CHAPTER XLIII

THE OWNER AND HIS ADVERTISERS

The third method by which the "kept" press is kept is the method of the advertising subsidy. This is the "legitimate" graft of newspapers and magazines, the main pipeline whereby Big Business feeds its journalistic parasites. Financially speaking, our big newspapers and popular magazines are today more dependent upon their advertisers than they are upon their readers; it is not a cynicism, but the statement of a business fact, that a newspaper or popular magazine is a device for submitting competitive advertising to the public, the reading-matter being bait to bring the public to the hook.

And of course the old saying holds, that "he who pays the piper calls the tune." The extent to which the bait used in the game of journalistic angling is selected and treated by the business fishermen, is a subject which might occupy a volume by itself. Not merely is there general control of the spirit and tone of the paper; there is control in minute details, sometimes grotesque. For example, Arthur Brisbane wrote an article on dietetics, deploring the use of package cereals. The advertising men of the "Evening Journal" came to him, tearing their hair; he had knocked off a hundred thousand dollars a year from the "Journal's" income! Brisbane wrote an editorial pointing out that stiff hats caused baldness, and the "Journal" office was besieged by the hat-dealers who advertised in the paper. Brisbane went to Europe and wrote editorials supporting a municipal subway. Said the advertising man: "Don't you know that Mr. —— at Wanamaker's is dead against that sort of thing?"

Max Sherover, in his excellent little pamphlet, "Fakes in American Journalism," writes:

The editor of a New York paper wrote an instructive editorial on the right kind of shoes to wear. The editorial was not inspired by any advertiser. It was simply the result of the editor's study and investigation of the problem of footwear. He advised against the wearing of the shoe with the curved point and urged in favor of the square-toed shoe. One of the big advertisers somehow got wind of the shoe-editorial that was intended to appear on the following day.