The Brass Check: A Study of American JournalismSinclair, Upton
General
The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism
Sinclair, Upton
Associated Press; Journalism -- United States; Press -- United States
Or perhaps maybe a report will be brought to the man that somebody else
has made charges against him; he is naturally indignant, and when he is
asked if he will bring a libel suit, he answers that he will think about
it; so the newspaper has a story that the man is thinking about bringing
a libel suit. Or someone will be hired to slander him to his face, and
when he knocks the slanderer down, the newspaper will have a story of a
public disturbance, so worded as to put the victim in the wrong, and at
the same time to make known the slander.
In extreme cases they will go as far as they did with Judge
Lindsey—hiring perjured affidavits, and getting up a fake reform
organization to give them authority. Lindsey, you understand, has made
his life-work the founding of a children’s court, which shall work by
love and not by terror. Love of children—ah, yes, all scandal-bureaus
know what that means! So they had a collection of affidavits accusing
Lindsey of sodomy. They brought the charges while he was in the East; a
reporter went to the Denver hotel where his young bride was staying, and
when she refused to see the reporter, or to hear the charges against her
husband, the reporter stood in the hallway and shouted the charges to
her through the transom, and then went away and wrote up an interview!
Or perhaps the Scandal-Bureau will maintain for its foul purposes a
special publication which is libel-proof; one of those “fly-by-night”
sheets, whose editor-in-charge is an office-boy, and whose worldly
possessions are a telephone address and three pieces of furniture. This
was a part of their scheme in Denver. The publication was called—oh,
most delicious allurement!—“Polly Pry”! I don’t know if it is still
published, but I saw copies of it during the coal-strike, and it was
full of the cruelest libels concerning everybody who stood for the
strikers.
I remember one full-page story about “Mother Jones,” a white-haired old
woman of eighty-two years, who was being held in jail without warrant or
charge for several months, because she persisted in coming back to the
strike-field every time she was deported. And what do you think they
said about “Mother Jones”? In her early years she had been the keeper of
a house of prostitution! They went into the most elaborate detail about
it; they gave the names of people who knew about it, they gave the
address of the house—and then they had their “kept” congressman, a man
by the name of Kindel, to read this number of “Polly Pry” into the
“Congressional Record”! So, of course, it was “privileged”; all the
“kept” newspapers all over the state of Colorado and elsewhere might
quote the story without danger of punishment! They might quote it, not
from “Polly Pry,” but from the “Congressional Record”!!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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