Incidentally, a comparison of the Federated Press budget with that of the capitalist agencies casts some light on the difference between real and formal equality. Federated Press spent $18,000 in 1936. The three employer-minded agencies spent $31,048,000 in a similar 12-month period (1942)! Linked to sensationalism, the commodity form of news destroyed the old profession of journalism and replaced it with pure business. The individual honest reporter or correspondent, however pure his intent, is sunk from the start. The _form_ of news he is taught to seek and permitted to send is hostile to the nature of truth. Not only the reporter, but the newspaper owner himself is alienated from the process of gathering reliable information and printing it. He is a merchant bound up with the problems of purchase and sale of goods, circulation, advertising and the like. The _Report on Freedom of the Press_ takes for granted the merchandising realities. It speaks constantly of “marketable words and images” rather than “news.” No wonder! The contents of newspapers are standard goods manufactured in distant news agencies, syndicates, canned-editorial factories. Development of 4-color facsimile processes by 800-word-per-minute wireless transmission, plus air-express of films, mats and plates, accentuates a trend. Simultaneous publication on five continents of a whole magazine, forty-eight hours after the material is written in a central editorial office anywhere, is now possible. But newspapers are already, in effect, edited at the central headquarters of banking and industry. And thus the boasted “free press” of America has become a simon-pure example of Big Business, absolute, brutal monopoly. The Fascist “Fringe”