Governors and mayors dance to Big Business tunes. Beyond all these departments of government are other tools at the service of the ruling class to help it maintain political dominance, regiment public opinion, terrorize and repress dissenters, employ and reward servants and agents of all kinds, to the end of constantly increasing its profits, intensifying its exploitation of the population and extending its enormous powers. Schools, churches, theaters are manipulated by boards directly selected by leading capitalists. The Morgans and Rockefellers personally oversee, as trustees, the largest universities, public libraries and museums. Radio, moving pictures, and the press--frankly described by their private owners as “opinion-forming industries”--are even more elaborately controlled devices for class rule. Of all these, the press is the most powerful single force in our time. The United States maintains a public-opinion-forming apparatus unparalleled in history and unequalled in any other land for the sheer weight of “information” hurled at a defenseless public. There is no chance for the public to make up its own mind. Private Power The newspaper owners have virtually unlimited control of this apparatus despite their elaborate pretense of suffering government constraint. The outcry against the government is a complete fraud. The owners are simply demanding a monopoly power over public opinion. They go so far as to impose a virtual censorship on an Administration with which they are not in complete sympathy. They got Congress to pass an act frankly designed to suppress Marshall Field’s pro-Roosevelt newspapers. If you so much as criticize the opinion-monopoly, you are accused of attacking freedom of the press. The monopolists have bulldozed the politicians until no less bold a critic than Mr. Ickes has gone on record as opposing publication of even a single government newspaper. _Yet the very idea of government as the chief enemy of press freedom is a fraud on history._ Long before the rise of modern industry, when printing was invented, the feudal ruling classes were indeed opposed to the spread of information among the dark masses. They objected not only to newspapers but even to the printing and distribution of the Bible. Not the content of the printed matter but the general increase of knowledge and understanding was the point at issue. The greater the ignorance of the people, the less danger to their rule.