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
And if you go to the small town in Pennsylvania or Arkansas or Colorado,
or wherever this paper is published, you find a country editor on the
level of intelligence of the local horse-doctors of Englewood, New
Jersey, and Tarrytown, New York, whose proceedings I have described in
this book. Frequently you find this editor hanging on by his eye-teeth,
with a mortgage at the local bank, carried because of favors he does to
the local money-power. You find him getting a regular monthly income
from the copper-interests or the coal-interests or the lumber-interests,
whatever happens to be dominant in that locality. You find him heavily
subsidized at election-time by the two political machines of these great
interests. His paper is used to print the speeches of the candidates of
these interests, and five or ten or fifty thousand copies of this
particular issue are paid for by these interests and distributed at
meetings. Campaign circulars and other literature are printed in the
printing-office of this newspaper, and of course the public advertising
appears in its columns—a graft which is found in every state and county
of the Union, and is a means by which hundreds of millions of dollars
are paid as a disguised subsidy by the interests which run our two-party
political system.
Our great metropolitan newspapers take a fine tone of dignity, they
stand for the welfare of the general public, they are above all
considerations of greed. But the conditions under which these small-town
newspapers are published do not permit them to pretend to such
austerity, or even to conceive of it. They are quite frankly “out for
the stuff”—as everybody else they know is “out for the stuff.” For
example, the “Tarrytown News,” which jumped on me with its cloven hoofs,
declaring that my home had been raided as a “free love” place. This
“Tarrytown News” explained quite honestly why it was opposed to allowing
agitators to come to Tarrytown and denounce the Rockefellers. And why
was it? Because the Rockefellers stood for religion and the home, the
Constitution and the Star-Spangled Banner and the Declaration of
Independence? No, not at all; it was because the Rockefellers carried a
payroll in Tarrytown of thirty thousand dollars a month!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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