash down.

His publishing business was joined by two brothers and two sons, Donald and Samuel Irving, Jr. The old man, however, kept the controlling interest in his vast empire for himself. He spends 95 per cent of his profits on acquiring new papers and shoring up old ones. He also pays himself a salary of $ 150,000 to $ 200,000 a year.

When he hears of a paper in trouble, he wishes to buy it as cheaply as possible, then applies his business acumen to turning it into a profitable enterprise. Sometimes he mergres two acquisitions, his sole consideration being profit.

In Syracuse, N. Y., Newhouse bought the POST STANDARD, then the HERALD and the JOURNAL, which he merged into the HERALD-JOURNAL. He offered businessmen to place two different advertisements in the combined paper instead of the customary practice of having the same advertisement in two different papers. Circulation grew rapidly.

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Today commercial, industrial, and financial corporations annually buy more than three million lines of advertising in Newhouse's Syracuse papers, helping his "local monopoly" pay off handsomely.^^8^^)

Newhouse's organisational tactics have been so successful that all the newspapers he acquired have ended up yielding higher profits than before.

Prosperity in the newspaper business is measured most aptly by rising circulations.

In 1961, Newhouse's daily and Sunday papers had an aggregate circulation of 4,212,000; five years later, it was in the neighbourhood • of six million.

Newhouse has 18 million readers. Every week 18,754,000 copies of his newspapers are distributed in 16 cities across the nation, placing him in second place in newspaper sales after the Chicago Tribune chain.

When Newhouse acquires a paper he has small concern for its layout or political leanings. The main thing is whether it can be made into a paying business. To that end he is quite prepared to allow his papers to flirt with liberalism, provided they boost circulation and, consequently, profits. Of him it can truly be said that his basic philsophy on the way to the pinnacles of economic power has always been that the end justifies the means.

Newhouse's major acquisitions over the last fifteen years offer graphic illustrations of this. In 1955, he bought the ST. LOUIS GLOBE DEMOCRAT for $ 6,250,000 in cash. The seller, Ray Lansing, whose family had owned the paper for three generations, wanted to find a buyer who would not change its conservative character (he was a staunch supporter of the Republican Party); that was why he had refused a bid from the ST. LOUIS POST DISPATCH, a successful but Pulitzer-owned, paper. Though nominally a Democrat, Newhouse accepted Lansing's stipulation not to alter the GLOBE DEMOCRAT'S Republican politics. More, he retained Lansing as publisher and made no changes in the staff. All Newhouse wanted was to boost the paper's profit. He began by giving the editors a pay rise, declaring that they had "complete freedom" in news presentation and interpretation.

Also in 1955, Newhouse paid $ 18,700,000 for two Alabama papers, the BIRMINGHAM NEWS and HUNTSVILLE TIMES, with a combined circulation of 237,000.

Two years later he paid $ 8,000,000 for the OREGONIAN and OREGON JOURNAL (combined circulation 383,000), effectively monopolizing the press of this state.

In 1962, he paid $ 42,000,000 for a monopoly position in New Orleans by acquiring the morning TIMES PICAYUNE and evening STATES ITEM (total circulation 233,000).

And in 1967 he bought the PLAIN DEALER, the only morning paper in Cleveland, Ohio, for $ 54.000,000. With a circulation of 340,000 and conservative leanings, it enjoys considerable influence in the Midwest and speaks for Republican sentiment.

This far from full list of Newhouse's deals, coupled with more and more millions paid for new acquisitions, offers an idea of the fantastic rate at which his profits are growing, making possible increasingly audacious ventures on the newspaper market.

Nor are Newhouse's business activities restricted to "collecting newspapers.''

Since 1959 he has been investing millions in magazines. In New York he paid $ 5,000,000 for a controlling interest in Conde Nast Magazines, which publishes VOGUE. GLAMOUR, HOUSE AND GARDEN, BRIDE'S MAGAZINE, and other, mainly women's magazines.

He also has substantial holdings in the New York-based Street and Smith Publications which puts out some highly popular women's, youth and sports magazines, notably MADEMOISELLE, CHARM. LIVING FOR YOUNG HOMEMAKERS, ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, AIR PROGRESS, HOBBIES FOR YOUNG MEN, and BASEBALL ANNUAL and FOOTBALL ANNUAL. Each magazine has a circulation of around 650,000.

From papers and magazines Newhouse went on to radio and television, acquiring stations in Syracuse, Harrisburg, Birmingham, St. Louis, Portland, and other cities.

Several years ago, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, acting as lawyer for the DENVER POST, issued a statement of intent to start anti-trust proceedings against Newhouse for trying to take control over the paper, in which he had held only 16 per cent of the stock. In a civil suit filed with the Federal Court of New York by the legal firm of Paul, Weis, Goldberg. Rifkind, Worton and Harrison, Newhouse was accused of concentrating greater power over the dissemination of news, ideas and advertisement than any other single person in America.^^9^^)

The suit stated that Newhouse had attemped to acquire the following eight newspapers: the HONOLULU STAR BULLETIN. OMAHA WORLD HERALD, BALTIMORE SUN. HOUSTON POST, HOUSTON CHRONICLE, DALLAS TIMES HERALD, BUFFALO COURIER EXPRESS, and BOSTON HERALD TRAVELLER, as well as all papers

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belonging to the Hearsts and the Curtiss Publishing Company,^^10^^)

The list is indicative of Sam Newhouse's scope. He combs more and more cities in search of desirable goods and appears to be especially drawn to the homes of newspapers owners who are near their death beds. He calls on expectant widows or other prospective heirs. He may be shown the door, but he is not a man to take offence. In such cases he kindly promises to call some other time and pay well if the widow agrees to disburden herself of the troubles and concerns of newspaper publishing. Such promises possess magic force, and quite a number of Newhouse's acquisitions were made in that way.

By the mid 70s Newhouse had almost 25 newspapers, most of them distinguished for their political resilience and lack of principle, clothed as "freedom to express different views." Abut half his papers are ``Democratic'', a large part of the other half are `` Republican'', the rest call themselves "independent.''

Their party affiliations, however, are purely superficial. Newhouse sees no great difference between the Republican and Democratic platforms. In Springfield, Mass., for example, he owns three papers, all produced from the same editorial, offices: the morning NEWS reflects Democratic opinions, the evening UNION is Republican, and the Sunday REPUBLICAN professes to be independent.

However, if in local matters Newhouse's papers take opposing lines, currying the favours of different political and trade groups, on foreign policy matters the majority form a united reactionary, anti-communist front and call on the U. S. government to act from "positions of strength." Only occasionally, for purely demagogic considerations, some papers embark on polemical debates on foreign policy issues.

Newhouse keeps his newspapers in rein by studying regular reports from their local managers and touring editorial offices. Every day he reads one paper carefully and looks through the rest. Unlike other ``chain'' owners, Newhouse has never written a line for his papers. But he keeps a close watch on the way news is presented and the kind of commentaries it gets.

After making his millions Newhouse's thoughts turned to seeking some way of establishing himself as a personality who would be remembered by a grateful posterity. He also decided to soften mounting criticism and public indignation with the blatant brashness of his ways in the newspaper and publishing business. To these ends Newhouse put up some $ 15 million for the establishment of a School of Communications at the University of Syracuse.

The grand gesture was calculated to draw wide public response as well as the gratitude of the academic and journalistic communities and the government. In August 1964, President Johnson attended the opening of the Newhouse Communications School. The event was witnessed by more than 20,000 guests, among them the then governor of New York and present Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller.

In his address Johnson declared that he shared "the general admiration at the generosity of Dr. Newhouse." (Newhouse was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Syracuse.) "We are all indebted to him," the President said.^^11^^)

It was a shrewd move which made Newhouse a name not only as a patron of journalism but also as a political figure who had not spared money to strengthen the country's propaganda potential.

The whole range of activities of Newhouse's ``chain'' is a typical example of the way a man of business involves himself by steps in the realm of political propaganda. Philip Hochstein, who had been a Newhouse editor for some time, remarked of his boss: "Sam Newhouse never pretended to be a public benefactor. He doesn't claim to be with the people. He's a capitalist.''^^12^^) Sam's brother Ted was even more outspoken when he said that Newhouse didn't care for the newspaper business as such at all. His business could just as easily have been shoe factories.

Experts of the American press agree that, with few exceptions, a newspaper's incorporation in a ``chain'' tends to increase its subordination to the profit motive above all other functions. Here is what Thomas Griffith, editor of a number of newspapers and then LIFE magazine, has to say on this score: "The trouble with the newspaper business is that it is becoming more and more just a business. The original owner of a newspaper probably opened up shop out of his impulse to be a journalist; the present owner more likely made a profitable investment. Increasingly through a quirk in the tax laws, newspapers are parts of chains (more than a thousand of the 1,749 daily papers in the United States are chainowned (that was in 1974---V. P.)) and 97 per cent of the newspaper managements are monopolies in their own cities. Only a few chain owners, such as Gannett and Knight, try to improve the papers they buy. The rest simply try to increase their profitability . . . These newspapers become simply money-making machines; often though their physical plants are superb they are more frugal when it comes to news gathering; absentee management knows little about what goes on in the town and probably wouldn't wanttodis-

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turb things if it did learn, and often has about as little commitment to the community as citizens as do to the chain stores and supermarkets on the highway strip at the edge of town. Editors are chosen who will do their jobs without making waves. Such an approach is stultifying to good journalism, as anyone in a business knows who must deal with superiors who regard him as a source of expense rather than of revenue... Corporate managers soon free themselves of editors they regard as negative, trouble-making, shrill or otherwise inconvenient.''^^13^^)

I have quoted Griffith at such lenght because I feel that, whether he so desired or not, he has presented some extremely qualified testimony to support the view mentioned before. Freedom in the "free press" belongs to its owners. The rest of the organism of every American bourgeois paper, from executive editor to crime reporter, is the collective employee of its owner, whether it be Hearst, Newhouse, Gannett, Knight, Pulitzer, Chandler or any other of the proprietors of "local monopolies" or "chains.''

8

>Y THE 70' THE NEWSPAPER ``CHAINS'' AND "LOCAL monopolies" had control of 25 per cent of all private, or commercial, as they are called in America, television stations. In 25 of the major metropolitan areas newspapers owned 35 per cent of the TV stations. From the outset television has been under the influence of the big press, in many ways adopting its priorities, objectives and methods, its style and ethical norms. In some ways it has gone farther, especially as regards profits, concentration of ownership, and the mass nature of public brainwashing. How is American television organized and what are its characteristic features?

Unlike other capitalist countries, where broadcasting is either wholly in the hands of the state or shared approximately evenly between state-owned and private companies, U. S. television is preeminently in the hands of privately owned broadcasting networks. But before dwelling on private, commercial television, let us first tqke a look at educational, or public television.

Unlike commercial television, it is financed not from advertising, which accounts for virtually 100 per cent of the revenues and profits of private broadcasters, but from the budgets of states and municipal authorities, private donations and, lately, small federal subsidies. The so-called public stations---there were 220 in 1972 - provide 15 per cent of all viewing time and are watched by one to five per cent of the TV audience. Public television gets about five per cent of the total spent on television in the United States, much less than the support given noncommercial television in other capitalist countries. A graphic comparison is presented in a table compiled by Wilbur Schramm and Lile Nelson.^^1^^)

It will be observed that, whereas other capitalist countries channel substantial funds from centralized government sources to finance television services (per capita $ 2.90 in Japan, $ 3.29 in Great Britain, $ 6 in Canada), the federal government in Washington is

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satisfied with a meagre 17 cents. That state of affairs is a source of wonder for some Americans and anger and protests for others. Our culture, Schramm and Nelson write bitterly, assumes there is no need to maintain public television.

Cost of TV Services in Different Countries (US$)

dation, which had for some time advocated the creation of a national public television network based on transmission via space satellites.

A reflection of the view that public television is a powerful means of ideological influencing is the jockeying for commanding positions within it between liberal and conservative groupings, with the latter gaining the upper hand. The role of public television as an ideological tool of state is inevitability growing. The number of stations is to be increased to 350-400, and they are to be linked in a unified national communications network, the beginnings of which already exist.

The federal government and local authorities are, of course, faithful servants of the interests of the bourgeoisie and private business. In this respect there should be no illusions regarding the purposes and functions of public television. Still, the development of commercial television, one of the most important ubiquitous components of the mass media complex, was left to the will and wishes of private interests. This could not but leave a special imprint on American television, its organization, structure, objectives and priorities.

A visitor to the United States sitting for the first time in front of the small ``box'' may quite naturally form the impression that television exists not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge, not for spiritual and cultural enrichment, but to advertise goods and services.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) recommends in its Television Code (rather hypocritically) that television programmes should not be overburdened with advertising, suggesting the ``normal'' allocation of no more than 16 (!) minutes per hour for advertising. But even that recommendation is a cry in the wilderness, and many stations devote much more time to advertising.

The average length of an advertisement sequence was once one minute. Today the trend is to slash it to 30 or even 15 seconds. The result is a fragmentation of informative programmes, documentaries, shows, sporting events and films, with the intervals filled with pervasive advertising.

Programme editors are obliged to splice up to 20 advertisements of various duration into one hour of broadcasting. During daytime viewing, when housewives and children make up most of the audience, advertisements increase to 25 per cent of broadcasting time. It is a time for showing the feeblest, silliest films and reruns of so-called popular programmes. But that is of no concern to the

Company, Type of Services

Per capita Total expenditure

CBC (CANADA) (1970-1971) Total CBC expenditures, including commercial programming*)

166,583,833

7.70

BBC (GREAT BRITAIN) (1970-1971) Wholly noncommercial television

183,241,000

3.29

NHK (JAPAN) (1971-1972)

300,000,000

2.90

US PUBLIC TELEVISION Total revenues (1971) Federal appropriation (1972)

165.632,100 35,000,000

0.80 0.17

US COMMERCIAL TELEVISION Station and network revenues (1970) Network revenues only (1971)

2.808,200,000 1,487,500,000

13,71 7.32

At the same time there are, of course, monopoly circles in the United States that donate to educational television, attaching considerable importance to it. They are moved not so much by philanthropy as by a desire to keep public television under their influence, seeing it as an important means of ideologically influencing the intellectual stratum of American society that is turning away from commercial television. That is where one should seek the reason why the Carnegie Foundation sponsored a study of the state of educational television, which recommended that Congress and the Administration give it the closest consideration, including subsidies. The proposal became a legislative act in 1968. A somewhat similar study was undertaken by a commission sponsored by the Ford Foun-

*) The CBC TV networks operate as commercial services for parts of each broadcast day, earning $ 42.8 million toward system costs. Parliament grants support of $ 166 million.

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advertisers, who see them only as a base on which to thread the goods they are poshing.

The invasion of advertising irritates viewers and arouses public indignation. Opinion polls show that, whereas in 1965 only 20 per cent of the public favoured a drastic reduction of TV advertising, by the early 70s more than half of those polled felt so. But the TV owners remain impervious to protest.

Advertisement plays a multiple role in the system of the capitalist press, radio and television. It is not only the main source of revenue. It is also a lever that ensures the correct ideological tuning of the whole mass media complex.

A sameness of fundamental class interests of the owners of broadcasting companies and the powerful monopoly groups, for whom the incumbent administration speaks, accounts for commercial television's constant drive to cement the American way of life.

One hundred corporations, most of them in the top hundred of U. S. monopoly business, pay 85 per cent of the television advertisement revenues. Reciprocally, those 100 biggest corporations, which control more than half of total assets in the manufacturing industry and have an overwhelming share of government military and civilian contracts, carry 2/3 of their advertising over television. As Nicholas Johnson, former member of the Federal Communications Commission, noted, the presidents of these hundred concerns, together with the network owners, decide what the people will be informed or-kept ignorant of via their television screens.^^2^^)

The same idea is voiced more explicitly by Yale University President K. Brewster, who says that the concentration of economic and political power over public opinion creates something like a closed circuit. The politicians must get money from the corporations to pay the networks for enormously expensive TV time. The corporations that buy TV advertising time set the tune for the networks. And the networks have to cooperate with influential politicians of both main parties to make sure of their broadcasting licences. The ``open'' society, says Brewster, seems to be closing as a consequence of not a conspiracy but of mutual dependence.^^3^^) The message is clear; The voice of television is the voice of big business and the federal government.

Most commercial television stations---there were more than 700 in 1973---are affiliated with one of the three major national networks: CBS, NBC or ABC, who supply them with national and world news programmes, interviews and commentaries, documentaries,

theatrical, concert programmes and sports coverages that only the national networks can afford to feature and pay for. The national networks also pay affiliated stations for carrying their programmes. That is because the greater the number of affiliated stations a national network can boast the more it charges for every second and minute of advertising time. Normally one minute of television time may cost an advertiser $ 30,000; a minute of evening "prime time" may cost as much as $ 50,000 or 60,000. And General Motors paid ABC $ 150,000 for every minute of advertising its cars during a showing of the film "Patton.''

Hence the fierce competitive struggle in which the three networks are locked. The most tasty morsels are, of course, stations located in densely populated metropolitan areas or "top TV markets." Total advertising revenues of television are in the neighbourhood of $ 5 billion. As stations in "top markets" are the best earnesr, they are at a premium as affiliates for the big networks.

One corporation can have no more than seven television stations of its own. The three national networks with the stations directly owned by them take in more than one-half of the total profits of the whole television industry.

They share their dominant positions in the field of other companies owning several TV stations. As in the newspaper business, they are called ``chains'', and the largest are Cox Broadcasting Corporation, Taft Broadcasting Company, Storer, Westinghouse, to name but a few.

Annual revenues of CBS, one of the biggest networks, is more than one billion dollars. It has 215 affiliated television stations and approximately as many affiliated radio stations. It has more than 25,000 employees, and lately has begun diversifying its business outside broadcasting. The economic crisis of 1974-1976 did not affect CBS. "While other corporations, many of CBS size and larger, are scrambling around desperately trying to find enough operating capital in a depressed money-tight economy," wrote the English GUARDIAN, "CBS is sitting on a nest egg of about $ 170 million in cash. Its biggest problem is not where to find dollars, but how to spend them.''^^4^^)

CBS was started as a radio network in the 20s by William Paley, a former cigar advertising manager (his father owned a cigar manufacturing company). It also sold news and entertainment programmes to other stations. Then came television, which Paley felt had the promise of a gold mine. But as the law restricted the number of broadcasting stations that could be acquired by one company,

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Paley added them to his network as affiliates. Profits continued to rise, and CBS embarked on diversification. In 1964 it paid $ 13.2 million for the New York Yankees baseball club, in 1967 it acquired the textbook publishing house of Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Inc. and in 1968 it took over W. B. Sauders Co., a leading publisher of medical literature. In those years, too, CBS became a major producer of records and tape recordings and also acquired a number of toy, souvenir, hobbycraft and handicraft businesses.

At the end of 1966. I was with a group of journalists at the Texas ranch of then President Lyndon Johnson. In the sitting room our host showed us an inlaid cocktail table, a present from CBS president Frank Stanton. It was a symbolic present. They were not only friends but also partners in business and politics.

Johnson owned the biggest radio and TV station in Austin, capital of Texas, and it was an affiliate of CBS. The network plugged for Johnson's foreign and domestic policies. The CBS TV news service was headed then by Fred Friendly. In 1966 he was dismissed for challenging a decision by Paley and Stanton not to provide CBS coverage of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearings on Vietnam: they were objectionable to Johnson and, consequently, to the network. By 1971 Friendly, already a professor of journalism at Columbia University, was writing that since 1964 the press and television had committed the "inexcusable crime" of fanning chauvinistic psychosis and war hysteria and drawing the country into the "dirty war" in Vietnam.

With the changes in attitudes and views towards the war in Vietnam and Johnson's forced exit from the political scene, CBS undertook a policy review of its own. Formerly, in line with other networks, it had maintained a virtual blackout on antiwar demonstrations. In 1969-1971 it could no longer ignore them - and was at once shrilly accused of ``liberalism'' by then Vice President Spiro Agnew. Other ``liberals'' in the mass media were also ^ targets of Agnew vituperation. The failure of American imperialism's Vietnam policy and aggravation of domestic socio-economic problems caused a public schism which cut through monopoly circles as well, interests which, like CBS, had no fingers in the cake of military orders attacked the military-industrial complex and called upon the administration to slash the military budget and use the money released to tackle urgent problems in the name of bailing out capitalism.

CBS's main competitor, the NBC network, remains firmly in the other monopoly camp and keeps plugging for the arms race. The reasons for its stand are made clear by a review of NBC history.

A network of five TV stations of its own and 215 affiliates and about as many radio stations, it is itself a subsidiary of RCA (Radio Corporation of America).

When RCA was set up in 1919, one of its first customers was the U. S. Navy, for which it manufactured vast quantities of radio transmitters, receivers and other communications equipment. The company's zeal did not go unnoticed, and when the Navy used the taxpayer's money to build a large factory for manufacturing vacuum tubes, RCA was later given the option of acquiring it for a song. A major part in assuring the corporation's ascent and prosperity was played by the Morgan banking house. Their liaison dates back to 1929, when Owen Young, then chairman of the RCA Board of Directors, was, together with New York bankers Morgan and Lamont, a member of the U. S. delegation in negotiations with Hjalmar Schacht, who represented Germany at the reparations talks. The delegation's chief counsel was RCA vice president David Sarnoff. It was he who during the negotiations put forward the programme for the revival of German militarism that later became known as the "Young plan." In fact, Schacht had initially suggested calling it the Sarnoff plan, but the young businessman deemed it more prudent to remain in the wings for the time being and not deprive Young of the "honour." The letter's gratitude was forthcoming, and soon after their return home from the talks Young made Sarnoff RCA president.

It is worth mentioning as a historical aside that when, in 1945, General Lucius D. Clay, commander of U. S. forces in occupied Germany, and his deputy General Draper entered Schacht's suburban villa near Berlin to arrest him as a Nazi criminal, he immediately declared that he had never been anti-American. As proof he led the generals to the only portrait adorning the walls of his study. It was Sarnoff's, embellished with a warm inscription.

In the post-war years the owner of RCA, with the rank of brigadier general and a senior officer of the occupation authorities, did a lot to help the revival of militarism in Western Germany. For the corporation and the Sarnoff family, which came to own it, the Second World War was a source of fabulous profits, its assets rising from tens of millions of dollars at the outbreak of the war to hundreds of millions by the time it was over. Ten years later they passed the billion mark and are now approaching four billions. Sarnoff's empire includes, besides NBC, more than 50 factories, dozens of laboratories which design and produce a wide range of missile, rocket, space-ship, aircraft, naval, comuputer and other components.

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David Sarnoffs services earned him, as I pointed out, a general's rank, which strengthened his Pentagon sympathies. He was charged with important assignments involving plans for the modernization and reconstruction of the U. S. Armed Forces. In 1946, Sarnoff setup for the Armed Forces a Communications and Electronics Association and became its president. Throughout the "cold war" Sarnoff was a freqent caller at the White House, offering advice and writing memos on how to carry on the "struggle against communism" and subvert the socialist countries from inside and out. He is regarded as the ``godfather'' of the Voice of America radio station. Sarnoff died several years ago, but his spirit continues to hover over RCA and NBC. The concerns, headed for a long time by his son, continued to plug for continuation of the nuclear and missiles race and against detente.

A few words regarding the television "chains.''

Cox Broadcasting Corporation, for example, owns TV stations in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Dayton, and Charlotte, all in the top thirty markets. Four of its stations are NBC affiliates, and the San Francisco station is claimed to be independent because of no affiliation contracts with networks. As a rule this means a station is fully supported by local advertising, has no need for guaranteed network revenues, and consequently, is free to contract programmes from different networks.

Taft Broadcasting Company has seven TV stations, in Birmingham, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Columbus, Kansas City, Philadelphia, and Scranton Wilkes-Barre. Formerly the Taft stations had, as affiliates, recourse to NBC programmes. Then ABC offered Taft larger revenues, and even though ABC broadcasts are rated least popular of the three networks, the temptation of cash proved stronger and NBC lost seven affiliates.

Monopolization and concentration of ownership is as intensive in the TV business as in the newspaper business. The table^^5^^) below, though ending with the year 1967, shows the growth trends of TV chains.

Another expanding form of monopoly is the concentration of newspapers, TV and radio stations in the same hands. Cross-media ownership of print and broadcasting properties has produced a new type of conglomerate. Robert Bishop of the University of Michigan estimates the combined holdings of groups, cross-media owners, conglomerates, and firms related to the mass media encompass 77 per cent of TV stations, 58 per cent of daily newspapers, and 28 per cent of radio stations.^^6^^)

Size of Chain

Number of Chain Owners 1956 1967

7 stations

0 2

6 stations

3 8

5 stations

4 19

4 stations

5 21

3 stations

22 34

2 stations

46 63

Tota

80 147

To former Vice President Spiro Agnew belong the words that powerful public information tools are being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. His predecessor as Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, voiced the alarm (true, when he was already out of office) about "excessive concentration of property in the information sphere" and suggested considering a ban on ownership of both a newspaper and TV station in one hands in the same city.

Whatever the motivations behind those statements, they are graphic proof of the subordination of the U. S. mass media to a handful of magnates - the media barons, Bishop calls them. As for the suggestion of Humphrey and others that cross-media ownership be banned, it has little chance of ever getting off the ground. That this is so is illustrated by a number of examples.

In the spring of 1974, the Justice Department asked the Federal Communications Commission to give cross-media owners five to eight years in which to go shopping for a TV station or newspaper away from home, acquire it, and then divest itself of one news vehicle in the city where it has interests in both media. The FCC agreed, drew up a list of press-cum-broadcasting interests accounting for 80 per cent of the market in their respective towns and asked them to divest themselves of one of the media. The trick, however, was that the list included only 16 relatively small conglomerates; all the others were free to continue their operations.^^7^^) The whole affair is convincing proof that the FCC, whose declared task is public supervision of "the air which belongs to the public", is in fact at the beck and call of monopoly interests.

Television in the United States is first and foremost a tool of class interests. A meticulously devised licensing system supervised by the FCC ensures that only duly screened, reliable representatives of the

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not give an objective view to the American public.''^^3^^) He began his drive for an "objective view" by firing editors and journalists from his newly acquired holdings (despite assurances to UPI of keeping them). Within less than two years, the TVN directorship was renewed three more times, and there was at least one mass firing of news staffers. The campaign for ``objectivity'' ended with the appointment of one Jack Wilson to head the television service.

Jack's career with Coors began as an assistant to an executive vice-president of the company. His advance along the business ladder was accompanied by a similar ascent in the conservative world. He was made a trustee of the Heritage Foundation, which gives financial support to the American Conservative Union. Blinded by hatred towards anything progressive, the conservatives fan anticommunist hysteria and view with suspicion all people of progressive views, fighters for the rights of Black Americans, and champions of peace. Here, for example, is what Wilson had to say of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King and his successor as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a member of the Presidential Committee of the World Peace Council. "Martin Luther King," Wilson wrote in a memorandum to Joe Coors, "was an avowed communist revolutionary. It is not necessary for us to cover him or any of his subordinates (Abernathy) just because the other networks do so. We are going to be different - if we are going to be the same then we are going to continue to cover all of the communist stories and carry all of their lines.''^^9^^) During Soviet-American summit meetings Wilson, instructed TVN to play down the Soviet Union, downgrade it vis-a-vis the United States, suggesting the Soviet Union cannot be treated as an equal partner of the United States in the talks, etc.

Coors, and Wilson with him, want TVN to become the fourth national TV network. Not content with poisoning the minds of Americans with hatred themselves, they would like to pressure the other three networks into more conservative positions. Such pressure methods have been employed before by big business and the federal authorities, with satisfactory results. This nurtures the hopes of Coors and Wilson, who are itching to get firmly onto the small screen.

Huge advertisement revenues make television one of the most lucrative businesses in the capitalist economy. No one knows the exact amounts because, as in other spheres of business, the TV tycoons find ways of tax evasion and concealing substantial portions of their incomes. Published company reports unabashedly

capitalist class loyal to monopoly ideals can become owners of TV broadcasting facilities.

Such an authority on mass communications as the COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW has noted that, as a class, the owners of the broadcasting industry, like the newspaper tycoons, are largely conservative. Not unnaturally, they seethe preservation and strengthening of the state-monopoly system as their main task.

The talk about the ``liberalism'' of the three television networks is but a reflection of the political jockeying for influence over them among various monopoly interests. And lately efforts to strengthen their conservative leanings have been most apparent.

Businessman and politician William Buckley, Jr. began by setting up the NATIONAL REVIEW magazine, a mouthpiece of rabid reaction and anti-communism. Later he acquired the Starr Broadcasting Group.

The Mormon Church, based mainly in the state of Utah, owns papers, two TV and eleven radio stations. It also owns stock in the Chandler Times Mirror chain and has invested in other broadcasting corporations.

Currently a sustained invasion of the television business is being conducted by Joseph Coors, one of the major ideologues of the conservative extreme right. Who is he? Together with his brother William he owns a giant porcelain manufacturing operation, a container company, a construction company, a trucking company; they also have invested in extensive agricultural and mineral holdings. But they are best known for their brewery product: Coors beer is considered one of the best brands in the western United States. It has cornered 41 per cent of the market in California, 68 per cent in Oklahoma. In 1974, Coors acquired United Press International's television service, Television News, inc. (TVN), as it is now called. With no broadcasting outlets of its own, TVN, like the three national networks, supplies recorded news and features to subscribing TV stations. It caters to 40 subscribers in all major cities of the United States. Coors is leading efforts in the United States to transmit TVN programmes via telecommunications satellite (the three big networks use telephone channels), building a network of ground relay stations in key areas around the country from which to deliver to neighbouring areas.

Why did brewers decide to invest in television? To advertise beer? Certainly not. Joseph Coors explains the move in carefully couched words: "(We) got into it because of our strong belief that network news is slanted to the liberal left side of the spectrum and does

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conceal considerable sums. Like the newspaper publishers, the broadcasting companies keep independent economists and researchers away from their books. Such an expert on broadcasting as Nicholas Johnson, former member of the FCC, considers that TV profits are as high as 90 to 100 per cent.

The quest for advertisement revenues impels the three networks to continuously hunt for ways and means of winning more viewers. This is necessitated by the fact that special private organizations keep coming up with estimates of the television audiences on various programmes, and it is that, not artistic quality, the actors' talents, or a producers finds, that determines their fate. If a programme has a large audience (that is, potential buyers of goods) it is supported by the advertisers, if not its life on the screen is short indeed.

The bulk of American TV broadcasts are designed for the " average American." They are fast-moving, spectacular and flamboyant, the best Hollywood and travelling foreign stars are invited to take part; added spice may be injected by having some well-known politician hammer out a few bars on a piano or dance a few steps (for adequate remuneration, of course). The catchy numbers, interspersed with less catchy advertisements, have the sole purpose of keeping the viewer glued to the screen. They claim neither education nor uplift, all they do is bedazzle and stun, riveting attention to a halucinatory world of thoughtless entertainment and semi-clothed pornography. In a book with the ironic title "The People Machine", former TV journalist Robert MacNeil writes: "Television is the machine through which American people are now reached, persuaded and nominally informed more extensively and homogeneously than ever before ... a machine to manufacture reassurance for troubled Americans ... to disconnect the audience from uncomfortable realities, to lull it on a sea of gentle inconsequence---and then to sell it deodorant.''^^10^^)

In the idiom of art critics and sociologists that function of television goes by the name of escapism. The aesthetic and ideological test of escapism in the American press and motion pictures has convinced bourgeois leaders of its merits as an excellent bait for people worn down by daily cares and worries and subconsciously seeking "escape from reality." The recipes for distracting people from troublesome social problems call for newspapers and magazines to fill their pages with social gossip and inconsequential trivia. In the 20s cowboys invaded the screen en masse in a carefully planned and executed onslaught: brave, undaunted, eternally

on /the move in quest of wealth, freedom and happiness---the basic ingredients of the "American dream"---forever pushing back the storyland frontiers of the Far West. Television was quick to grasp and carry via VHP into every home the temptation to forget the present, submerge in fantasy, nostalgically reminisce about the "good old days", or dream of a future snug little world of one's own conjured up by advertisements of cosy furniture, plush carpets, sparkling cars and neatly clipped lawns.

The escapism of the last two decades is liberally spiced with the mounting cult of sex bordering on the pornographic. But when in 1975 nine per cent of the workforce - 8.5 million Americans---found themselves without jobs, and confidence in the future began rapidly dwindling among their more fortunate brethren, the magicians of escapism started to cut back on sex images in advertisement and promotion and seek more appropriate means of helping to market goods.

A hale old man looks out from the screen to inform the TV viewer that he had some pretty bad days during the depression, he'd gone hungry and was near despair - but now he's got nothing to fear because some of his money is safe in such-and-such a bank.

Taking a different tack, industrial corporations extol their products as money-savers ideal for weathering hard times---so hurry up and buy them. Thus, Mennen Skin Bracer, which for years had been advertised as an energiser, now turns out to be a .bargain. Campbell's Soup advertises its canned goods to the refrain, " Campbell's in the cupboard's like money in the bank" while a soup can with a, combination safe dial appears on the screen, yielding a jackpot of coins.

Here is a 30-second commercial sponsored by a group of finance and industrial companies. It shows a lonely bull set against a prairie sunrise. The voice of the announcer tells us: "We believe America's economy has the strength to endure hard times - and come back even stronger." Whereupon a huge herd of bulls gallops along the prairie. The galloping is supposed to breed confidence in the American economy . ..

Escapism is prized even more in entertainment programmes. One of the best methods of audience attraction is serial productions. "The Virginian", for instance, is comprised of 373 half-hour segments. To see all the episodes without interruption one would have to watch TV for more than two weeks, day and night. ``Bonanza'', another "family drama", lasts 359 hours, "Peyton Place" has 514 episodes.

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``Situation comedy" heroine Lucille Ball made her CBS debut in 1951 with the weekly programme "I love Lucy." In 1962, she carried on with "The Lucy Show", then changed to "Here's Lucy" in 1968. The years go by, Miss Ball herself passes 40, 50, then 60 - but Lucy of the screen is still the nice young girl of before. Incidentally, the CBS scandal mentioned before that resulted in the dismissal of news service president Fred Friendly had also involved Lucille Ball: CBS decided not to carry the Senate Vietnam hearings because they interfered with Lucy's programme, which, it was deemed, was better for the viewer than Vietnam.

A special category of TV viewers in the United States are the late-night ``owls'' who stay up till two or three in the morning. Their idol is Johnny Carson, who for 14 years has been appearing every day at 11.30 p. m. on NBC channels to clown until 1 a. m. He has aged, as have his ``owls'', but his clowning goes on.

Imitators of Johnny Carson are plentiful, competing for the ``owls'" attention: after all every ``owl'' - never forget - is a potential buyer. And Johnny Carson's show is liberally spliced with advertisements. So far none of Johnny's imitators have been able to match his popularity, for which NBC pays him a million dollars a year.

Incidentally, imitation is a typical aspect of the news and entertainment policies of TV networks and stations. ABC president Leonard Goldenson in a fit of frankness once decried the medium's lack of creative growth, deplored the networks' relentless imitation of their own programme successes.^^11^^)

Such confessions have been made by other leading figures in American television---though they do not seem to have led to any noticeable improvements. An apt characterisation of television broadcasting in the United States was given by an English student of the problem, Anthony Smith: "The whole broadcasting culture which has resulted from the efforts of a few major business interests to grasp the full-time attention of the entire middle range of the public." "The enormous and diverse system of American television is based on an extreme version of the ideal of culture freedom, but provides for the overwhelming mass of American viewers and listeners a stultifying sameness." It has "scores of independent programme-making organisations with limitless capital, fabulous quantities of writing talent. . . Yet the end-product betrays the signs of an appalling cultural tyranny . . . The creative worker is thus turned into businessman competing with other businessmen." "... the purest and most abstract conceptions of freedom of ex-

pression (are placed) inside a high-pressured commercial tyranny.''^^12^^)

The "stultifying sameness" and "commercial tyranny" are especially apparent in American television's portrayals of real and imagined worlds of violence.

Murder, robbery, rape and other crimes are invariably front-page news in American newspapers. Magazines present the same fare with psychological seasoning. As the editors see it, the ``dark'', violent side of human nature is ideal "human interest" entertainment. However, pride of place as far as depicting violence is concerned goes, beyond doubt, to commercial television.

An analysis of TV programmes during evening "prime time" undertaken by Dean George Gerbner of the Annenberg School of Communications of Philadelphia University, produced some remarkable figures. In the week of October 1-7, 1967, the three television networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC) transmitted 96 plays in 64 hours of broadcasting time. During the same week in 1968 the networks transmited 87 plays in 58~^^1^^/2 hours. In that total 455 characters played major parts, 241 of which were violent. These occured in 149 plays, filling 105 programme hours, which contained a total of 872 violent episodes. In 112 plays (79 programme hours) violence was significant to the plot. These plays included 1,215 separate violent encounters.^^13^^)

The action in the American fictional television world of violence is usually set in the past or the future. Foreigners and non-whites are more violent than white Americans, but pay much more dearly for thejr actions. Legality is seldom portrayed as being violated unless criminal themes are involved, in which case violence is often a consequence of due process of law. Violence is egoistic in character and directed against fortuitous or helpless persons. Television drama, Gerbner notes, projects America as a violent country, a world of many violent strangers, with a mostly violent past and a totally violent future.

Television viewers are increasingly less able to distinguish between fictionalized violence and documentary violence, between reality and fiction. It was hard for Americans to accept the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers or the reality of the Vietnam war, but on the other hand, those events were hardly distinguishable from their daily television fare. Violence in television plays is becoming increasingly realistic while in a documentary news feature it seems more and more like fiction, which inevitably blurs the viewer's perception. The effects of violence on the young are especially bad, poi-

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political groups behind them to take over television, with its promise of huge commercial and political dividends.

According to sociologists, television plays a prime part in moulding the views and opinions, norms of behaviour and values, likes and dislikes of Americans---much more than school, college, the press, or the church. The ruling circles see it, accordingly, as a most effective means of fostering anti-communism and the myth of the superiority of the "American way of life.''

The first few TV stations broadcasting in Spanish appeared in New York and Los Angeles, catering for Puerto Ricans and Chicanes (Mexican Americans), only in the early 70s. Other ethnic minorities have no way of organizing TV programmes in their own languages, the millions of Black Americans have virtually no TV outlets of their own either. Thus, the homogeneous character of U. S. television tends to impress the dominant WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) cultural and historical values and norms on the whole population.

As mentioned before, there are no national newspapers in the United States, but the gap is amply filled by national magazines and TV networks. Television gives preference to national advertisements, national events, national problems, national leaders, and the socalled mass culture. Such factors as urbanisation, higher education standards, conscription, and the mass media have, over the past years, made U. S. society "more compact and homogeneous," as some American demographers and ethnographers put it. It is their view that television played a significant part in "turning the United States into a single, coast-to-coast community." •

Professor Robert E. Gilbert considers that television has contributed to the formation of a national community, insofar as it has brought all parts of the nation together through a network of instantaneous visual communication.^^16^^)

It is, however, difficult to accept Gilbert's view that television helps to remove "group contradictions", especially as by groups he means classes.

Another viewpoint in support of U. S. television claims that it makes for "greater democracy." The appearance of politicians, philosophers and other celebrities on the "small screen" is lauded as "phosphorescent visits" into every home. But obviously, such a ``visit'' does nothing to place the viewer watching television in a slum dwelling and the millionaire ``visiting'' him via the TV screen on an equal footing in the social hierarchy of bourgeiois society.

To make a "phosphorescent visit" a politician must pay a substantial sum to the TV owners. A 30-minute address costs $ 125,000.

soning their thoughts and souls and often pushing them to crime. It is not accidental that public figures accuse the mass media of contributing to the growing crime rate. Attempts by Congress to restrain the owners of the mass media, especially television, are in vain. Violence continues to fill the television screens.

In an interview with U. S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, writer and TV commentator Alistair Cooke said: "(Television) images overwhelm our ability to make judgments or handle our government and our lives." "I think that's the reason for the sort of low-key hysteria . . . that a lot of us live in." "Television can also spark trouble, especially among sick people. It can trigger fashions---whether in 'streaking^^1^^ or in kidnapping. ...Television (can give) the imagination to plan or contemplate violent acts . . . The people who bear the responsibility for the programmes are the network presidents and advertising agencies . . . We often forget that in our country the primary function of television is that of a merchant. But people forget that if gun play and neurotic families sell more detegrents than classical drama and documentaries on saving our landscape, they'll get gun play and serials . . . Whether we like it or not ( television) does encourage cynicism . . . Many people give up and slump into cynicism.''^^14^^)

There are, however, people not entirely displeased with the portrayal of violence: reactionary and military circles, to be precise. They would like to have young Americans determined and ruthless enough to carry out their ambitious plans. There are more than 200 million firearms in private possession in the United States; they are sold not only in sports or hunters' shops, but in special stores displaying a wide range of submachine guns, revolvers, machine guns, mortars, and ammunition to match, most of them army surpluses no longer needed by the Pentagon. Such ultra-reactionary organisations as the Minutemen and the John Birch Society call on people to acquire arms in order to deal with Reds, Blacks, Indians and others deemed hostile or harmful to "the American way of life." With television catering to the more violent instincts of human nature, these weapons are often used "for kicks" or juvenile larceny. "As we have developed into a society whose most prominent business is violence," writes former Senator Fulbright, "... one of the leading professions inevitably is soldiering.''^^15^^)

The artfully created but artificial magnetism of commercial advertising and entertainment on television has helped make it the idol of the ``average'', "100-percent" American. All the greater the incentive for the broadcasting networks and the monopoly and

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In the 60s a candidate for public office had to pay $ 36,000 for a one-minute promotion spot. Candidates for all offices - President, Senator, Representative, Governor---regard television as the most effective means of conducting an election campaign. In 1972, the candidates of the two main bourgeois parties, Democratic and Republican, spent more than $ 40 million among themselves---and this does not include the Presidential candidates, who evidently spent even more. With television advertising getting more and more expensive with each passing year, the present state of affairs favours continued political centralization and perpetuates the power of the two main parties by virtually barring other parties access to the electorate via the "small screen.''

Television has helped mankind push back the frontiers of knowledge. It has made people eye-witnesses of, and in many ways participants in, exciting events. It gives them access to a fuller, more versatile and interesting life. No one can deny American contributions to television as a technological system, an art and a cultural phenomenon. In the last few years there has been a trend away from the dogma's of anti-communism. Many people working in American television would like to see it placed at the service of the society, to see it more responsive to the needs of the working people. But their voice is muted. The greed of the owners of U. S. television pushes them into the service of Mammon and subordinates television to vulgar material objectives having nothing in common with culture, art or knowledge. Although the ideas of peaceful coexistence and friendship of peoples are making increasing headway all over the world, American television continues to serve forces opposed to peace, democracy and progress. The cult of violence, sadism, and pornography spread by television leads to the distortion of many values and moral concepts, crippling the minds and souls of substantial segments of the younger generations.

In writing this book I had set myself the limited task of showing how the mass media operate in America, with the American public in mind. However, an account of American television would be incomplete without at least a cursory mention of the efforts to promote its wares in other countries. One of the motivations is, of course, profit. I firmly believe, however, that profit is not the dominant motive behind commercial, to say nothing of government, exports of television produce. The federal government is represented in the field primarily by the United States Information Agency (USIA), a State Department appendage which annually circulates 1,700 TV

programmes in 62 languages in more than a hundred countries, all of them free and all geared to U. S. propaganda needs.

The commercial networks frequently take only token payments from foreign stations. Thus, one episode of "Peyton Place" (and, remember, there are 514), production of which costs $ 100,000 in the United States, fetches its owners a mere $ 500 in Finland. Prices are even lower (if not waived altogether) for developing countries of Asia and Africa, and even for some Latin American TV stations. True, in Latin America many stations have North American owners and profit there plays an important part. All in all, however, TV exports from the U. S. in 1971 totalled $ 85 million, or only 0.3 per cent of the revenue made by commercial television inside the country.

As a consequence of this policy of dumping, to put it mildly, TV exports from the United States reach 161 countries. Annually programmes totalling 100,000 to 200,000 hours of viewing time are distributed. In the last few years the expansion of U. S. television and other mass information and cultural media in Western Europe has been running into difficulties. Attendance of American films has been declining in France and other countries. Explaining the reason, a French film distributor said: "It may be that a lot of people no longer need the kind of escapes that American films give them.''^^17^^) Wolfram Henye, a West German importer of American news and entertainment products, says that in the 1940s and 1950s America "was considered a country where everything functioned, a 'clean democracy' ... To a Europe sick of its own failures, it seemed stable, creative. Then came the assassinations---the Kennedys and Martin.Luther King---the race riots, the Vietnam war, My Lai,*) the weakening of the dollar and now Watergate. "It was blind love," Mr. Henye said, "and when you fall out of love everything seems worng with the person.''^^18^^)

Of course, such isolated setbacks do not prevent the high priests of American television from pressing for new converts. The purpose is ideological and cultural expansion, propaganda of the "American way of life." In this the profits of the TV tycoons are of secondary consideration, albeit always welcome. The prime concern is the

*) A village in South Vietnam where American soldiers in 1968 shot all the inhabitants, including old people and children. My Lai hos become a symbol of the cruelty of American soldiers in the dirty war. Significantly, al those who took part in the shootings are free today, though many representatives of U. S. public opinion feel they ought to have been punished like the Nazi war criminals by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946.

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``selling" of America, of its ideas and values, its philosophy and mass culture. Ruling imperialist circles in the United States regard television as an effective medium for winning over "minds and souls.''

c

MPETITION AND COMMERCIAL RIVALRY BETWEEN

television and the press, between the owners of different mass media, in no way prevents them from closing ranks to shape public opinion and promote bourgeois values. On this score full agreement reigns, despite tactical differences due to the political convictions and leanings of individual owners and their association with different monopoly groups.

As the news and propaganda media all see eyeball to eyeball as far as overall monopoly ideals and interests are concerned, they have no great difficulty staking out spheres of influence and penetration or delineating their respective duties and commitments. Two thirds of all Americans, for example, get practically all information and views on current politics from radio and television reports. The "more intellectual" sections seek answers to their questions in newspapers and magazines.

The .propaganda business has chosen information, news, as its main tool for reaching out to the former group. For that reports must be brief, up-to-date, matter-of-fact, with limited comment, but wellpackaged. Profesor Marshall McLuhan of Toronto University, billed by a U. S. TV GUIDE as "guru od 20th century communications theories", describes the press, radio, television and motion pictures as means of "psychological massage." A book on the subject bears the title "The Medium is the Massage." Explaining it, McLuhan says that the title points out that a medium "does something to people ... It takes hold of them . . . rules them off... bumps them around. ... It massages them.''^^1^^)

The ``massages'' for the "more intellectual" segments of the public are provided by the celebrated commentators, the highly paid syndicated columnists and humorists.slheir task is to fill the "market of ideas" with original, preferably fresh, ideas; they may be critical, and must be attractive enough to hold the attention of the reading

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public. The newspapers, wrote WASHINGTON POST editor J. R. Wiggins, are open to commentators holding different views. But their's is controlled competition, devoid of fire and passion.^^2^^)

There are also narrower targets on which various sections of the mass media are oriented. Attention to this mode of operation has been fed in recent years by the "dissolution of the masses" theory.

The "mass society" and "mas culture" theories proceed from the need to breed and satisfy the depersonalized tastes and requirements of the mass customer, the mass viewer, the mass reader. The preachers of "mass culture" declare that it has replaced demographic and social differences between different sections of the public, which have, allegedly, become irrelevant.

The authors of the "dissolution of the masses" theory claim that currently there is a reverse process of sorts, a "fragmentation of the mass audience and the media." According to this view, the mass media must adapt themselves to certain groups according to political preference, age, sex, income, professional or cultural requirements, and interests. The selection of material and mode of presentation is designed to produce a specific audience reaction in the form of a greater or lesser ``identification'' with the medium involved .

In this connection great expectations are placed in the so-called specialty magazines and the possibility of their becoming mass publications. Meanwhile existing mass magazines are beginning to appear in different editions addressed to businessmen, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, etc.

Significantly, although the "dissolution of the masses" theory was born on Madison Avenue, that is, the centre of the American advertising business, its objective is not only to assure the greatest possible returns on advertising investment, but to raise the social and ideological effectiveness of the mass media as well. Advertising, writes professor Herbert Schiller of California University, is an important means of manipulating public opinion in the hands of monopolies, multinational corporations in the first place.^^3^^) Through its intermediary - Madison Avenue - big business notifies the mass media: We shall invest (in other words, advertise) only in those organs of the press, radio and television that most ably promote our ideas and have the greatest hold over various population groups.

The ``masseures'' entrusted with the job of providing " psychological massage" are equipped with the most up-to-date technologies and techniques, but in using them they employ methods and means

evolved over decades and centuries of American bourgeois journalism.

After one of the first news conferences I attended in Washington I asked an American journalist what he thought of a political statement that had just been made. "Why, nothing," he said. ``I'm not paid to think, only to report what I heard.''

Subsequently I heard the same sentiments repeated frequently. It is said that a reporter needs his feet to feed himself, but in the United States the words have another meaning.

``The first requirement (of a reporter)," Joseph Alsop admonished students of journalism at the University of Minnesota, "is a good pair of feet. The feet are just about as important as the head, particularly for a political reporter.''^^4^^)

The daily quota of an AP reporter covering the Congress is 5,000 words. In the press gallery above the Senate President he has a place next to his chief competitor, the UPI correspondent. Whispering into a highly sensitive telephone mouthpiece, he reports on the proceedings while at the same time contriving to jot down the words of the Senators reaching him from the barrel-like hall. Every once and a while, after taking down a legislators' words, he hands the receiver to another AP man and hurries to the agency's office next to the gallery.

``If I got to think about a story at all, it was in the few steps running from a Senate hearing room to the phone booth," John Fischer, editor of HARPER'S MAGAZINE, confided the secrets of his trade to the Minnesota students, speaking of the time when he was the Associated Press reporter in Washington. "I was constantly reporting what somebody said, even if I knew that it was untrue, misleading or self-serving, there was no way within the canons of press association work that I could indicate that a senator or witness before a Senate Committee was telling a damn lie.''^^5^^)

Reflecting on Fischer's confession, one cannot help wondering at the ease with which a person can deliberately mislead the hundreds of millions of readers of the thousands of newspapers in the United States and other continents that are AP subscribers.

A journalist is not a surgeon, they say in the United States, and his scalpel is not sterilized. Realizing the untenability of such a justification, newspaper publishers and editors hasten to add that following a falsehood a reporter may well chance on a truth, which he will also report. What can one say to that? Perhaps the best answer was given by Mark Twain, who remarked that a lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

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Paradoxically, many American editors are proud of the "canons of press association work" handed down from one generation to another, and they continue to file their ``objective'' and ``exact'' reports by telegraph, radio and telephone. An assessment of that substitute of truth was offered by TV commentator Eric Sevareid. "Our rigid formulas of so-called objectivity . . . have given the lie the same prominence and impact that truth is given; they have elevated the influence of fools to that of wise men; the ignorant to the level of the learned; the evil to the level of the good.''^^6^^)

The fact is that there is often no difference between ``objectivity'' and lies. Both are useful means of confusing the mass consciousness, misleading it with respect to the motivations and actions of corporations, associations and authorities.

These canons have been reaffirmed by Pentagon practice, for which a convenient theory was enunciated by Arthur Sylvester when he was chief information officer for the Department of Defence. The government, he said, has an "inherent right... to lie to save itself.''^^7^^) His successor Phil Goulding confessed after resigning that for four years he had "misled and misinformed the American people a good many times.''^^3^^) Ris justification, though, is that government propaganda and information services are sometimes slow and imperfect and have no alternative but to relay to the press the incorrect or falsified reports coming from field commanders.

And what do journalists think of a government agency that deliberately lies to them? "News management has its legitimate side," declared WASHINGTON EVENING STAR columnist Richard Fryklund going on to explain that "another aspect of news management can be outright lying.''^^9^^) "Lying," echoed CBC diplomatic correspondent Marvin Calb, "is a legitimate part of the defence mechanism of the administration, and the reporter goes along with it when in his opinion it is in the national interest.''^^10^^)

Thus, the American mass media for all practical purposes are willing purveyors of deliberate lies. Which gave David Wise, a wellknown author and political writer, the grounds to declare at Congressional hearings on "freedom of information" in 1971: "The American people have not been told the truth . . . We now have a system of institutionalized lying.''^^11^^)

The mass media are an important, if not the main, component of that system. In words they protest against misinforming the public. But only in words. For if they were really opposed to it they wouldn't have become a mechanism for the "management of news." How is this management effected?

After the end of World War II, U. S. ruling circles urgently needed to foster anti-communist sentiment in the country so as to have a justification for their global imperialist policies abroad and for attacking the rights of their own people at home. But how was that to be achieved if, in the course of the joint struggle against Hitler fascism and Japanese militarism, the American people had come to like and trust the Soviet people?

``There was," write Joseph and Stewart Alsop in their book "The Reporter's Trade", "... a great need to correct the American public's wartime delusions about the character and purposes of their former Russian ally; and it had to be done just as rapidly as possible. So the reporters who rode the post-war conference circuit, and the officials on the second level like Charles E. Bohlen and George F. Kennan and Benjamin V. Cohen, and Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg and Senator Tom Connolly and Secretary (of State) James F. Byrnes himself, all travelled together and worked together and lived together, forming the kind of cosy family that must be formed by a small, well-run, itinerant circus. The result was a swiftly altered, newly realistic American public opinion concerning Soviet purposes. The whole experience rather finely proved how wise officials, working with responsible newspapermen with the common aim of informing the 'public, can achieve this vital aim with great rapidity and against rather heavy odds.''^^12^^)

That experience marked the beginning of a whole series of similar brainwashing campaigns by "wise officials" and responsible newspapermen." In all of them government propaganda remained hidden behind the smokescreen of the "free press" while forming a united front with it. To ``plant'' a needed item in the press the system of so-called background briefings was devised. They are, in effect, confidential or semi-confidential news conferences behind the closed doors of offices or private homes, exclusive clubs or army headquarters, aboard planes or yachts. Briefings are conducted by Presidents, secretaries of state, generals, admirals, CIA and FBI officials, company directors and press secretaries of various standing. The unwritten rule is for a reporter to make reference to unnamed ``officials'', ``spokesmen'', "reliable sources", or "business experts.''

Such reticence and anonymity in a publicity minded society where unabashed self-exposure is an accepted norm is not accidental. Briefings are a kind of launching pad for "trial balloons" that precede various, usually unpopular, measures in the economic, financial, military or diplomatic fields. If the reaction is favourable they are put into effect at once. If it is sharply negative there are two al-

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ternatives: either to launch a deliberate campaign to swing public opinion; or the President, or Secretary of State, or Treasury, or whoever, may publicly disassociate himself, deny, or even denounce the plans, initiatives and ideas voiced at the briefings, thereby also reaping some political benefits.

I attended some of President Johnson's briefings in November and December 1966, at his office in Austin, Texas. Much time was devoted to the draft federal budget for the 1967/1968 fiscal year. Johnson cited deliberately exaggerated expenditure figures. The newspapermen reporting them were, on Johnson's instruction, supposed to quote "administration experts." Then, as everyone knew from the experience of previous years, Johnson would submit to Congress a budget smaller by several billion dollars than the one ``drafted'' by the mythical "administration experts." Thus Johnson earned the credit of saving public funds and being concerned with reducing federal spending. In the final analysis, these artifices didn't help Johnson much, and instead of running a surplus most of his budgets had huge deficits caused by the growing costs of American imperialism's war in Vietnam.

``The number of such background discussions has been inordinately high in the Johnson administration," write W. McGaffin and E. Knoll, ". . . and particularly at times when Johnson's policies, prestige, or poll ratings appear to be slipping.''^^13^^)

It was James Reston who, back in 1955, called all these dodges and devices of the government propaganda machine "management of news." Suppression of some news and giving prominence to other, manipulation of facts and falsehood, ``leaks'', ``planted'' information, and "trial balloons" are all part of the arsenal of "news management" in the course of which, as Dan Nimmo notes, newspapermen and public relations experts are actors performing the same role of shaping public opinion.^^14^^)

The authorities decide whether to delay or hasten an important statement, whether it is made in the name of the President or a member of his cabinet. Timing---whether a news item is published in the morning, afternoon or evening, before or after the stock exchanges close, before or after national elections---is an extremely important consideration. The administration decides whether to make an announcement officially or at a briefing, whether the news be given to all or some reporters, whether the news be circulated at once or parcelled out. It decides whether an item should be published when public attention is focused on another important event or whether to wait for a lull in information.

Sometimes the authorities may deliberately create a "news vacuum" so as then to open the floodgates to information it considers important. To fan public interest in political moves the President may suddenly take off and travel half-way round the globe to meet with some prime minister, or with his own generals.

``The government," Jack Raymond noted, "can twist its announcements on a technicality, fail or refuse to answer questions for a variety of professed reasons . . . The government can even tell a lie and the reporter who hears it does not know whether the lie is an invention of a subordinate official or has been ordered at the White House.''^^15^^)

Another widely used device is official "leaks." Reporters often do not suspect an ``unwary'' official's "slip of the tongue" was quite intentional. But as frequently they know only too well that a ``leak'' was intentional.

This kind of knowledge is facilitated by the way all government agencies are increasingly courting journalists. For example, writing in the DEPARTMENT OF STATE NEWSLETTER, Barry Zorthian, former USIA chief in South Vietnam and later vice president of Time Inc., spoke of the need for the State Department to adopt a special doctrine of relations with the press. The idea, blessed by the official leadership, was to use the whole diplomatic personnel to educate the press and manage the news.^^16^^)

American diplomats - in Washington, embassies, consulates and USIA centres - "educate the press": the American and any other that cares to be educated. And as the U. S. diplomatic service is, according to many American authors,^^17^^) full of CIA agents, one can readily imagine who often has the task of "educating the press." But the CIA also guides the press quite openly, without resorting to diplomatic camouflage.

In 1966, the Washington firm Ruder and Finn, which specialises in political advertisement, conducted together with the department of journalism at the American University a pool of 500 Washington reporters to establish the "most useful" press service of any department or agency from the point of view of the Washington press corps. First place went to the State Department press service, followed by the White House and CIA, in that succession.^^18^^) What better testimony that the CIA is at least as good, if not better, than other government agencies in its efforts to use the press corps for its own ends.

The results of such close contact between reporters and the respective press services are graphically seen in the example of U. S.

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press and television coverage of the situation in Chile during the Popular Unity government of President Allende. William Buckley, Jr., whose commentaries appear, besides his own NATIONAL REVIEW and television company, in such leading papers as THE NEW YORK TIMES and INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, compared Chile with "Hitler Germany" and described Allende as "the outspoken friend of Socialist tyranny." He kept up his vilification after Allende's murder by the fascist junta and defended the CIA for using $ 8 million for economic sabotage against Allende's government.^^19^^) His defence was most outspoken: the interference was needed to save the hundreds of millions of dollars in American investments in Chile. Less conservative reporters find other justifications. "In hindsight," writes CBS News correspondent Robert Schakne in the COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, "the obvious major shortcoming in reporting from Chile . . . was the under-reporting or non-reporting of the United States campaign to `destabilize' the Allende government. . . The economic campaign against Allende, went under-reported for no beter reason ... than that economic news is often under-reported from overseas.''^^20^^)

Schakne does concede, however, that U. S. government denials of any "economic campaign" against Allende were very widely reported indeed. The whole world was aware of it, the Allende government time and again showed with documents how that campaign was being conducted, how the Inter-American Bank and other financial organisations dependent on the United States denied the Allende government loans and credits, yet American reporters in Santiago, including Robert Schakne, did not hear or see those statements. Fifteen months after Allende's death Washington reporter Jack Anderson got around to saying that the U. S. government's policy amounted to "financial strangulation" of the Allende government.^^21^^)

Another widespread method of using the mass media for the purposes mentioned earlier is the issuing of press releases. Of 38 executives of U. S. government propaganda services surveyed, 89 per cent declared that they considered press releases the most convenient and effective method of circulating information.^^22^^) The number of White House press releases has been steadily rising, from an annual average of 306 under Roosevelt, to 525 under Truman, dipping slightly to 506 under Eisenhower, then 553 under Kennedy and 1,500 under Nixon.

Whereas earlier administrations had restricted their press releases mainly to the Washington press corps, the managers of the Nixon administration's propaganda apparatus took an entirely new

approach. Every unit of the federal executive branch's propaganda machine decided what news media---papers, magazines, bulletins, radio stations---outside Washington ought to receive press releases from the point of view of being best suited for propagating the administration line, as well as for pursuing the narrower objectives of the agency concerned. On the recommendations of the respective units, press releases were addressed to the listed media, as well as to specified columnists, editorial writers and editors.

Many editors, columnists and correspondents began receiving press releases from several or many Washington agencies. I could see for myself the ``concern'' of the Washington propaganda apparatus for the local press when I was shown piles of press releases stamped by different federal .agencies in the editorial offices of newspapers in Chicago, Kansas City, and Atlanta 1 visited in 1972. And they included not only Presidential speeches, statements or letters, but also orientation material, background information, etc.

A special form of press release is magnetic tapes for radio stations and films for TV stations, a brand of "electronic propaganda" to which growing importance is attached. In the 60s, federal departments and agencies put out an annual average of 2,500 documentary films, 5.000 videotapes, 75,000 sound recordings, and 4,500 sets of projection slides. Of the documentaries, 1,500 were Pentagon productions and 1,000 were from civilian agencies.^^23^^)

The methods of work with the mass media devised by federal agencies are copied by state, county, and municipal authorities. They rely more and more on the press, radio, and television as tools for promoting policy and upholding the interests of the monopoly circles that helped them come to power. Nor do the latter lag in their exploitation of the mass media to manipulate human minds and behaviour. Every corporation, from the biggest to the smallest, has public relations staffs, which keep the hot line to the press constantly in operation.

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10

Society of Newspaper Editors begins with the words: "The primary function of newspapers is to communicate to the human race what its members do, feel and think. Journalism, therefore, demands of its practitioners the widest range of intelligence, of knowledge, and of experience, as well as natural and trained powers of observation and reasoning. To its opportunities as a chronicle are indissolubly linked its obligations as a teacher and interpreter.''^^2^^)

The objectives are lofty indeed. But the very first'canon " codifying the sound practice and just aspirations of American journalism" under the heading ``responsibility'', establishes the following work criterion: "The right of a newspaper to attract and hold readers is restricted by nothing but consideration of public welfare.''^^3^^)

Thus, subject to one vague restriction, newspapers have the unlimited right to attract and hold readers. And how are they ``attracted'', or rather snared, by America's "free press"? There are many ways. One is justified, both legally and morally, by the following philosophy: "Media are the extensions of man, and he has always relished the knowledge of the intimate details of the lives and doings of others.''^^4^^) So write David G. Clark, associate professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin, and Earl R. Hutchison, professor of English at George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, in a collection called "Mass Media and the Law. Freedom and Restraint", compiled and edited by them in 1970. They write this to explain the reason for the invasion of the private life of Americans by the press and television. Man himself, we^^1^^ see, is to blame, because he relishes the knowledge of the intimate details of the lives of others!

Invasion of private life is a problem of great concern to U. S. public opinion. Government and private surveillance, telephone tapping, electronic eavesdropping, violation of mail, spying---these and other forms and methods of invading privacy are widely protested.

Moreover, information obtained by tapping or other types of surveillance is filed by various government agencies, the Internal Revenue Service, insurance companies, and others. The Government Administration Service keeps files which contain not only biographic data, but also gossip, rumours, and characterisations about eight million persons. The Pentagon has a similar file for 14 million Americans. And the FBI has files on 158 million citizens. Sophisticated Computers are used to keep the files up-to-date and for retrieval of information. Technological achievements have brought Americans honour and glory, remarked Congressman Cornelius

HE CONCLUSION CAN THUS BE DRAWN THAT professional journalists of the U. S. capitalist press, radio, and television are subject in their daily work to constant pressures from a number of sources. There are, for one, the newspaper and magazine publishers, the television station presidents and managers, the executive editors, the public relations offices of the federal administration, local authorities, business corporations, political organisations, the church, the military-industrial complex, and so on, and so forth. In another category belong the police, courts, FBI, CIA, private-eye agencies, ultra-reactionary, and pseudo-leftist groups. Finally, there is the pressure exerted by the ``canons'' of journalism evolved by the owners of the mass media and rooted in tradition, ethical norms and standards passed from generation to generation of journalists and drummed in at universities and refresher courses. The totality of all these forms of pressure makes the journalistic profession in the United States anything but simple; the person who has chosen the trade of reporter, journalist or editor in the press, radio or television is subjected to above-average physical and moral wear and tear.

Without taking this into account it is difficult to understand statements such as the following, which appear more and more frequently in the American press: "The new power of the press has aroused much resentment, and not only among the mighty whose crime or misjudgements have been exposed. Journalists these days experience antagonism, even raw hatred.''^^1^^)

Thus wrote Anthony Lewis, a leading columnist in THE NEW YORK TIMES, on December 27, 1974. In the next chapter I shall endeavour to explain the statement regarding ``resentment'' among the "mighty." But first let us try and fathom the causes for the `` antagonism'' towards journalists among the unmighty.

The preamble to the "Canons of Journalism" of the American

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Gallacher. But they have also undercut their human dignity and threaten to dehumanize them still further. An American being served by government or private organisations with computer cards demanding payment or something else, cards with the warning inscription, "do not bend, spoil or perforate", is deprived of any guarantee that he himself may not be bent, pierced or defiled. Computers, the Congressman concludes, deprive us of our individuality, our dignity, our intimate life. (VITAL SPEECHES, June 15, 1969, Vol. XXXV, No. 17.)

It is not computers, of course, but the social system that uses such a marvel of technology to humilate and degrade its citizens. And the system is vigorously assisted by the "free press." The editorial offices of all newspapers and other news media in the United States keep so-called ``morgues''---files containing information of every conceivable kind about very many Americans. Besides, reporters have access to computerised ``morgues'' where they can get ``fascinating'' information of "human interest" to the reader. Actually it is a method of using the "free press" to discredit any person that has fallen into disfavour. But the press can also take the initiative and discredit, ridicule and destroy its victim. Professors Clark and Hutchison call the "intrusion upon private matters" a "byproduct of mass media." I would call it not a byproduct but one of the main products of the press and television. And in any case it contributes to the creation of an atmosphere defined by Clark and Hutchison in the following terms: "As the mass media thrived in an American society more closely governed, more urban and more of a huge familial complex, an insidious and, more often than not, blatant force crossed the threshold bringing disquiet, discomfort, and distress. This force - the invasion of privacy - steadily grew into a Frankenstein*) that today is one of the major concerns of its victims and the thoughtful members of the American family.''^^5^^)

These thoughtful Americans object to the airing of people's private lives in newspapers and magazines, to the invasion of privacy by television against people's will. Hundreds of law suits are brought against organs of the mass media, but as often as not those accused of violating the right of privacy get away unscathed. The newspapers and television stations can afford to hire expensive lawyers, and they mostly win libel suits. In the rare occasions when a court rules that a case of libel has been established the plaintiff

*} A monster or destructive agency that cannot be controlled and brings about the ruin of its creator (after the monster created by baron Frankenstein, a character in a novel of that name by Mary Shelley, written in 1818).

may receive monetary compensation, but this does not restore his honour or good name, for the papers do not report it to their readers.

Evidently realising the untenability of their first theses concerning the causes why newspapers are filled with items probing intimate private affairs, Clark and Hutchison come up with another one: the mass media have created a "mass society" existing on the brink of "disquiet, discomfort, and distress." The people of that society "submit readily, almost eagerly, to media invasion.''^^6^^) So it is, after all, not a Freudian relish of the "knowledge of the intimate details of the lives and doings of others" but a relish created by the mass media and encouraged by this "teacher and interpreter" in the name of attracting and holding the reading public---that is the cause of the growing antagonism towards the press on the part of Americans, who do not relish that kind of "human interest." But by attracting and holding public attention on topics of no civic interest, on the shady, the trivial, on sex, pornography, perversions, sadism, on everything over which the eyes can skim arousing nothing more serious than a smirk, a giggle, a lascivious thought, cynicism, the bourgeois mass media distract public attention from public and economic problems, from the burning issues of the society. And that is fully in keeping with the "canons of journalism", one of which, ``Independence'', states: "Freedom from all obligations ..."')

The monopolies so closely linked, as said before, with the newspaper business, and influencing it through their fellow-businessmen, the newspaper owners, seek to extend direct influence over the rank-and-file of the mass media, they strive to bribe and corrupt them.

The "canons of journalism" also proclaim: "Promotion of any private interest contrary to the general welfare, for whatever reason, is not compatible with honest journalism." We leave aside advertising, which is the promotion of private interest PAR EXCELLENCE, and which, as Congress hearings indicated, is often downright untrue. But there is a practice whereby newspapers favour regular advertisers by carrying, free of charge, articles and pictures extolling them. Nor is that all.

Lately scores and hundreds of cases have come to light (and how many haven't!) of reporters, columnists and editors receiving payments for publishing items about companies and their owners. They get cases of liquor (by no means a cheap item in the United States), gifts, free fare for themselves and their families, free recreation in exotic places, and sometimes free call-girls. The venality

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of the press, its lies, triviality, flagrant invasion of privacy and other qualities have earned it a sad reputation among Americans. Which is why the self-adulation in which the "free press" likes to engage is becoming more and more of a mockery. That is the conclusion to be drawn from Anthony Lewis's words and similar confessions. "Those of us," writes former LIFE Editor Thomas Griffith, "who were drawn to our craft believing it an exciting way to do good must now concede that our self-esteem seems not entirely to be shared by the public. In popular judgement (or so we are assured), to be a journalist is to be a man slightly suspect, a perverter of the truth, an invader of privacy, a disturber of the peace, a sensationalist, a simplifier.''^^6^^)

But wasn't that always the case, judging by Thomas Jefferson's remarks which were quoted in the second chapter of this book?

An especially great blow to the credibility of the mass media in the eyes of the American public was dealt by its coverage of the war in Vietnam. It is worth a more detailed examination.

The secret Pentagon Papers relating to the war and published, as is known, by the major newspapers in 1971, revealed that President Johnson and his closest advisers had frequently resorted to Aesopean language, even in the closest circles, to keep the ultimate top-level intentions of stepping up the air war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and dispatching an expeditionary force of half a million to South Vietnam from reaching the press prematurely.

Commenting on the Pentagon Papers NEW YORK TIMES columnist Neil Sheahan wrote in his foreword to a volume of the principal documents that they "make clear the deep-felt need of the government insider for secrecy*) in order to ... maintain a maximum ability to affect the public world." "The segments of the public world---Congress, the news media, the citizenry, even international opinion as a whole---are regarded from within the world of the government insider as elements to be influenced. The policy memorandums repeatedly discuss ways to move these outside `audiences' in the desired direction, through such techniques as the controlled release of information and appeals to patriotic stereotypes.''^^9^^)

*) Secrecy was one of the main elements in the propaganda campaign aimed at preparing American public opinion for the escalation of the war. For a long time Washington's official propagandists managed to conceal the true nature of the participation of so-called «advisers» in the hostilities in South Vietnam, the true nature of the Tonkin Gulf events in August 1964, the total inability of the Saigon regime to resist the national-liberation movement on its own, etc.

In 1964, the mass media, along with Congress, were among the principal ``audiences'' of the administration's propaganda apparatus. Using the ``technique'' of "controlled release of information", the Johnson administration flooded the press, radio and television with elaborately conceived, mostly doctored, versions of events.

In the spring of 1965, Johnson in his instructions stressed the need "for all possible- precautions" against "premature publicity" about the increase in the size of the American expeditionary force in South Vietnam. He also declared his desire to "minimize any appearance of sudden changes in policy.''^^10^^)

To cover up the changing.policy towards escalation. Johnson and members of his cabinet launched a "marathon public information campaign", in the words of a Pentagon study, "to quiet critics (of his policies) and obtain public support."J1)

At the same time Johnson issued orders to launch a powerful propaganda campaign to promote his plans of building a "Great Society", combatting poverty, and moving forward on civil rights. Although some of Johnson's plans in the socio-economic sphere were forced, and belated, responses to "neglected domestic affairs", many of them were of a patently propaganda nature. This was accentuated by the very choice of the "Great Society" slogan.

The administration's propaganda campaign doubtlessly had as one of its objectives the distraction of public attention from the escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Simultaneously, patriotic stereotypes were created with the idea of appealing to the American "Puritan ethic" of "never abandoning friends .and allies" and "faithfully carrying out commitments.''

There was great fanfare in launching the so-called "domino theory." The American public was told that if the expeditionary force wasn't dispatched to South Vietnam all the ``free'' nations of Asia would fall, like a row of dominoes, into "communist hands." The intensity of that demagogic campaign was so great that, as R. J. Barnett wryly commented, Americans could easily visualize victorious Viet Cong sailing in their junks and sampans under the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay.^^12^^)

Some of the most unsavoury methods of manipulating public opinion were used as legitimate tools during the Johnson administration. It was a time when misinformation, lies, and threats rolled off the Washington propaganda conveyer in unprecedented quantities.

The statements by Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening on the Senate floor in August 1964, when ihey voiced doubts about

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the administration's version of the "Tonkin incident" and voted against the notorious "Tonkin resolution", were tucked away in the inside pages of American newspapers. At the time no one could imagine the extent of the crisis of credibility that Johnson would encounter with respect to his policies, his programmes, even himself.

Speaking of the main causes of the "crisis of credibility" or the "credibility gap", one should single out, firstly, the aggression in Vietnam and the great civil rights movements that merged with it; secondly, dissatisfaction of political circles in Congress and in the Democratic Party itself with the White House's Vietnam strategy and tactics, and the Republican Party's efforts to win power; thirdly, the Johnson adminstration's loss of support from a substantial segment of big business,

In August 1965, Washington became an arena of antiwar protests. At first they involved a few thousand; the famous "Pentagon March" in October 1967 drew more than 200,000 peace champions. Many trade unions, leading civil rights groups, academic circles, intellectuals, youth and students, women's groups, and clergymen came out against the White House's Vietnam policy. Moves were underway to form a coalition of war opponents, civil rights champions, and crusaders against poverty.

The participants in the "Poor People's March" to Washington in 1968 linked their demands for a better deal with calls to halt the bloody aggression of American imperialism against the Vietnamese people. The movement against the Pentagon's Vietnam adventure expanded into a struggle against all manifestations of Washington's aggressive policies, against the arms race, against the dominance of the military-industrial complex.

Doubts about the correctness of the administration's Vietnam policy began to grow in the Congress. They most vividly became apparent during televised hearings on Vietnam in the beginning of 1966 before the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Academic and public figures testifying at the hearings sharply denounced the escalation of the war. And in its election campaigns the Republican Party raised aloft the catchword of the "credibility gap" to prod the Johnson administration.

These and other elements in the "crisis of credibility" within U. S. society towards the Johnson administration could not be left unnoticed by the owners of the mass media. Initially they had given their all-out support to White House's policy, but as dissatisfaction with Vietnam and other actions of the Johnson administration

mounted the press, radio, and television also began to speak of a "credibility gap.''

This had two important consequences. Firstly, the mass media's very acceptance that there was a "credibility gap" and the exposure it gave to various aspects of it tended to deepen it still more. Secondly, the endless stream of commentaries and reflections on the "credibility gap" began to lead to friction and tension between the administration and the mass media.

In 1968 there appeared a book, ANYTHING BUT THE TRUTH. The painstaking investigation of the "credibility gap" and stagemanagement of the news in Washington by Washington reporters William McGaffin and Erwin Knoll, aroused the wrath of the White House. Almost simultaneously there appeared a book CRISIS IN CREDIBILITY, by Bruce Ladd, a young Republican, who had been given a year's leave of absence by a Republican Congressman to write it. After a cursory retrospective review of "crises in credibility" in previous administrations, from George Washington onward, Ladd notes that under Johnson the federal government's credibility suffered particularly as a result of the war in Vietnam. He attributed the crisis in credibility to three basic factors: the government's unwarranted and unjustified concern with secrecy and refusal to reveal information which is properly in the public domain; lying by government officials; the government's adeptness at devising new ways to mislead the public and the press through manipulation of information or "news management.''^^13^^)

Some leading American columnists fell victim to that "government adeptness", including such opinionmakers as Walter Lippmann, James Reston, Marquis Childs, and Drew Pearson, who were especially keenly aware of the obvious fact that the administration had first manipulated them like young reporters and then, when they began to be critical of its Vietnam policies, utterly ignored their views.

As the war escalated in 1967, the ranks of the critics of Johnson's Vietnam policy were joined by such prestigious dailies as the ATLANTA JOURNAL, WASHINGTON EVENING STAR, CHICAGO SUN TIMES, MILWAUKEE JOURNAL, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, ST. LOUIS POST DISPATCH, MIAMI HERALD and NEW YORK POST. Doubts concerning the correctness of the policy were voiced by the LOS ANGELES TIMES, the WASHINGTON POST, and even the HOUSTON CHRONICLE, once Johonson's most loyal supporter in Texas.

The credibility issue extended from Vietnam to many other aspects

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of the administration's foreign and domestic policies. It was raised in connection with the failure of Johnson's plans to build a "Great Society", win the war against poverty, halt inflation, curb crime, etc. The bourgeois press, radio, and television, worried together with monopoly groups about the dangers to the interests of the ruling class stemming from the "crisis in credibility", analysed it not so much to make things uncomfortable for Johnson as to prevent any future recurrence of a situation like the one that had confronted capitalist America in the mid 60s.

But the "crisis in credibility" did not remain a monopoly of the government elite, it embraced many institutions of imperialist America, above all the mass media. This is not denied in the United States, except, perhaps, by the most vociferous apologists of the "free press." Another form of apologia can be found in the reasoning of those who justify the mass media as "innocent victims" of Johnson's manipulations. It has been claimed, for instance, that sitting in Washington, reporters had no idea of the real state of affairs in Southeast Asia (some knew or suspected the truth about Vietnam but did not care, or dare, to divulge it), that in their reports (they were compelled to repeat the words of Pentagon or State Department officials, or of the President himself. But thereby they misled tens of millions of readers, listeners and viewers. From that point of view the Washington press.corps, and through it all the press organs supplied by it, played an evil role in misleading national public opinion, lulling the attention and vigilance of liberal sections of U. S. society, which in similar critical situations had shown more scepticism and critical analysis than at a time when the United States was being drawn into its longest and most unpopular war.

A negative assessment of the activities of the Washington press corps in 1964---1965 can be found in a special issue of the COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW devoted to the "lessons of Vietnam" for American journalism.^^14^^) At the time, writes Jules Witcover, the Washington press corps was unable to withstand the "statistical avalanche of a constantly augmented Pentagon propaganda machine." Matters were made worse by the fact that "the bulk of the Washington press corps still was listening primarily to one source . . . the government", while in the best traditions of ``objectivity'' ignoring opposition views in Congress and taking a hostile view of the budding mass antiwar movement.

However, historians and political scientists undertaking a detailed analysis of that campaign of deception ask themselves another

question: What would have happened if Johnson and the managers of his "information-propaganda bureaucracy" had told the mass media owners and syndicated columnists that they were expected to help shape public -opinion, that in the interests of "national security" it was necessary to conceal certain facts? Some American scholars hold that the mass media would have gone along and deliberately misled the people. That, for example, is the view of R. J. Barnett. The anger of the newspapermen and owners in connection with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he wrote, stemmed not from the contents but from the fact that the administration hadn't confided in the press during the war preparations. The advice of the mass media owners was something like: next time in planning an operation like the Vietnam war, trust us.^^15^^)

Thus, the "credibility gap" between the press and the administration, which led to the mounting "crisis in credibility" between the public and the authorities is, according to the press owners' philosophy, which Barnett should know, a consequence not of deliberately misleading the American people, but of a rupture in the system's propaganda organism, a violation of the postwar tradition of making the "big press" owners party to government plans.

And there is one more important reason why the mass media so readily played their negative part. The fever of extreme anti-- communism which had gripped the press, radio and television during the Cold War in general, and the high pitch it had reached in 1964-65 in particular, played a decisive part in helping the mass media so readily ``believe'' the claims of President Johnson and his propaganda machine about the "aggression from the North" in Vietnam and the evils of the Viet Cong.

That the blinkers of anti-communism did not permit the U. S. press to display greater interest in the true course of events in Southeast Asia has been noted by quite a few observers whom it is hard to accuse of bias against the United States. "Generally speaking," declares deputy editor of the London TIMES Louis Heren, "I think the U. S. media, with one or two outstanding exceptions, were slow to question official policy.. . The majority appear to have been inhibited by the old anticommunist ideology.''^^16^^)

These and other factors mentioned contributed to the American public's growing antagonism towards capitalist journalism of which Anthony Lewis, Thomas Griffith and many others complain. The "crisis in credibility" with regard to the mass media has taken deep root in the minds of millions of Americans and it will be virtually impossible to overcome it as long as the "free press" continues to

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be guided by its canons. Still, attempts are being made to remove the stigma. They vary in character and method, depending on who, and for what reasons, undertakes the job: the owners of the mass media or their editorial personnel, many of whom are undoubtedly grieved and shamed to share the journalist's public reputation of, as Thomas Griffith wrote, a man slightly suspect, a perverter of the truth, an invader of privacy, and so on.

11

HE OWNERS OF THE MONOPOLIES OF THE PRINTed and spoken word are naturally worried by the press, radio, and television's loss of credibility. The seriousness of the situation is illustrated by the findings of a Harris public opinion poll: Between 1966 and 1971 public confidence in the administration dropped from 41 to 23 per cent; in Congress from 42 to 19; in the military leaders from 62 to 27; in bankers from 67 to 36; in leading businessmen from 55 to 27; in public education officers from 61 to 37; in scientists from 56 to 32; in advertisements from 21 to 13; and IN THE MASS MEDIA FROM 29 TO 18.1)

Besides the ideological, moral and ethical consequences of such massive lack of confidence in the media, the press monopolies also feared that loss of credibility in the eyes of the mass reader might strike at their pockets. Perhaps that was where the wind was blowing from when critical materials began to appear in growing numbers ip the press? Economic considerations compelled the press to restore its ``credibility'', and to do that it had to criticise some aspects of the administration and its policies. Of course, many owners of the press were extremely reluctant to make such a move, but profit considerations are often more weighty than any others.

Another aspect of the process of the latter 60s and early 70s was the realisation that the press, radio and television were finding it increasingly difficult "not to see" the spread of the antiwar movement to ``respectable'' sections of the population, the unrest among the blacks, the youth, etc. These were topics that had to be discussed in the papers and on television. The Johnson and Nixon administrations attempted to ``reason'' with the mass media about their coverage of black ``revolt'', unrest, protests and the mounting class struggles. Such things, they felt, should be kept out of the press, or at least tucked away unobtrusively and reported in muted tones. Representatives of the Justice Department travelled to New

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York, Chicago. Indianapolis, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Houston, St. Louis, Omaha, Buffalo, Baltimore, and other cities with sizeable black populations, to meet with owners and editors of newspapers, radio and television stations. According to a Justice Department statement, the meetings had the purpose of calling for restraint in reporting racial explosions in the mass media. This meant that the papers, radio and television should not report unrest until it had been quelled by the police. Editors were cautioned not to allow the publication of ``inflamatory'' articles and reports that could lead to the spread of violence.^^2^^)

But even without Justice Department instructions local measures were taken to "put out" anti-racist fires. Committees of leading citizens---bankers, industrialists, lawyers---were formed to impress on the owners of local newspapers and radio and television stations the dangers of giving press coverage to such issues. That, for instance, happened in Boston in the summer of 1974, when the city authorities began to prepare for the coming school year and racial unrest was expected in connection with plans for busing black pupils to "white schools." And when all through the fall of 1974 the respectable white parents of the enlightened American city of Boston began to block integrated education, with resultant bloody clashes, the Boston press was ready to overlook the shameful events or to portray black schoolchildren as their instigators.

From the point of view of the administration and the more reactionary publishers the situation in the mass media was aggravated by the fact that many of the thousands of rank-and-file journalists were beginning to take a sympathetic view of antiwar protests, civil rights fighters and ``rebellious'' students. The press owners were well aware of such moods and began thinking how to neutralize them.

Many American journalists, especially the younger, who only yesterday had taken part in sit-ins, barricaded themselves on university campuses against police and National Guard attacks, took part in "freedom marches" in the South and antiwar demonstrations, began to wonder whether the "free press" was actually doing its civic duty, whether it was not resorting too frequently to the ``muzzling'' of news, which Frederick Engels had once called "the favourite device of the big press" in England.^^3^^)

In presenting a portrait of an American reporter, TV commentator John Chancellor remarked: "Reporters, by the nature of their work, spend time with the poor, with the hungry, with the wounded and dispossessed of our society. Young men who begin as police re-

porters see a sort of Dickensonian underside of American life. When they begin covering politics, they see the differences between rhetoric and reality; this produces an important kind of scepticism. Some of these men and women in journalism are given the task of writing down and remembering the promises of politicians; this can produce a kind of cynicism not unknown in the craft.''^^4^^)

It is worth citing some examples of how the new moods and attitudes appeared and grew among rank-and-file journalists.

At the time of the Antiwar Moratorium on October 15, 1969, 308 members of the staff of THE NEW YORK TIMES asked for and were refused permission to hold an antiwar meeting. Outside the building 150 employees held a silent vigil for American soldiers killed in Vietnam. At TIME magazine 462 staff members signed a petition asking for an observance of Moratorium day in the auditorium. Permission was granted to avoid a confrontation.

On October 15, 1969, 250 employees of NEWSWEEK failed to show up for work. The same day employees of the WALL STREET JOURNAL received permission from the management to take part in a peaceful demonstration of businessmen against war.

In 1969-1970, unions, associations, or groups of reporters and editors were formed in some American newspapers to discuss with their managements the hiring of more blacks, Puerto Ricans and other ethnic minorities. These reporter-editor groups also sought, very timidly, to be sure, to win a say on the subject and contents of news items, reviews and articles.

James Aronson, a left-wing journalist and author of books on the U. S. mass media, called those efforts and the changing mood among reporters and editors "activist movements", pointing out that it became possible because of the waning influence of anti-communism. "The anti-communist mythology," Aronson writes, "no longer has a grip on the working members of the communications industry. Too much has happened in the 1960s. The emergence of a militant black freedom movement, the young white radical movement, the rise of anti-war sentiment in labour's ranks, women's liberation, the disillusionment of the majority of young people with liberal politics in the traditional electoral sense, the revolt in the universities . . . and above all, that war in Indochina---all these things have combined to break the effectiveness of the Cold War mythology.''^^5^^)

Aronson says that the honest journalists in the bourgeois press, conscious of their own responsibility, conscious of the potential power of an informed people, represent "the hope of the future of American journalism.''

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However, as Aronson rightly points out. the "activist movement" is still in an embryonic stage, cautiously testing its strength; it encounters the fierce resistance of the press, radio and television owners, as well as of the administration. To keep the situation under control and not allow it to get out of hand, some newspaper publishers combine repressive measures with methods of so-called "democratic participation", "collective action" or "community control" to take the wind out of the sails of the "activist movement", or they try to bribe it with promises of reforms.

The "activist movement" is as yet not so much a fire as sparks in the wind, but such pillars of liberalism as Daniel Moynihan, Harvard University professor, and formerly U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, were brought in to quench them. The press, he wrote, is increasingly influenced by views patently hostile to American society and the administration. It seems a trend that is fated to continue in future. Young journalists bring a moral absolutism to the press.^^6^^) After such a grim, and not quite fair, assessment of the American press corps, made deliberately to frighten his brother liberals, Moynihan addressed himself to the editors, calling in fact on them to mute the voices of young journalists who, in his opinion, are infected with the germ of a "hostile culture" and do not accept the values or traditions of the American way of life.

As a reflection of the exaggerated fears of Moynihan and his ilk of the dangers the youthful stratum of American journalism constitute for American society and the administration, there appeared the theory of "reporter power.''

Different versions of the theory included statements about the growing role of journalists, correspondents, reporters and editors, who are represented as something of an independent force, as a "revolution in the editorial room." Analogous conceptions concerning the "technocratic age" and "managerial revolution" were enunciated by bourgeois scientists as proof that the capitalists were moving out of their leading positions in the economy and entrusting their affairs to technocrats and managers.

But the journalists and other intellectuals are certainly not the autonomous "managerial force" some make them out to be. The monopolies seek to use intellectuals to serve their interests, multiply their capital and continue to spread their reactionary ideology.

Nevertheless, the processes reflected in the "reporter power" theory have alarmed the big press owners. In 1969, a group of journalists of the MINNEAPOLIS TRIBUNE presented wage demands coupled with demands for a more active part in formulating the pa-

per's general guidelines that would take into account the need for a more intensive ``moral'' search for the solutions of public issues. They also resolutely denounced the newspaper's distorted interpretation of the trial of the leaders of the Chicago anti-war demonstrations and the practice of ignoring unpleasant truths and events.

Similar actions by journalists occurred on the WALL STREET JOURNAL, DENVER POST, PROVIDENCE JOURNAL and some other papers.

While encountering the mounting resistance of the press, radio and TV tycoons, as well as of the administration in Washington, the "activist movement" in a sense helped revive a tradition that had made a considerable imprint on American journalism and literature around the turn of the century and is associated with the liberal-reformist tradition of reform journalism known as " muckraking." In the 1960s and 1970s it has been called "investigative journalism." In fact, ``muckraking'' and "investigative journalism" are used synonymously.

The revived ``muckraking'' of the mid 1960s and early 1970s was in large measure a reaction of liberal bourgeois circles to an unprecedented upsurge of corruption. There were other important reasons too, but perhaps the greatest impetus to the trend was generated by fears of some of the more far-sighted liberal groups that runaway corruption could result in irremediable consequences for capitalist society.

Anthony Lewis, for example, voiced alarm over a numbing public unfeelirjgness and indifference towards everything, a universal indifference towards the corruption and venality of the powers that be.^^7^^) THE NEW YORK TIMES wrote in an editorial: "Even for people who regard themselves as knowledgeable about the facts of business and political life in the United States, the cumulative impact of the recent series of business and government scandals has been stunning . . . One is forced to ask whether a new rot has infected the American political-economic system.''^^8^^)

When a leading American bourgeois newspaper is forced to raise the question so sharply and go on to declare that "there may in fact be something more pernicious and dangerous about the recent outbreak of scandals", credit for this must be given to seasoned muckrakers, as well as to the novices in the trade, whose exposes brought those scandals out into the open. Moreover as, in the conditions of the monopoly press, they have to overcome many difficulties, including the threat of surveillance, lawsuits and jail.

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America's big bourgeois press has not changed substantially over the last few years. It remains predominantly conservative, with monopoly trends expanding to include mergers with other businesses. But at the same time, in the conditions of a mounting socio-political crisis, some publishers find it useful to open their pages to " investigative journalism" in an attempt to pacify the public by impressing the notion that there is no cause for worry or dissatisfaction with the existing state of affairs since the press is, as always, playing its role of ``watchdog'' of the public interest.

The muckraking tradition in journalism is a very complex and contradictory phenomenon: It is certainly not homogeneous, with different trends, objectives and methods.

The 1940s and 1950s are usually seen as the low years of muckraking, though even then such liberal magazines as NATION and NEW REPUBLIC published materials that exposed militarism and racism and depicted the poverty in which millions of Americans lived. However, neither the NATION nor the NEW REPUBLIC, nor small newspapers of similar leanings, have a mass readership.

In 1965 newspapers, magazines, radio, and television throughout the United States zeroed in on an obscure San Francisco monthly called RAMPARTS. Its July issue carried an article by Robert Sheer about the South Vietnam lobby, written on the basis of a study undertaken at the request of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions and laying bare the hidden springs of Washington's Vietnam policy. Then RAMPARTS exposed CIA involvement in the National Students Association, setting an example for other press organs to search for organisations and institutes used as fronts by U. S. intelligence service. The facts that came to light sparked a wave of public protests, joined by rank-and-file journalists.*) The series of exposes undertaken by RAMPARTS made it the leading political muckraking journal of the latter 60s. Its circulation rocketed from 4,000 to 250,000.

Much is written about muckraking in the big press and in scholarly publications. Some see it as typical of the American bourgeois

press, whether conservative or liberal. Thus, Daniel Moynihan, in an obvious overstatement, declared that, ever since the period 1880--- 1914, the American press had seen its prime task in loyalty to the traditions of ``muckraking''---the exposure of government corruption or deals with private enterprise.^^9^^)

That is hardly the case. It would be wrong to imagine that muckraking has ever been universal. Today it is probably more intensive and widely spread than ever before. But if it wasn't in the interests of certain monopoly groups the publishers would easily have quepched it.

It must be said that one of the purposes of the sharp criticism levelled on and off for five years since November 1969 against some segments of the mass media by former Vice President Spiro Agnew, was to have the press tycoons get the muckrakers off the back of the Republican administration.

The federal authorities were especially concerned with two aspects. Latter-day muckraking showed a tendency to attack controversial national issues. At the turn of the century exposes did not, as a rule, reach out beyond city or corporation level. Now the targets included the administration's foreign policy, the dominance of the military-industrial complex, the ultra-right threat, etc. Furthermore, among the politicians and officials supplying newspapermen with ``secrets'' there appeared a small but extremely dangerous category of "whistle-blowers." Some may be motivated by no more than the desire to get even with someone, but others may genuinely want something to be done to promote a policy change.

One of the leading ``muckrakers'' is Ralph Nader, known as the "consumer's advocate" for his exposure of defects in General Motors cars and flaws in other consumer goods. That was in the mid 60s. Before that the efforts of Nader and other "consumer advocates" remained largely unnoticed by broad sections of the public. But gradually mounting dissatisfaction with the low quality of many goods, aggravated by the rising cost of living and climbing taxes, created conditions for people like Nader to capture the public scene. Besides, it should be remembered that in his struggle against one group of swindlers he enjoyed the ``sympathy'' of other swindlers happy to see their competitors discomfited.

Nader went farther than criticism of unsavoury actions by individual corporations; he condemned the monopolies and big business in general for plundering and squandering America's national wealth with the connivance of the administration. As he saw it, big business's drive for profit had mutilated national values.

*) Journalists were especially shaken by the disclosures concerning the leadership of the American Newspaper Guild, the trade union of editorial personnel with a membership of 35,000 founded in the 1930s by Heywood Broun, a journalist noted at the time for his fairly progressive views. Between 1961 and 1967, the CIA had channeled more than one million dollars to the Guild's treasurer Charles Perlick for subversive work among journalists in foreign countries, mainly in Latin America. In spite of the exposures, Perlick managed to get himself elected president of the guild.

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Nader's activities won him fame as one of the leading muckrakers. Here is what Julius Duscha, director of the Washington Centre of Journalism has to say of him: "Nader and his Raiders are interested in much more tha'n muckraking. They are seeking to reform governmental and corporate bureaucracies. Nader and his Raiders do a far better job of reporting than do most of the Washington press corps.''^^10^^)

Nader not only writes himself (in an interview in Washington in November 1972, he told me that his column appears in 70 newspapers. He also contributes to 20 magazines). Many more articles appear that are based on studies and investigations conducted under his supervision. Nader's headquarters in Washington are manned by fifty young men and women known as "Nader's Raiders.''

High taxes for working people and rebates and exemptions for corporations; lack of rights for working people; poor quality food containing too many chemicals and various substitutes; marketing of untested and harmful drugs; crooked lawyers; inadequacy and ineffectiveness of Congress and administration antipollution measures; trade union corruption; inaction of the Justice Department's anti-trust machinery; bank frauds---these and other faults and evils are exposed in "Nader Report" paperbacks.

Nader links his hopes for a better America with the youth. He hopes the students of today will be active citizens of tomorrow. However, when he calls for young people to "take over power through citizen action" he sows unfounded illusions. For in the conditions of state-monopoly capitalism is is Utopian to rely on the youth instead of the working class as the decisive force capable of effecting social change. Thus, the only djfference between Nader and the pseudo-left is that Nader calls for "citizen action" where the latter call the youth to violent rebellion.

Another delusion of Nader's is that he hopes well-to-do Americans will realise the need for change. The appeal to them is added testimony that Naderism does not envisage a change in the existing capitalist system, only a greater or lesser refurbishing. Is not that the reason why Nader continues to have access to the youth and the mass media, why his lectures are attended by professors, managers and businessmen, why some legislators cooperate with him?

For all the shortcomings and ideological vagueness of Nader's platform, his organisation is a significant phenomenon. Its influence is in large measure due to the muckraking methods it employs. Nader and his Raiders, Duscha comments, offer the best example of what newspapering ought to be all about, of the kind of journa-

lism that produced such great muckrakers as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Turbell, Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair.^^11^^)

Lincoln Steffens heads this list of great muckrakers, and with good reason. It is said that when President Theodore Roosevelt coined the word he had Steffens in mind.

As a journalist Lincoln Steffens travelled a long and tortuous road. At the turn of the century he was a close confidant of Theodore Roosevelt. The son of a successful businessman, he received an excellent education in an exclusive university that held out the promise' of a great future in the "big press." But he soon became disillusioned with the job of a Washington reporter and turned to city slums, investigating corruption in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and St. Louis, the Democratic Party racket of Tammany Hall in New York, publishing his exposes in the liberal-leaning McCLURE's magazine. Subsequently he put them together in a book, "The Shame of the Cities", which earned him the displeasure of Theodore Roosevelt, and they parted ways. At first Steffens hoped that the articles and exposes by him and other muckrakers would help promote important reforms in capitalist America, but soon he realised that those hopes were in vain. Mere reform, he reflected in his 1931 biography, was not enough. "Structural changes" would be needed, too, if the "evils of big business" were to be "properly purged.''^^12^^)

Lincoln Steffens visited the young Soviet republic, where he met with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. On his return in 1920 he said: "I have seen the future, and it works." He wrote and spoke a lot in America about the "great Russian experiment." Like his famous colleagues and compatriots John Reed, author of "Ten Days that Shook the World", which describes the Great October Socialist Revolution, and Albert Rhys Williams, author of "Through the Russian Revolution", Lincoln Steffens was a genuine and sincere friend of the Soviet people.

What I would like to say is, that though Ralph Nader can doubtlessly compare with Lincoln Steffens as a great muckraker, Steffens later came to realise that in capitalist conditions muckraking was not enough for honest journalism.

He rose higher, to a socially more significant level of journalism, and it is those traditions, which became the golden pages of his life, that are being carried on in the United States, not by the muckrakers, but by the genuinely democratic journalists, in the first ranks of which are American Communist journalists. It is they who represent and embody the genuinely free press of America, uninfluenced by the will and interests of the ruling circles and the

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monopolies, upholding the genuine national interests and the rights of the working class and the people as a whole. They work in extremely difficult conditions putting out the Communist DAILY WORLD, but they courageously hold aloft the banner of MarxismLeninism in the very citadel of imperialism.

But to get back to present-day muckraking.

Ralph Nader shares in common with Fred Cook, Michael Harrington, Jack Goulden, Seymour Hersch, Robert Sherril and other thoughtful liberal-bourgeois critics a sense of civic mission. But in the past few years there has been an apparent tendency in the "big press" to restrict muckraking to exposes of individual highplaced officials, raking out scandals that can be sensationalized. The objective here is less moral than practical; higher circulation and greater profit. Special departments were set up to prepare items of "investigative journalism." One appeared in the latter 1960s in LIFE magazine, when colour television began to advance in the advertising domain, depriving the mass journals of millions of dollars of revenues. To keep their magazine in the running, the owners of LIFE decided to hold its readership by printing scandalous exposes. One of the first ``victims'' in 1969, was Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, accused by LIFE's ``investigators'' of financial wrongdoing (not without the assistance, it was rumoured in Washington, of then Attorney General John Mitchell, a conservative who didn't care much for Fortas's reputed liberalism).

LIFE's reporters also spent several months tracking down alleged links of Ohio Governor Roads with the Mafia. The ``ghosts'', as the reporters were dubbed, came up with a number of other sensational stories. But neither they nor other devices were able to save LIFE from being doomed by its owners, Time Inc., and it collapsed at the end of 1972. Like the publisher of LOOK, another mass illustrated, the proprietors of LIFE decided that it was losing money (no one could check them anyhow) and there was no sense in continuing publication.

Like LIFE, even Associated Press, which for more than a century had preached the idea of factual information, set up a special group of 10 reporters in Washington. Their materials (250 articles were transmitted by AP in 1969) were not so much exposes as critiques. Far from any idea of seeking reforms, their authors' task was to expose shortcomings in some department or agency and bring some high-placed crook out into the open. But the main thing was to increase circulation and obtain new clients.

Between Nader on the one hand and AP on the other runs the channel of muckraking, fed by streams and tributaries springing from local papers publishing exposes researched and written by their own staffs.

The publication of such articles has been facilitated by the activities of magazines and bulletins that have been appearing in many cities to keep a lookout on local newspaper, radio and television stations. This new development in U. S. journalism originated in the latter 1960s. Bulletins criticise methods of concealing information, subordinating newspaper policy to the interests of the big advertisers, the conservatism of most American papers.

One of the first such critical publications, the CHICAGO JOURNALISM REVIEW, was founded in 1968 by reporters R. Dorfman (Chicago SUN-TIMES), K. Pierce (NEWSWEEK), K. Chandeler (Chicago DAILY NEWS), and 30 other journalists, who made corresponding cash contributions. It appears once a month and has a circulation of 7,000.

R. Dorfman, whom I interviewed in Chicago in 1972, said that he and his colleagues got the idea of publishing their review after the bloody events in Chicago in August 1968 during the Democratic Party convention. They were, in his words, appalled by the striking contrast between what they had seen and reported and what appeared in print. After the police attacks, in which newspapermen were beaten up along with participants in the antiwar demonstrations, many reporters felt they could no longer remain neutral observers.

The CHICAGO JOURNALISM REVIEW was followed in rapid succession by New York's MOO and INSIDE MEDIA, the ATLANTA JOURNALISM REVIEW, the ST. LOUIS JOURNALISM REVIEW, Denver's UNSATISFIED MEN's REVIEW OF COLORADO JOURNALISM, Berkeley's OVERLOAD, and similar publications in Philadelphia, Baltimore, South California, Connecticut, Hawai and other states and cities.

In April 1972, MOO sponsored an impressive convention of newspapermen in New York in memory of the late A. J. Liebling, political writer and critic of the "yellow press." Attended by 2,500 journalists from all over the country, the meeting was timed to coincide with the 86th annual convention of newspaper publishers, and was called a "counter-convention." The speeches at the two conventions revealed, on the one hand, the fear and rage of newspaper publishers at the mounting self-consciousness of journalists and, on the other,

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the letter's refusal to tolerate the existing state of affairs. A second Liebling counter-convention was held in May 1974.*)

The critical magazines and bulletins continue to appear despite threats and intimidation on the part of publishers and editors. Some underground bulletins were forced to close under pressure from press owners, sorne of their publishers lost their jobs, but others have survived and are winning the support of, and contributions from, more and more leading reporters. Many of these reviews pioneered muckraker research that later found its way to the masscirculation press.

N. Blumberg, visiting professor of journalism at the University of California, in Berkeley, called for the mass media to launch a muckraking crusade. It should include, he wrote, a "serious examination of the structure, policies, and practices of the privately owned electric power utilities", how they "exploit our natural resources" and influence "our municipal state and federal governments.''

``The rake then might be drawn through the muck of the corruption of the legal profession, in which large numbers of lawyers become beholden to or fearful of the corporations. From there it is a logical step to a reappraisal of our courts, our judges, our entire judicial system.

``Then we should stare at our black ghettos," the "red ghettos - the reservations . . . the peonage of Mexican-Americans.''

Muckraking, he goes on, should delve into the Mafia, the police, the prisons.

It is also necessary to reopen the closed cases of assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X.

The muckraking agenda should include the practices of the slumlords and real estate agencies.^^13^^)

The seventies, Blumberg predicts, will be "the golden age of muckraking", with the television networks committed to it, and the trained journalists wresting control of the content of the media from the publishers.

*) One of the points made at it was the superficial quality of reporting by some American journalists in foreign countries. Notably, very little is written about the ways other countries tackle the social, economic, and day-to-day problems that beset U. S. society. And if such articles are rare from capitalist countries, they are virtually nonexistent from the socialist countries. Yet examples were cited at the counter-convention of the socialist countries' substantial achievements in organizing mass transit, especially in big cities, of factory and mine safety, etc. A number of journalists spoke of the need to evolve a " Comparative journalism" that would give the U. S. public an idea of the achievements of other countries.

Professor Blumberg is probably right when he says that if muckraking gains on television it will also gain in the newspaper, magazine and book industries. So far, however, so to say "electronic muckraking" is very limited. Given the general low level of informative and documentary viewing on the three commercial networks, muckraking programmes are rare indeed. And most of them ("Hunger in America", "Health in America", "Biography of a Bookmaker", some documentaries on the war in Vietnam) appeared before the fierce attacks against "liberal trends" in television undertaken by the Republican administration towards the end of 1969. After a series of administration threats and underhand manoeuvres by the Republican administration's propaganda machinery television became much more docile.

In the spring of 1971, CBS presented an hour-long programme, "The Selling of the Pentagon", acclaimed by leading TV critics as an expose of the Defence Department's propaganda machine in the best muckraking tradition. The film aroused the wrath of both the Republican administration and the Democtratic-controlled Congress. A House committee began an investigation of CBS, accusing the network of a number of deadly sins. This incensed the owners, not only of CBS, but of other companies and hundreds of TV stations all over America. A struggle ensued in which the TV tycoons (guided by considerations other than upholding the right to muckraking) extensively lobbied Congress to halt the investigations. The House Trade Committee voted 25 to 13 to pass a draft resolution censuring CBS. The vote took place on the very next day after the Suprerpe Court decision permitting major American newspapers to continue publication of the Pentagon Papers, suspended at the demand of the administration. The House debate on the Trade Committee's resolution went on for two weeks. Finally, after extensive lobbying by the TV corporations, the House rejected the committee resolution by 266 votes to 181.

Some American experts on the mass media voice the opinion that the House decision was more important for U. S. journalism than the Supreme Court's ruling on the administration's appeal in connection with the publication of the Pentagon Papers. One consequence, it was held, would be more muckraking on television. The prediction, however, did not come true, investigative reporting did not increase, and no more films of the caliber of "The Selling of the Pentagon" appeared.

Just as Professor Blumberg's prediction that the television networks would be committed to muckraking has yet to come true, his

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MUCKRAKERS AND GHOSTS - AT WORK prediction of the "golden age" of muckraking and, notably, that "trained journalists" would stop being mere executors of the press barons' will, is far from realistic. The "activist movement", "reporters power", "revolution in the editorial room", the "advocacy journalism"*) - these and other developments do not as yet provide sufficient evidence of the radical changes Blumberg would like to see sweeping the media. His prediction that control of the content of the orthodox media will begin to be wrested from the publishers and taken over by "trained journalists" seem extremely naive. Rather it is an appeal to the "trained journalists" to reflect on their position as subordinate personnel and take steps to win a voice in editorial affairs. But in conditions of monopoly domination and an efficient system of economic and legal repression dreams of control are no more than wishful thinking. And author Gore Vidal was all too right when he declared with a tinge of bitterness at the New York counter-convention that the press could never be changed unless the society was changed.^^14^^) And that is another important reason why the "golden age of muckraking", as Blumberg sees it, may never come about. The owners of the mass media and the monopoly circles behind them will hardy permit muckraking on the scale for which Professor Blumberg appeals.

Another Washington journalist of muckraker fame is Jack Anderson, whom TIME magazine has compared with Nader, noting that they shared a mutual respect, information, and a deep conviction of the objectionable influence of powerful individuals and big business on government officials and administration policies. Behind that similarity, if it indeed exists, however, lies a profound difference in objectives and methods. Having inherited from his mentor and partner Drew Pearson the syndicated column "The Washington Merry-Go-Round", bought by 600 papers, in two and a half years Anderson managed substantially to expand his clientele, leaving all other American columnists far behind. By the end of 1972 his column was appearing in 750 papers with a readership of tens of millions.

*) The term has a derogatory flavour on the lips of those who coined it: the press owners and their paid theoreticians. As distinct from "objective journalism", which assumes that the reporter unquestioningly follows the policy of the party or political grouping to which his publisher belongs, «advocacy journalism" means articles and reports that reveal the author's "personal attitude". An opponent of such "freedom», Professor W. Rivers of Stanford University, writes that strong convictions, especially the conviction that the status quo should be challenged, are doubtlessly the main reasons for the wave pi advocacy journalism sweeping the editorial rooms.

Anderson grew up as a journalist in joint work and constant association for 21 years with Drew Pearson.* He took part together with Pearson in a number of major investigations involving ultraconservative circles.

But lately the hostility of the political right has been receding as Anderson has been increasingly directing his barbs against liberal figures.

Some are inclined to see him as a Democratic supporter, especially after the appearance, early in 1972, of the so-called Anderson Papers---the full texts of the minutes of three confidential meetings in the White House at the time of the Indo-Pakistan conflict, which revealed the anti-Indian trend of U. S. policy. He also exposed some shady dealings between the Republican Party and the International Telegraph and Telephone Company. Though this was doubtlessly a service to the Democrats,**) Anderson's sympathies as a journalist are not simply defined.

In many cases Anderson appears to be motivated by sensationalism pure and simple. In fact, he makes no secret that he thinks all means are suitable, including those of yellow journalism, to promote his public fame. And fame, he reckons, will expand his clientele. Some, including Anderson himself, see his efforts as concern for expanding the influence of the "Washington Merry-- GoRound" and thereby strengthening Anderson's credibility in his ``crusade'' against corruption. Others---many others---claim that Anderson's sole concern is money.

Though there appears to be no limit to the geography of Anderson's exposures, the accent is most apparently on Washington. The Anderson Papers revealed an unknown aspect of Washington's policy with regard to the Indian subcontinent. In one interview explaining his decision to publish them together with other official documents, Anderson remarked that foreign policy was being made in the dark corners of White House basements and he felt that the government should not operate in such total darkness.^^16^^)

*) In its obituary the Nation magazine wrote that, virtually alone among newspaper columnists, Pearson continued the muckraking tradition in American journalism. He was the connecting link between the old muckrakers who, with the exception of Lincoln Steffens, had been inclined to moralise and skim over the surface, and the new muckrakers of whom Ralph Nader is an example, who are more practical and more penetrating.^^15^^)

**) These exposures, it has been alleged, precipitated plans, in December 1971 or January 1972, to assassinate Jack Anderson. Writing of this in September 1975, the WASHINGTON POST reporter indicated, however, that there was no firm proof of such a plot.

MUCKRAKERS AND GHOSTS - AT WORK

130 131

MUCKRAKERS AND GHOSTS---AT WORK

But Anderson doesn't always publish confidential papers that fall into his hands, and it is said that on several occasions he withheld material at the specific request of the CIA.^^17^^) These and other facts indicate that the appearance of the Anderson Papers and other confidential materials in "The Washington Merry-Go-Round" is mainly a reflection of internal rivalries in the federal government, of the continued friction between the executive branch, which is in the hands of the Republican Party, and the Democratics controlling the Congress. In turn, these differences, which periodically flare up in the capital, reflect the struggle of different monopoly groups on important issues of external and internal policies. From this point of view the muckraker becomes a tool in the struggle of one group, or even individual, against other groups or individuals. And Anderson's muckraking talents are rated very high.

Washington is a scene of sharp, occasionally bitter, struggle between rival political groups; between concerns vying for multimilliondollar contracts; between various bureaucratic structures, etc. In this struggle no punches are pulled. In the last few years, with the widening split in imperialist America's ruling elite caused by foreign policy failures and other acute problems, the role of muckraking in political infighting has been increasing.

As a rule the muckrakers do not reveal their sources. In an effort to discover them, the FBI, Pentagon intelligence service and other investigative agencies have been screening hundreds of federal employees, subjecting them to lie-detector tests and planting eavesdropping devices in their offices.*)

Sensationalism and the drive for news scoops have occasionally led Anderson and other muckrakers along the slippery road of using planted or faked facts. Sometimes---perhaps without being aware of it---they get involved in questionable, shady cases, accepting questionable materials for the sake of sensation. And sometimes, one suspects, they deliberately churn up muddy waters and side with the opponents of international detente. Lack of scruple

*) In the spring of 1975 the Congress debated a bill that would make it a felony for anyone to «communicate» information capable of jeopardizing "national security". Commenting on it, THE NEW YORK TIMES noted that it would make any journalist accepting information from a government official, and any editor who published or broadcast that information, guilty of violating the law.^^18^^) The bill's ominous implications are compounded by the fact that the actions of the official and journalist involved could be qualified as «espionage» for a foreign power. The vagueness of the bill, the Times points out, makes it possible for the government to qualify any spread of information as being harmful to «national security.»

and apparent subordination to the selfish interests of hidden forces tend to give "investigative journalism" a bad name in the eyes of many Americans.

The leading muckrakers of old fully realised the limited impact and weaknesses of their efforts. Towards the end of his life Lincoln Steffens even expressed regret that he ever engaged in muckraking. Walter Lippmann abandoned it early in his career. Drew Pearson kept saying that he had never had any illusions and had never regarded even the most intensive and socially pointed muckraking as being capable of "reforming the system." Muckraking exists within the complex structure of the American establishment and does not go beyond strictly defined limits. Like the whole of the capitalist press, it stands faithfully on guard of private property interests.

At the same time many muckraking exposes obviously strike painfully at certain groups within the ruling class. "The . .. corruption that envelops Washington," writes the U. S. Communist Party magazine POLITICAL AFFAIRS, "...is not unnatural; it is the grease for the functioning of state-monopoly capitalism." And "one gets the impression that political corruption (in the United States) was never so wide-ranging as it is now.''^^19^^) The magazine goes on to note that the current rash of exposures of corruption is in many respects a consequence of the efforts of newspapermen and those who provide their information. Their investigations are taken up by the daily press. Whatever their objectives or presentation, the materials that appear in the press objectively level serious accusations against the state-monopoly system.

The unprecedented divisions in American society caused by the failure of Washington's policies in Indochina, the collapse of the "Great Society" plans, capitalist society's inability to overcome poverty and need, continuing racial friction, youth disillusionment with the values and morals of the bourgeois system, the credibility gap, contradictions within the ruling elite: these and other factors contributed to the crisis situation in which muckraking reappeared as a trend in American journalism, as a consequence of the dissatisfaction of certain sections of the society, especially the liberal wing. For all that, muckraking is not an effort for any fundamental change of society; it is no more then a safety valve to let off steam and reduce the pressures on the social structures of capitalist society caused by mounting mass dissatisfaction.

The measures taken by various forces within the mass media, both those mentioned here and others, to narrow the credibility gap

MUCKRAKERS AND GHOSTS---AT WORK

132 133

MUCKRAKERS AND GHOSTS---AT WORK

yielded certain results. In September 1973 the Senate financed a poll, conducted by Louis Harris, to determine the public's confidence in various U. S. institutions and occupations. It found that confidence in the medical profession was rated at 57 per cent, garbage collection 52, colleges 44, local police 44, TV news 41, Supreme Court 33, Senate 30, press 30, major companies 29, local government 28, state government 24, law firms 24, etc.^^20^^) Thus, confidence in the mass media increased over 1971. Yet, commenting on the poll, Associated Press had to point out sarcastically that "Americans place more confidence in garbage collectors than in the police, press, church, Congress or the White House.''^^21^^)

Besides greater criticism of the state of affairs at home, the mass media have been displaying a more sober approach to the presentation of foreign policy. A number of press organs has hailed the process of international detente and improvement of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. In August 1974 the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES hailed President Ford's intention to maintain continuity in American foreign policy and continue the previous administration's policy of improving relations with the Soviet Union. "A wise course," was the DENVER POST's comment. At the same time. THE NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST and other newspapers, as well as TV commentators, while paying lip service to detente called on the administration to raise absurd conditions as ``payment'' by the Soviet Union and other countries of the socialist community for detente.

One of the methods of casting doubt on the policy of detente was the playing up of the Watergate affair in the press and television. A Gallup poll held in the summer of 1974 revealed that 53 per cent of Americans felt the newspapers, television and radio were giving too much attention to Watergate.^^22^^) Newspaper editors kept receiving readers' letters calling for a toning down of the campaign in favour of more vital national problems. "Most of the editors found," THE NEW YORK TIMES wrote July 1, 1974, "that the strongest reaction (to Watergate) was boredom.''^^23^^) George Gill, managing editor of the LOUISVILLE COURIER-JOURNAL, said: "By mail, by conversation, in the telephone calls we receive, the line from most people is just get rid of Watergate, get onto something else.''^^24^^)

Press coverage of Watergate, begun by the muckrakers, evolved into sensationalism, into rivalry in the acquisition of irrelevant titbits. The mounting economic crisis was largely ignored. For example, as early as in May 1974, Franklin Bank, one of America's

largest, with a capital of $ 5 billion, began to experience difficulties symptomatic of the country's financial crisis. Yet even when it collapsed in October in one of the largest bank catastrophes in U. S. history, the press limited itself to brief, superficial reports. Papers, magazines and television devoted much more attention to the streaking fad than to financial and economic problems. Actually, it was a typical case of ignoring the crisis in the hope of diverting public attention from it.

These and other factors make it impossible for the mass media to overcome the lack of confidence in it. The spreading roots of the "crisis of credibility" may be undercut at some points, but they continue to grow deeper at others.

135 BY WAY OF A CONCLUSION

OPEAKING IN DECEMBER 1974, SHORTLY BEFORE

retiring from the Senate, William Fulbright told the members of the National Press Club in Washington: "After a long era of divis'iveness and acrimony we are in need of reaffirmation of the social contract among people, government and the media.''^^1^^) The media, he said, have a "special responsibility" for the restoration of civility in public life, especially so as they "have become a fourth branch of government in every respect." Fulbright is one of the most moderate and farsighted representatives of the capitalist elite in the United States. He seeks to reconcile the people, on the one hand, and the government---as spokesman for the will of the ruling class---and mass media---as tools of the ruling class---on the other. His appeal is indicative of the mood among the ruling elite of today. It seeks full reconciliation at all costs, and primarily between the government and the mass media. It has achieved much in this respect. Witness the "post Watergate lull" in relations between them.

As for reconciliation between the two social partners and the people, it is for the American people to decide. Judging by current moods, the "social contract" being offered on the conditions of the ruling class---bearing the burden of the economic crisis and the arms race whipped up by the most reactionary circles---is not widely relished, especially as the monopolies are using both the crisis and the arms race to make fabulous profits. But that is a topic for another research. I have reached the end of my subject. And I think postcripts, like forewords, should be brief and not distract the reader from reflections which may have been prompted by this book.

REFERENCES

136 137

REFERENCES

1. RESPONSIBILITY TO GOD

17 W. A. Swanberg, LUCE AND HIS EMPIRE (Charles Scribner's

Sons, New York, 1972), p. 306 21 Ibid., p. 217

2. ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS

1/ A FREE AND RESPONSIBLE PRESS. By the Commission on Freedom of the Press (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1947, pp. 16-17

2/ Ibid., p. 14

37 R. Hofstadter, THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION (Knopf, New York, 1948), p. 4

4/ B. Bailyn, THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (Belknap Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 18-19

57 See D. Boorstin, THE AMERICANS (New York, 1967)

61 B. Bailyn, op. cit., p. 1

7/ H. Aptheker. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (International Publishers, New York, 1960). p. 23

87 See J. Flexner, GEORGE WASHINGTON IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775-1783), (Boston, 1968), Vol. 2, p. 64

9/ WORKS OF JOHN ADAMS (Charles Francis Adams, ed.),

VII, p. 159 107 J. E. Pollard, THE PRESIDENTS AND THE PRESS (Macmil-

lan, New York, 1947, p. 8

11/ C. R. Adrian, C. Press, THE AMERICAN POLITICAL PROCESS (McGraw - Hill, 1969), p. 646

127 MASS MEDIA AND THE LAW, D. G. Clark, E. R. Hutchison

(ed.), (Wiley, New York, 1970), p. 25

137 WRITINGS OF GEORGE WASHINGTON (Bicentennial Edition), XXX, pp. 7-8

147 WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON (Paul Leicester Ford,

ed.), IV. pp. 357-361 157 Ibid.. IV. pp. 131-134 167 Adams, op. cit., VII, p. 180 177 As quoted by Pollard, op. cit., p. 75 187 Jefferson, op. cit., VII, pp. 83-85 197 Ibid., V, pp. 508-510

207 John Locke, SECOND TREATISE OF GOVERNMENT, IV, p. 23 217 Samuel Cooke, A SERMON PREACHED AT CAMBRIDGE

(Boston, 1770), p. 42 227 THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF BENJAMIN RUSH (D. D.

Runes, ed., New York, 1947), p. 17 237 As quoted by Bailyn, op. cit., p. 240 247 Washington, op. cit., XXCIII, p. 428 257 Ibid., XXXV, p. 430 267 Ibid., XXXII, p. 60 277 Ibid.

287 As quoted by Pollard, op. cit., p. 92 297 As quoted in MASS COMMUNICATIONS, ed. Wilbur

Schramm (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1960), p. 209 307 Ibid., p. 210

317 Jefferson, op. cit., VIII, p. 475 327 Ibid., p. 216 337 Ibid., IX, p. 71 347 Ibid., p. 446-450 357 Pollard, op. cit., p. 83

3. THE FOURTH POWER 17 Pollard, op. cit., p. 4 27 Jefferson, op. cit., IV, pp. 357-361 37 See THE SPIRIT OF SEVENTY-SIX. THE STORY OF THE

AMERICAN REVOLUTION AS TOLD BY PARTICIPANTS, Ed.

H. Commager and R. Morris (New York, 1967), pp. 18-19 47 COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW (subsequently referred

to as CJR), January/ February 1975, p. 39 57 A FREE AND RESPONSIBLE PRESS, op. cit, p. 14 67 W. Rivers, THE OPINIONMAKERS (Boston, 1965), p. 3 77 Pollard, op. cit., p. 70 87 Bruce Ladd, CRISIS IN CREDIBILITY (New York, 1968),

p. 15 97 O. Gramling, AP. THE STORY OF NEWS (New York, 1940),

p. 187

REFERENCES

138 139

REFERENCES

107 As quoted by J. Bell. THE SPLENDID MISERY (New York,

1960), p. 182 117 G. Creel, "Open secrecy", in DATELINE: WASHINGTON,

(Garden City, N. Y., 1949), p. 205 127 W. Chittick, THE STATE DEPARTMENT, THE PRESS AND

PRESSURE GROUPS (New York, 1970), p. 35 137 Ibid., p. 34 147 Bruce Catton, ``Handouts'', in DATELINE: WASHINGTON,

p. 157

157 H. J. Dodge, "Tradesmen's Entrance", Ibid., p. 129 167 See PUBLIC RELATIONS JOURNAL, October 1971 177 See NATIONAL JOURNAL, July 24, 1971 187 Joseph and Stewart Alsop. THE REPORTER'S TRADE (Rey-

nal and Company, New York, 1958), p. 18 197 D. Cater, POWER IN WASHINGTON (Collins, London,

1965), pp. 225-226 207 THE NEWSMAN'S SCOPE (Ford Foundation, New York,

1970). p. 10

217 CJR, September/October 1971, p. 23 227 Ibid., pp. 31-32

4. THE FINEST BRAINWASHING SYSTEM

17 Theodore White, THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT - 1964 (New York, 1965), pp. 86, 87

27 B. Bagdikian, THE INFORMATION MACHINES (Harper and Row, New York, 1971), p. 203

37 V. I. Lenin, COLLECTED WORKS (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964), Vol. 23, p. 117

47 Bagdikian, op. cit, p. 39

57 As quoted by B. Ladd, op. cit., p. 27

67 V. I. Lenin, op. cit.. Vol. 33, p. 264

77 STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1974. p. 508

87 Ibid., p. 504

5. MONEYMAKING MACHINES

17 INFORMATION PLEASE ALMANAC. Atlas and Yearbook

1975 (New York. 1974), p. 80 27 MASS MEDIA AND VIOLENCE. A Report to the National

Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence

(Washington, D. C, November, 1969), p. 170 37 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY BULLETIN 1970-1971 (New York.

1971), p. 4

47 THE FAILING NEWSPAPER ACT. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee on the Judiciary. United States Senate. Ninetieth Congress, Second Session. Part 7 (Washington, D. C. 1969), p. 2943 57 Ibid., p. 2945 67 Ibid., p. 3089 77 Ibid., p. 3096 87 Bagdikian, op. cit., p. 133

97 THE FAILING NEWSPAPER ACT, op. cit., Part 4, pp. 1745- 1746

107 FACT, July-August, 1967

117 See J. R. Wiggins, FREEDOM OR SECRECY (New York, 1956), p. 211

127 READER'S DIGEST, February. 1975

137 James Aronson, PACKAGING THE NEWS (International Publishers, New York, 1971), pp. 13, 15

147 Adrian and Press, op. cit., p. 370

157 N. Johnson. HOW TO TALK BACK TO YOUR TELEVISION SET (New York, 1970), p. 129

167 TIME INCORPORATED 1969 ANNUAL REPORT (New York, 1970), p. 21

177 CJR. March/April, 1972

187 See EDITOR AND PUBLISHER, December 23. 1969

197 CJR, Winter. 1969-1970

207 Theodore S. Kreps, THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY, as quoted in THE FAILING NEWSPAPER ACT, op. cit, part 4, pp. 1738, 1748

217 Ibid.

227 THE NEWSPAPER PRESERVATION ACT. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee on the Judiciary. United States Senate. Ninety-First Congress, First Session on S. 1520 (Washington, D. C., 1969), p. 11

237 EINSTEIN ON PEACE. Ed. by O. Nathan and H. Norden (New York, 1972), p. 502

6. -LOCAL MONOPOLIES-

17 Bagdikian, op. cit., p. 116

27 Ibid., p. 137

37 NEWSPAPER PRESERVATION ACT, op. cit., p. 10

47 Ibid., p. 11

57 Ibid., p. 13

REFERENCES

140 141

REFERENCES

61 Ibid., p. 14

77 Ibid., p. 193

87 FAILING NEWSPAPER ACT, op. cit., part 4, p. 1574

91 THE BAY GUARDIAN, February 7, 1968

7. THE "FREE PRESS" IN THE CHAINS OF "CHAINS"

1/ THE NEW YORK EVENING JOURNAL, February 4, 1901 21 THE BROOKLYN EAGLE, as quoted by Pollard, op. cit., p.

565

37 Ibid., p. 602

4/ SATURDAY REVIEW, December 14, 1968 5/ CJR, November/December, 1972

61 FEDERAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR A FREE AND COMPETITIVE PRESS (1963, by International Typographical Union), p. 70

7/ Bagdikian, op. cit., p. 115 8/ See EDITOR AND PUBLISHER, August 15, 1970 91 Ibid., August 16, 1969 107 Ibid.

11/ Ibid., Augusts, 1964 12/ TIME, July 27, 1962

137 Thomas Griffith, HOW TRUE (Little, Brown, Boston, 1974), pp. 131-132, 133-134

8. A MACHINE TO DISCONNECT FROM UNCOMFORTABLE REALITIES

17 See CJR, January/February, 1975

27 Nicholas Johnson, GOVERNMENT BY TELEVISION. Address

to the International Association of Political Consultants

Third Annual World Conference (FCC News, Washington,

D. C, December 14, 1970) 37 Ibid.

47 THE GUARDIAN, January 2, 1975 57 Bagdikian, op. cit., p. 174 67 CJR, November/December, 1972 77 CJR. March/April, 1975 87 Ibid. 97 Ibid.

107 LOOK, September 7, 1971 117 Les Brown, TELEVISION. THE BUSINESS BEHIND THE BOX

(Harcourt Brace JovanoVich, New York, 1971), p. 275. 127 Anthony Smith. THE SHADOW IN THE CAVE (Allen and

Unwin, London, 1973) pp. 188-189, 208, 236

137 "The Television World of Violence", in MASS MEDIA AND VIOLENCE, op. cit, pp.311 ff.

147 U. S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, April 15, 1974

157 William Fulbright, THE PENTAGON PROPAGANDA MACHINE (New York, 1969), p. 143

167 See Robert E. Gilbert, TELEVISION AND PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS (North Quincy, Mass., 1972), pp. 12-13

177 INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, May 20, 1974

187 Ibid.

9. "THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE" 17 TV-GUIDE, March 10, 1968 27 See J. R. Wiggins, FREEDOM OR SECRECY (New York.

1956). p. 179

37 Quoted from ZA RUBEZHOM, No 7 (764), 1975 47 Joseph Alsop. REPORTING POLITICS. Fourteenth Annual Newspaper Guild Memorial Lecture (University of Minnesota, October 17, 1960), p. 3

57 John Fischer, MAGAZINE AND NEWSPAPER JOURNALISM. A COMPARISON. Sixteenth Annual Newspaper Guild Lee ture (University of Minnesota, October 11, 1962), p. 3 67 As quoted by James Reston. THE ARTILLERY OF THE PRESS

(New York, 1967), p. 17 77 As quoted by Ladd, op. cit., p. 3 87 NEWSWEEK, March 23, 1970

97 See THE PRESS IN WASHINGTON, Ed. Ray Eldon Hiebert, . (New York, 1966), p. 170 107 Ibid., p. 162

117 U. S. GOVERNMENT INFORMATION POLICIES AND PRACTICES - THE PENTAGON PAPERS (Part 2). Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations. House of Representatives, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session (Washington, D. C., 1971), pp. 329-330 127 Joseph and Stewart Alsop, op. cit., p. 15 137 W. McGaffin and E. Knoll, ANYTHING BUT THE TRUTH

(New York, 1968), p. 133 147 See Dan Nimmo, NEWSGATHERING IN WASHINGTON

(New York, 1964), p. 43 157 Jack Raymond, POWER AT THE PENTAGON (Heinemann,

London, 1964), p. 325

167 See DEPARTMENT OF STATE NEWSLETTER, March 1971 177 See THE WASHINGTON POST, January 27. 1971

REFERENCES

142 143

REFERENCES

187 See CJR, Spring 1970

197 INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, September 18, 1974

207 CJR, January/February 1975

21 / CJR, May/June, 1975

22/ Nimmo, op. cit., p. 142

237 See THE WASHINGTON POST, January 24, 1971

10. THE "CRISIS OF CREDIBILITY" AND ITS ROOTS

17 THE NEW YORK TIMES, December 27, 1974

27 MASS COMMUNICATIONS, op. cit., p. 623

37 Ibid.

47 MASS MEDIA AND THE LAW, op. cit., p. 185 •

57 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

77 MASS COMMUNICATIONS, op. cit., p. 624

87 Griffith, op. cit. p. 6

97 THE PENTAGON PAPERS (New York Times, 1971), p. XIII

107 Ibid., p. 384

117 Ibid., p. 388

127 See R. J. Barnett, ROOTS OF WAR (New York, 1972)

137 Ladd, op. cit., pp. 6-7

147 CJR. Winter 1970-1971

157 Barnett, op. cit., p. 302

167 CJR, Winter 1970-1971

11. MUCKRAKERS AND GHOSTS - AT WORK

17 See THE PROGRESSIVE, December 1971

27 See THE NEW YORK TIMES, July 8, 1967

37 See K. Marx and F. Engels. COLLECTED WORKS (Moscow), vol., 17, p. 387

47 CJR, Summer, 1970

57 Aronson, op. cit., p. 103

67 See COMMENTARY, March 1971

77 See THE NEW YORK TIMES, September 23. 1972

87 Ibid., April 2, 1972

97 See COMMENTARY, March, 1971 107 THE PROGRESSIVE, April 1971 117 Ibid.

127 INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, April 8, 1974 137 CJR, Fall 1970

147 See THE PROGRESSIVE, June 1972 157 See THE NATION. September 15, 1969

167 See THE WASHINGTON POST, January 16, 1972

177 TIME, April 3, 1972

187 THE NEW YORK TIMES, May 7, 1975

197 POLITICAL AFFAIRS, July, 1972

207 INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, December 3. 1973

217 Ibid.

227 THE NEW YORK TIMES, June 30, 1974

237 Ibid.

247 Ibid.

BY WAY OF A CONCLUSION

17 INTERNATIONAL HERALD 1974

TRIBUNE, December 28-29,

Vitaly Petrusenko: The monopoly Press

Translated from the Russian by Vladimir Leonov

Lay out and Cover: Zdenek Pavlik

Editor in Chief: Old rich Bures

Published by the International Organization of Journalists

Prague 1, Parizska 9

Printed: Severografia - Most