remember how I went to the head of the Denver office of the

Associated Press, to try to get a hearing for my side—the people's side—and how completely I failed? Needless to say, it is different when a representative of Big Business makes complaint; this gentleman obtains the promise of the Associated Press to send out six hundred and fifty words, and later on Mr. Stone is found writing to his Denver manager:

Personally I am inclined to discourage the carrying of long statements of a controversial nature, but inasmuch as we carried Mr. Arbuckle's statement rather fully, my judgment is that we might have handled a little more of Mr. Hamlin's provided it was prepared as briefly as our copy here indicates.

Here, you see, we are close to the heart of a grave problem. Here are enormous sums of "easy money" in sight. If the managers and district managers and correspondents of our great press associations all sternly decline to touch this "easy money," they are all, all honorable men; also, they are different from most other men in most other branches of Big Business in America.

Do they all decline? I sincerely hope so. But I recall how Max Eastman, in the "Masses" for July, 1913, made very specific charges against the Associated Press, which thereupon caused Eastman's arrest for criminal libel. The indictment brought by the Grand Jury against Eastman and Art Young quotes a paragraph from the offending editorial, as follows:

I am told that every trust is to be encouraged to live its life and grow to such proportions that it may and must be taken over by the working public. But one trust that I find it impossible to encourage is this Truth Trust, the Associated Press. So long as the substance of current history continues to be held in cold storage, adulterated, colored with poisonous intentions, and sold to the highest bidder to suit his private purposes, there is small hope that even the free and the intelligent will take the side of justice in the struggle that is before us.

The indictment goes on to interpret the above:

Meaning and intending thereby that the said corporation intentionally withheld, suppressed and concealed from its members information of important items of news and intelligence and intentionally supplied its members with information that was untruthful, biased, inaccurate and incomplete, and that the said corporation for and in consideration of moneys paid to it intentionally supplied to its members misinformation concerning happenings and events that constituted the news and intelligence of the day.