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
Any kind of radical, it makes no difference; anyone who advocates a
change in anything, who expresses discontent with the system of
legalized plunder and repression. Six or seven years ago Mrs. Pankhurst
came from England in the interest of militant suffrage. The American
people had read about Mrs. Pankhurst, and wanted to know what she looked
like, and what she was going to do in America. A New York paper came out
with a report to the effect that Mrs. Pankhurst, before being allowed to
land in New York, had been required by the Federal authorities to give a
pledge that she would not engage in militancy in America. This report
was cabled to London, where it was hailed with glee by Mrs. Pankhurst’s
opponents; Lloyd George made a speech about it, and this speech was
cabled to America by the Associated Press, and thus widely spread in the
American papers. Mrs. Pankhurst stated to me personally that she had
been asked for no such pledge, and had given no such pledge, and that
all her efforts to have this false report corrected by the New York
newspapers and by the Associated Press had been in vain.
Such was the treatment of a “militant” leader. You say, perhaps, “Well,
nobody cares about those militants.” If so, let us hear one of those who
vehemently opposed “militancy.” I write to Mrs. Alice Stone Blackwell,
and she replies:
For many years, the news carried by the great press agencies on the
subject of woman suffrage was habitually twisted, and the twist was
almost always unfavorable to suffrage. As editor for a long time of
the “Woman’s Journal,” and later as one of the editors of the “Woman
Citizen,” I had constant occasion to observe this, and I commented
upon it repeatedly. The thing happened so often as to make it
impossible to explain it as accident or coincidence.
As an extreme instance, take the following: Every time that the woman
suffrage bill was defeated in the British House of Commons, the fact
was promptly cabled to this country; but when the bill finally
passed—an event which both friends and opponents of suffrage were
awaiting with great interest—not one of the papers in the United
States that are served by the Associated Press gave the news!
In my suffrage work, I learned beyond question that the news coming
through the great press agencies was colored and distorted; and if
this has been done on one subject, it has doubtless been done on
others. A good many women, I think, learned a wholesome distrust of
press reports during the suffrage struggle.
And now let us hear some radicals of the male sex. Hiram Johnson of
California is a radical. In “Everybody’s Magazine” during 1908 there
appeared an interview which had been submitted to him and printed with
his corrections. Sixteen newspapers published on their front page the
report that Governor Johnson had repudiated this interview; and when he
declared that the report was false, they refused to correct it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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