It happens, curiously enough, that I have met socially half a dozen members of the “Times” staff. They are cynical worldlings, doing a work which they despise, and doing it because they believe that life is a matter of “dog eat dog.” I met the lady, Alma Whitaker, who had written the account of my Friday Morning Club lecture. She had enjoyed the lecture, she said, but afterwards had gone to the managing editor and inquired how I was to be handled; she took it for granted that I would understand this, and would regard it tolerantly. I explained to her the embarrassments of an author in relation to an unpaid grocer’s bill. As a result of what she had written about me, I had not been invited by any other woman’s club in Southern California! Also I met one of the high editors of the “Times,” an important personage whom they feature. Talking about the question of journalistic integrity, he said: “Sinclair, it has been so long since I have written anything that I believed that I don’t think I would know the sensation.” My answer was: “I have been writing on public questions for twenty years, and I can say that I have never written a single word that I did not believe.” I have had much to say about the Associated Press in the course of this book. I need say only one thing about it in Southern California—that its headquarters are in the editorial rooms of the “Los Angeles Times.” A good part of what goes on the Associated Press wire is first strained through the “Times” sieve; and so I can inform Mr. Fabian Franklin, formerly of the “New York Evening Post” and now of the “Review,” that his sacred divinity, the Associated Press, has established here in Southern California a system which makes it impossible that any news favorable to the radical cause should get onto the Associated Press wires, and that everything dealing with the radical movement in Southern California which goes over the Associated Press wires should be not merely false, but violently and maliciously false. For example a prominent criminal lawyer in Los Angeles is blown up by a bomb, and the report goes out to the country that the police authorities believe that this was the work of “radicals.” But next day the police authorities state officially that they have no such belief; and a couple of days later the crime is proven to have had a purely personal motive.