Industrialists' Press Howls for Right to Lie
OLIVER, BRYCE
Industrialists' Press Howls for Right to Lie Increased Advertising Grants Pay for Attacks on New Deal By BRYCE OLIVER News Commentator at WEVD, New York 117ITH Americas leading newspapers now...
...it will be nourished by the domineering behavior of the conquerors...
...Austria today is a conquered country...
...This was probably the most high-handed price rise ever put over on the public...
...There is but one force which would make Hitler pause...
...They will react like, a sensitive receiving set to the signals and slogans, secretly broadcast by the active illegal fighters...
...Frank Knox, last Republican candidate for vice-president, had his Chicago Daily News urge that "any self-respecting and responsible editor, summoned to appear before the Senate Lobby Committee for questioning regarding anti-New Deal activity, tell Senator Minton and his lobby committee to go to hell...
...They don't have to, even though they are a form of public utility, since the taxpayers put up the money for circulating' them through the mails...
...The signal for the change was given when Merlin Aylesworth, former head of the National Broadcasting Corporation, was placed in charge of publishing the New York paper...
...The Austrian reserves in gold snd foreign esrrency have been removed to Berlin, large-scale looting goes on throughout the country, officially as well as "illegally...
...I had a startling illustration of the situation this very week when a magazine publisher explained to me why it was that he carried an attack on the undistributed profits tax in his columns...
...The possibility of such a remedy appears in New York, where the two standard-size morning newspapers recently increased fhe price from two to three cents without a single word of explanation...
...He said: "As advertisers, the advertising agencies may exercise unbelievably powerful pressure upon newspapers...
...they, too, resent deeply that these specific values (which in a free union with Germany could freely continue to prosper) are now being deliberately trampled under the totalitarian jackboots...
...They want the public to got its hv" formation from the newspapers only...
...And the chances are that competition would mean a new Mght on the news...
...Don't expect spectacular feats from them in the relentless, clandestine, anonymous life-and-death struggle, which is to be their lot for years, perhaps for many years, to come...
...and an even greater decline in gloves— from $2,062,820 to $747,550 in the above period...
...The public never knew that the utilities were financially back of the editorials and stories deprecating public ownership until another Congressional investigation turned it up...
...Certainly, government control would be merely exchanging one form of censorship for another...
...The rape of...
...Faced with the infinitely more devastating suppression of the Hitler regime, it would be suicidal to carry on the illegal work on the same lines and to the same extent as up to now...
...Edward A. Rumely...
...German economy is the Achilles heel of the Third BsSeAf country can spend itself to ruin...
...Glenn Frank, former president of the University of Wisconsin, but forced out by the LaFollettes, now is master minding for the Republican Party...
...distributed free of charge as an anti-New Deal propaganda sheet for the farmers, that the money for the losses had been put up by Big Business...
...TPHE increase in German trade as expressed in cold figures has *• been accomplished mostly in such articles as coal, coke, iron and steel, where the Boycott has the least control of the consumer...
...The big cost of news print is largely due to the heavy poundage of paper that's used to print advertisements...
...WILL GUILD FORCE TRUTH...
...Take the case of the Scripps-Howard chain...
...The Third Reich does both...
...but German trade has decisively declined in consumer's goods...
...Industrialists' Press Howls for Right to Lie Increased Advertising Grants Pay for Attacks on New Deal By BRYCE OLIVER News Commentator at WEVD, New York 117ITH Americas leading newspapers now in a " virtually united front against the national administration and progressive legislation, a show-down between the press and the administration may be coming close to hand...
...The much overrated Anglo-FTench alliance, like everything else which emanates from the Chamberlain-Tory brain, is designed not so much to curb Hitler as to keep the Popular Front in France tovm defying Hitler...
...It cost almost a million dollars to distribute that propaganda around twelve Middle Western states...
...At Philadelphia the Sage of Emporia said that great advertisers were gaining an or-# ganized control of the press...
...The adviser, paid in turn to control public opinion, may constitute a new threat to the freedom of the press...
...Where the democratic governments in utter dis-rtSa*d of their peoples' interest shirk and fumble, the masses must take matters in their own hands...
...By JOHANN HIRSCH formerly an editor of the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung, suppressed in 1934...
...In its stupendous task it will be helped by its four years' experience in clandestine political work...
...A veritable rash of charges has appeared in the press all over the country to the general effect that "the Administration is preparing to suppress the news...
...Events which only a few years sgo would have rocked the nations into a fury of protest and condemnation are accepted today with apathetic compliance and with complaisance in more conservative quarters...
...Fatal short-sightedness on the part of the notorious powers hindered it, thus creating a national inferiority complex on which violent nationalism throve until it developed into Nazi domination in Germany...
...This was done by having International Paper & Power buy in the newspapers...
...The only way Dallas ever found out about it in the beginning was through Out-of-town newspapers...
...PLOT TO STOP FIRESIDE TALKS IN the case of a good many newspapers, it isn't * necessary to offer advice...
...Not a line about it was printed by the four Dallas papers until the banker passed along fhe word that maybe the news would be better than the excited gossip going around...
...That has happened before, when prices for newspapers went up, and will happen again...
...Every time he talks, people seem to believe him, and the short-sighted business leaders, back of the newspapers, dont like that...
...JOSEPH TENENBAUM Chairman of the Joint Boycott Council 1*HE saddest commentary upon the sinking morale of our times is the insensibility and obtuseness of the world's conscience te the present-day world affairs...
...Under ground Tactics Reshaped in Austria SOCIALIST ACTIVITY CARRIED ON IN GREATER SECRECY TO MEET ADVENT OF HITLER—Austrian WORKERS ANTAGONISTIC TO GERMANY, REFUSE TO AID GESTAPO...
...Another thing that heated up the publishing boys to about 110 in the shade—and no shade— are some mean cracks being made around the ' country by one of the foremost Republican editors, William Allen White, of the Emporia Gazette...
...The Austrian working class combines a keen political realism with Socialist education...
...and from 0.$>% to 2% m Central America...
...This has...
...Thus in Central and South Amsstsm countries, in some of which labor has a voice in the affairs •» *JJJ and where there exists an organised trade-union movement "J* could be used to advantage to checkmate German dumping tf and "its insidious propaganda—the Nasi trade in South Am*** jumped from 4.97c of the total German export trade m IP...
...This great chain, stretching from coast to coast, represented the principal newspaper support for Roosevelt in 1936, but they have now plumped to the United States Chamber of Commerce...
...The pries of everything'else is discussed in the press and explanations made...
...So now, the public not only pays for what it buys, but pays for being told what to buy...
...The publishers are now fighting for that kind of freedom, and as a result of quiet conferences at the recent meeting of the Amedican Newspaper Publishers' Association, the boys are beginning to gang up in a drive to keep government officials off the radio...
...it will result in much grumbling and dissatisfaction—but it will never in itself be able to get rid of the oppressors...
...At once, the battle cry was raised and a sanctimonious prayer for "freedom of the press" was raised on high...
...Instead, we have had sporadic foycott activities by groups of labor, of Jews and some liberals, no-real well organized mass movement on a great international *J*te- And yet, even these sporadic boycott movements register •oostantial gains* well illustrating the potentialities a Boycott on ¦ *rger world-wide scale could have...
...PROPAGANDA DISHED OUT—FREE fHE biggest newspapers in the land screamed * in anguish as this unsavory business of the "Rural Progress Magazine" was brought out from underneath the stone where it had been crawling...
...It certainly will have its effects...
...The dreaded "Anschluss," which once would have been the peaceful union of two friendly peoples, has thus been accomplished in its crudest, most brutal form, with arrogant war^ke display and ruthless violence...
...Col...
...The Austrian workers, too, have a keen appreciation of' those peculiar cultural values, which Austria, and especially Vienna, produced in the course of the centuries...
...The great hullabaloo was raised because the Minton committee extracted the fatal truth from the publisher of "Rural Progress Magazine...
...Her frontiers are lined with German troops, her towns are policed by imported German "Schupo" (the Austrian police force being re-drilled in Germany), the German Gestapo (Secret State Police) reigns gupreme over law and life, German officials, industrialists, business men, technicians, journalists flock into the country, taking up all the key positions...
...It is here where the leaders of the masses have their tTOat opportunities, of which, unfortunately, they have failed to «*ke full use...
...The publishers have been squirming over the fireside talks and other speeches of the President...
...So was Washington's Senator Schwellen-bach, who refused to permit Dr...
...The Chicago Tribune snarled on Monday that here was an attempt to abolish honest criticism of government...
...now come about...
...Faced overnight with the tremendous onslaught of Nazi fascism, they are, of course, fully occupied re-adapting their underground organizations to the disastrously changed circumstances and have not yet been able to consider their long-range policy...
...That was a lie, the publisher had to admit...
...The Newspaper Guild was fbught by the publishers not because the Guild would interfere with freedom of the truth, but with the freedom of the publisher to lie...
...And the weapon of the masses to paralyze a common foe is the Boycott...
...Already Czechoslovakia is being discounted as the next victim by professional democrats, and even genuine liberals fail to see that the nazification of Czechoslovakia will mark not only the dead line but the death blow to world democracy...
...LONDON...
...It happens not to be true...
...u HOW DALLAS GOT THE NEWS /^NE glaring example of this kind of press freedom came to light the other day down in Dallas, Texas, where the city's second most important banker was forced by the courts to disgorge over a hundred thousands dollars he had obtained by methods described in the court papers as "false representation...
...About 75 per cent of all the great foreign advertising— in newspaper jargon "foreign advertising" is the advertising that comes from outside of a newspaper's home city—is representative of four concerns—Henry Ford, General Motors, the duPont Corporation, and Chrysler...
...Well, you see," he explained, "I'm trying to get some additional capital from a certain group and I stuck that in to impress them...
...Unfortunately, a totally different conception of Austria's historic part was visualized and put into force (force, in the real sense of the word |) by the then rulers of Austria, who did not believe in freedom themselves, but set oat to fight the formidable German fascism by a pocket fascism of their own brand...
...And so what it Bails down to is this: The public is forced to pay for the cost of printing highly remunerative advertising...
...Aad yet, taking into account that United States importations have Increased from $1,322,745,000 in 1932 to $3,089,061,000 in 1937, including a gain of 171r/r of imports from Great Britain, a 185'r increase from Czechoslovakia, 242'/e from Belgium, etc., Germany's share looks rather meager...
...WMfa publishers like Frank Knox of too Chicago Newt, William Hearst, number one liar In America, aad Frank Garaaaff bowl that their freedom is threatened of the Roosevelt administration, the Tory press continues to sprood Its anti-labor propaganda obeying the big business interests who pay for, their control with large advertising subsidies...
...But there are few countries will sell themselves to ruin...
...It happened as the influence of the Scripps ownership began to dwindle and Roy Howard, editor of the New York World-Telegram, gained more control...
...The inference is that the newspapers are against the administration for no good reasons and that consequently their publications ought to be censored...
...Publishers fear that some day a strongly organized editorial staff will rise right up and refuse to be a party to some flagrant misrepresentation...
...pHROTJGH this peaceful, but no less deadly weapon the consumer has gained a paramount influence on the foreign policy of his nation, and if properly organized he may become a decisive factor » international policies...
...It will be rooted in the deep-felt resentment towards the German invasion...
...IT'S understood, of course, that the higher 'price * of newsprint paper is in some way responsible for the price upping, but that doesn't really stand examination...
...Aylesworth was generally regarded as the spark plug of a clever device a dozen years ago, by which-the great utility companies gained control of the editorial policies of key newspapers...
...once sent to prison in 1918 under the Trading With the Enemy Act and now the super-lobbyist for the anti-New Deal organization headed by the chain newspaper publisher, Frank Gannett...
...but it is the intent of the authors to have it appear as a grave reflection upon the honesty of publishers...
...And yet the advertisement.' produce the revenue...
...It may be that economic and social changes will be the remedy...
...THIS response in the great masses above * keeps the small movement underground alive and gives it that potential power, that dangerousness in times of political earthquakes, which make the all-powerful dictators dread and cruelly persecute the few hunted men who, carrying on the eternal fight for liberty against overwhelming odds, are the real heroes of our times...
...After four years of underground struggle against the austro-fascist system, at the very close of which they emerged for a brief instant in unbroken spirit and strength, they have now to mine their way much deeper underground...
...Another point against the illegals is that some of their best are already known to the police through their previous struggles against Schuschnigg, and therefore cannot fight inside the country against Hitler...
...As a definite advantage, however, compared with their German comrades, popular assistance in the Gestapo work, amateur spying and informing, will probably play—for the reasons stated before—a much smaller part ih Austria than it did in Germany...
...Austria and the horrors perpetrated on the Austrian Jews and liberals since the "peaceful" Nazi march* into 'Hitler's homeland have shocked, but not galvanized the much overrated world conscience...
...Eventually, such a system will result hi its own doom...
...The world is too tired to protest, the nations too weary to retaliate...
...When these empires perished in the flames of the great isr, the peaceful peoples of the newly created ¦publics wanted to join forces in order to heal Is wounds of war and defeat in common aaialist reconstruction...
...ANTI-GERMAN FEELING WILL GROW IN AUSTRIA *?*HE consequence will be that now for the * first time a genuine anti-German feeling will develop in 'Germanic Austria...
...WelL maybe that would be a challenge to the freedom of the business office of the press—but not of the press itself...
...The Nazis live on debts, robbery and confiscation, ana Jg latest bit of Goering arithmetics in confiscating Jewish pr*f**7 is symptomatic of the disastrous strains on German eco nosey It is up to ns liberals, the laessss of woi hots and toilers sew strengthen the Boycott as to give the coup de grace to that F*^ on clay feet, called the Third Reich, before a bloody war das***"' civilization...
...Thus in toys, for instance, there is a decrease of German imports from $358,375 during the first eight months of 1936 to $245,188 during the same period in 1937...
...In the polecat patter of the New Deal speakers," began the Tribune, "it is a favorite statement that 96 per cent of the press is against the administration...
...A good illustration what Boycott can accomplish in one country...
...Glenn Frank, editor of the magazine at a big salary, to make a speech...
...For, be it remembered at the present juncture, Germany is a conquered country, too— conquered by the same man and the same rang that ravages Austria now...
...CEN4TOR MINTON'S recent proposal, teat the government refuse the press the right to lie, was seisod upon by the industrial-1 hts' eowssapors (a Htm U. S. as a focal paiaf from which to launch a bitter attack oa the Now Deal...
...These four are heavily anti-labor and their advertising advisers move heaven and earth to see to it that the newspapers are, too...
...mortality...
...But they have no longing whatever for the aristocratic pre-war Austria nor for the musical comedy Vienna, which never had very much of a counterpart in a rather squalid reality of overcrowded tenements and shockingly high T.B...
...But the Austrian Socialist movement means to survive Hitler as it survived Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, and it will therefore accommodate itself to the new conditions...
...st*« 'j6 ^'mte<* States sales resistance found expression in a «dia27 of German imports up to the latter part of 1936 0 tl 1' wnen a spur in world prosperity and a gigantic effort into t man government raised the quota of German exports ™» the United States by about 25% as compared with 1932...
...The fireworks started over the activities of Indiana's Senator Minton, chairman of the Senate Lobby Investigating Committee, who stated that a large section of the press had been deliberately lying to the public and introduced a bill making it a felony for any publisher to send through the mails a deliberate perversion of the facts...
...This is an essentia] fact—essential especially for the Austrian Socialists' outlook into the future...
...Boycott The People's Weapon Against Fascism's Military Machines By Dr...
...And yet, I do not think that it can grow into a decisive historic force...
...Part of the money, $12,000, it was brought out, came from Dr...
...The worst of these features may pass,- as time passes...
...it will deprive the Nazi regime in Austria of the enthusiastic popular collaboration which it enjoyed in Germany in its early stages...
...I think, they will not allow themselves to be driven into the blind alley of Austrian particularism...
...They thought it possible to counter the terrific driving force of nationalist ideals by their thoroughly reactionary ideal of a clerical prewar Austria in miniature, to be crowned in the appropriate moment by the restoration of the detested Hapsburg rule:' We Austrian Socialists knew from the very beginningNhat this attempt was doomed to utter failure, and in fighting it tooth and nail we always predicted that it would lead Austria inevitably into Hitler's hell...
...But, of course, its formidable enemy, the Gestapo, has also had time to bring its insidious methods to the highest state of perfection...
...Surrounded by untold dangers, difficulties, and sufferings, the Austrian workers are now undergoing their severest test...
...AT this moment, however, they are con-fronted with a most grim reality...
...The magazine has been telling the farmers that the reason it can be distributed free of charge is that the advertising pays for it...
...But the newspapers dont do that...
...But I do not doubt for a moment that they will find their German comrades better allies in the struggle against Nazi despotism than those Austrian sentimentalists who lament the passing of an era which will never return and which, incidentally, the Austrian workers never cherished...
...From this moment the Austrian Socialists proclaimed the maintenance of an independent Austria, not as an aim ih itself, but as the preserve of German freedom, now lost in the Reich, as a nucleus from where to strive for the liberation of the entire German people...
...Cruel revenge against the vanquished—Socialists, Catholics, jews—is the order of the day...
...Minton was called every name under the sun...
...These figures— and we could multiply them from other export branches in which Germany had almost a monopoly—show conclusively the power of the Boycott...
...AUSTRIAN SOCIALISTS CHERISHED DEMOCRACY THE Austrian Socialists, in common with their German brethren, cherished the great tzsaitions of the revolution of 1848, which toft them the vision of a democratic Greater Germany as opposed to the autocratic Haps-bnrg and Hohenzollern empires...
...PI* subsidies, barter, aski mirks, and what not, Germany's lttf trade is only 8% higher than in 1982, and only 43.8*' of that * 1929...
...That was a bad blow for progressive democracy when the Scripps-Howard chain went oyer...
...Moreover, the Austrian workers will prove practically immune to nationalist infection, and with their shrewd common sense they are not likely to be taken in by the high-sounding phraseology which veils the hard facts of capitalist exploitation under fascism...
...The Vienna and the Austria they are fighting for will bear the stamp of that creative Socialist spirit which they exercised in the all too short democratic period after the great war...
...Had there been a real Boycott International, as there are so jnany other international bodies for good or evil, there would have j*en no Hitler today, no suicidal armament race, no Franco— J*in no prospect of a new world war, or what is worse, a peace "ought at the price of shameful surrender and abdication of the most cherished rights of humanity...
...Once the whole country has been ¦pacified'' with German thoroughness, open violence may cease to dominate the streets aad the deadly efficiency of the most accomplished tyranny the world ever witnessed will reign as quietly in Austria as it does in Germany...
...The higher the price of information, the more certain it is that capital itself will be invested in new newspaper enterprises...
...9% in 1937...
...Publishers know who these advisers are...
...This , been bought at a terrific sacrifice in price reduction JgWjCh concealed and open subsidies, and all kinds of barter SJ*8"** which amount to as much as 40% and in some articles to • v»- « their original value...
...The Austrian mjrken are subjected to the medieval German labor laws, pledging them to feudal fealty towards the exploiters of their labor...
...THE SACRED RIGHT TO LIE r\ENY a publication the right to lie and you've " got dictatorship, was the frenzied counterattack...
...But we may trust that in the end they will again emerge victorious, driving out the conquerors and oppressors from their country in the great antifascist revolution—not to revive Old Austria again, together with archdukes and archbishops, but to build in common effort with the German workers the great and free Socialist Germany...
...There is grave danger that in the coming decade, as social, industrial and economic problems become more and more acute, this capacity for organized control of newspaper opinion through the political advisers of national advertisers will strengthen...
...Unfortunately, the potentialities of the Boycott have been sadly neglected in other countries...
...Indeed, on a percentage basis Germany's share in the United States' total importations has decreased from 5.5rv to 2.9'r...
...One other element that may improve the morals of the press, without government interference, is organized labor...
...The power of the Boycott has shifted *ke decisions of state from the dusty chancelleries of sedentary diplomats to the whirlwind of red-blooded popular reaction, making diplomacy a moral issue instead of a cross-word puzzle for crafty politicians...
Vol. 21 • May 1938 • No. 20
