[Illustration: (cover)] THE “FREE PRESS” PORTRAIT OF A MONOPOLY By GEORGE MARION NEW CENTURY PUBLISHERS: _New York_ _Published by_ NEW CENTURY PUBLISHERS, 832 Broadway, New York 3, N. Y. June, 1946 209 PRINTED IN U.S.A. CONTENTS PART I: PORTRAIT OF A MONOPOLY I. It’s Free--For Millionaires! 5 II. For Whom The Press Toils 11 III. Words For Sale 15 PART II: NEWS--ARM OF EMPIRE IV. The Rover Newsboys Abroad 22 V. Secret History of a Cartel 28 VI. Responsibility--A Challenge To the Press 42 About the Author George Marion, the author of this pamphlet, was born and raised in the Middle West. A member of the Newspaper Guild (C.I.O.), he got his education in “free” journalism at first hand. His experience covers work in every department of news manufacturing, the modern process by which “marketable words and images” are produced. He is a veteran war correspondent and roving reporter, and his news background includes a period with the defunct semi-official French news agency, Havas; free-lancing in Europe, North Africa, and India; and front-line reporting of the historic conflict in Spain of the 1935–37 years, Hitler’s “dress rehearsal” for World War II. When this pamphlet went to press, he was on the staff of the New York _Mirror_. THE “FREE PRESS” By GEORGE MARION Part I: Portrait of a Monopoly _Chapter I_ IT’S FREE--FOR MILLIONAIRES! Brooks Atkinson filed a peevish dispatch to the _New York Times_ from his Moscow post not long ago. Atkinson, ex-dramatic critic, is a highly-civilized, able and honest correspondent whose reports from China and the Soviet Union have shown a certain respect for people as people. His cablegrams are often touched with humor. All the more striking was the humorless dispatch in which he complained: The Soviet Union goes on coldly repeating Marxian myths about America--that we have no freedom of the press, that our democracy is formal but not real. Only the other day the Moscow _Bolshevik_ was saying: In the conditions of bourgeois democracy the workers do not have the minimum material requirements for actual use of the rights that are proclaimed. They do not have at their disposal printing presses and paper. Newspapers, clubs, theatres--all are the property of private individuals or groups. Atkinson sneered: “If these old myths are not deliberately false then they are products of the lack of a basic understanding.”