A STUDY IN SUPPRESSION: PROPAGANDA IN THE PRESS
Wechsler, James A.
A Study In Suppression PROPAGANDA IN THE PRESS by JAMES A. WECHSLER Tn any long retrospect it may be hard to decide whether certain information about the mendacity (and, in lesser instances,...
...Finland—for Win Nathanson & Associates, Inc...
...But an abundance of correspondence unfolded by the investigators indicates that this was more than a private matter, and that such inspired stories were carried as ostensibly straight reporting on the INS wire...
...For Selvage and Lee paid Mr...
...Its terms were summarized in the following letter: Dominican Republic Information Center New York, N.Y., May 13, 1957 Re INS Services, La Voz Domini-cana Mr...
...It is, first, that in many instances UPI correspondents and reporters interrogate public officials about many matters without revealing that they are actually working for private clients, rather than searching for straight news for the UPI wire...
...Much of its researches, he said, were merely compilations of data already transmitted on the UPI wire...
...Senator Fulbright elicited from Taylor the acknowledgement that the U.S...
...Government Printing Office...
...At about that time, through the initiative of New York publicist Sidney Baron, attorney Morris Ernst and New York Supreme Court Justice William H. Munson were persuaded to lend their names to a "study" of the case in full cooperation with the Trujillo authorities...
...Secretary of State Manuel de Moya Alonzo asked me to convey his personal regards and high esteem of your good self...
...Today...
...press revealed during the first phase of recent hearings before Senator J. W. Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee was more shocking than the fashion in which most of the press buried these disclosures of this betrayal of the public trust...
...Taylor: "It was inserted in our regular service to those editors who have asked to receive that service, and sent to editors in all fifty states...
...At the same time a minimum of discretion was apparently demanded by the INS representatives...
...After all, the editorial was hardly one of the memorable manifestoes of our time, and it was not really unusual for Hearst papers to discuss such topics with a favorable nod toward Trujillo...
...Nor can many editors and publishers claim that they were simply uninformed...
...Have you ever turned down an editorial submitted to you by Selvage and Lee...
...Item: International News Service New York, N.Y., April 2, 1953 Mr...
...Taylor and his learned associates...
...The record shows that, during the past three years, twenty-two public relations firms have at one point or another used the "query service" of the UPI special unit...
...It is very clear that your personal interest and endeavor on behalf of INS was instrumental in concluding this matter...
...Johnson...
...They had no way of knowing that this was a subsidized fraud, and that the days of Trujillo's prison paradise were numbered...
...Sincerely yours, Louis Allwell (Mr...
...In December of that year, Harry Klemfuss sent Trujillo's Secretary of State a "memorandum of opening address," containing suggestions drafted by Huss for an impending oration by the Dominican dictator...
...thirteen days later, back in New York, Huss wrote Klemfuss: "If you compare the original report with the one I have prepared you will see that the latter one is more complete...
...Robert Nelson Taylor, having testified that the Association was founded in 1910 by the late J. E. Jones, said that he and Mrs...
...One presumes that the readers of these gazettes take for granted that editorials presented to them reflect the considered opinions of the owners or editors of the local publication...
...They relate primarily to the close spiritual and fiscal relationship between Hearst's International News Service and Trujillo's propaganda headquarters...
...The real trouble is two-fold...
...There is a vast amount of conspicuous waste in the whole business of lobbying...
...The Fulbright inquiry, engaged as it was with "foreign principals" and possible violations of the foreign-agent registration law, did not concern itself with the domestic messages promoted by the Taylor service...
...Ernst and Justice Munson to undertake their mission— and the questions were even sharper after they filed their controversial and enigmatic report which afforded so much satisfaction to Trujillo 8c Company...
...But I offer the confident prophecy that there will be no serious response to that proposal...
...The questioning continued: Fulbright: "What was done with the editorial...
...Perhaps it will be said that many of the practices reported here have no great bearing on our national future...
...Taylor testified...
...Allwell was duly inclentified at the hearings as Director of Special Services for Hearst's International News Service...
...Part of the story, although the priority might be reversed, concerns the fashion in which 1,399 newspapers (about 150 of them dailies, the rest of them weeklies) are the regular recipients and intermittent users of "canned" editorials transmitted to them by an agency called the U. S. Press Association...
...Thus, on April 10, correspondence reveals Huss accepting an invitation to visit the Dominican Republic...
...In defending the UPI's Special Services unit, Earl Johnson, the able vice president and editor of UPI (who did not seem to relish the role of defendant), minimized both the scope and significance of the enterprise...
...Selvage and Lee were the hired hands of Portugal...
...Such an editorial might be printed in a considerable number of places where publishers and editors like to exhibit their erudition and their lack of provincialism...
...That such arrangements would be inconsistent with any semblance of objective coverage of that regime, is a point Senator Fulbright did not feel obligated to labor...
...In a letter to General Trujillo, Harry Klemfuss had blueprinted this program, explaining that the statements obtained "might be released simultaneously in the United Nations, in Ciudad Trujillo [the capital of the Dominican Republic], and in Washington...
...In the summer of 1957, it may be recalled, the Trujillo dictatorship was still under world fire as a result of the disappearance of Jesus de Galindez, under circumstances strongly suggesting that he was the victim of Trujillo terrorists...
...in a free society, we cling to the view that the printed word has a certain sanctity, and that exposure of abuse is the great corrective, and that "conflict-of-interest" is bad business...
...But the letter, against the background of all the earlier Hearst-Trujillo dealings, adds some cumulative weight to the portrait of a shameless liaison between some pillars of American journalism and the bloody Trujillo band...
...He assertedly exercised this right during the final phase of the Trujillo regime, but for a long time the Taylor Press Association was a favorite medium for the communication of the views of the Dominican Republic Information Center, Trujillo's American ministry of propaganda and enlightenment, which figures recurrently in this story...
...Dear Harry: Here's a story we carried on the wires today about a Communist-led strike in Brazil...
...He would be, in fact, the agent of a lobbyist, disguised as a working newspaperman...
...Klemfuss' office paid INS to "cover some news event or occurrence" presumably calculated to promote the propaganda line of Trujillo...
...Senator Fulbright: "You think he did it for nothing...
...This would seem to me to be a fraud on your clients...
...A Study In Suppression PROPAGANDA IN THE PRESS by JAMES A. WECHSLER Tn any long retrospect it may be hard to decide whether certain information about the mendacity (and, in lesser instances, gullibility) of large sections of the U.S...
...But, to return to my opening remarks, if you consult the files of your local newspaper you will see how little of this record ever saw light of day...
...They are the old Hearst INS and the merged UPI, and more specifically the "Special Services" branches thereof...
...Harry Klemfuss Dominican Information Center, New York, N.Y...
...The headlines would surely have been bigger if the U.S...
...Taylor took charge in 1951 when Mr...
...On the other hand, there is no exact way of measuring such matters...
...The agency was created in 1946 by Klemfuss's father, now deceased...
...Chairman . . . No sponsor is identified specifically unless it happens, in the nature of the story, to be obvious...
...Johnson, the way you have described this service as being of such minimal importance, it seems to me that these solicitations for business rather misrepresent the kind of service you render...
...Mr...
...Whether or not Huss (who has also been, among other things, president of the U.N...
...Nearly a half century ago, in his celebrated indictment of the press, The Brass Check, Upton Sinclair wrote: ". . . when you pick up your morning or evening newspaper, and think you are reading the news of the world, what you are really reading is a propaganda which has been selected, revised, and doctored by some power which has a financial interest in you...
...Please feel free to call upon us at any time if we can be of further service...
...The move was widely criticized as a crude Trujillo propaganda venture since the "judges" employed for the mission were to be paid by the regime which was, in effect, on trial...
...At about this time, the record shows, Pierre J. Huss, Hearst's widely-by-lined chief United Nations correspondent, became an active member of the pro-Trujillo cast...
...He added: "It should be pointed out that the persons interviewed will not have to know at any time who the sponsors are of the search for information . . . It is estimated in a general way that the cost of undertaking this project would not have to exceed $850...
...Klemfuss: "I have no right to say...
...it offers only certain highlights, and perhaps a clue to the real dimensions of this large case history in suppression...
...He might respond with full candor, assuming that the man was toiling diligently on a UPI study of Senate sentiment...
...and which for the protection of that financial interest, has been willing to take trouble, and go into the most minute detail...
...The hearings were held as part of the Fulbright inquiry into "Activities of Nondiplo-matic Representatives of Foreign Principals in the United States...
...Manuel De Moya Alonzo Ambassador of the Dominican Republic Washington, D.C...
...that Selvage and Lee, for example, have scarcely managed to make Portugal a household word in Utah, and that not all the dollars squandered by Trujillo's local operative could save him when the moment of truth arrived...
...We beg to comment that it is unusual that the Hearst [chain] should editorialize on a subject such as that with which we are concerned...
...It need hardly be stated that this article is inadequate to the 675 pages of committee testimony assembled on this subject...
...From another viewpoint, however, the larger moral scandals unfolded at these hearings were those affecting much bigger institutions than Mr...
...Not even a reasonable degree of quiet coverage in The New York Times and by James McCartney of the Chicago Daily News Service seemed to stimulate wide response...
...Taylor could not resist commenting with sad humor that, by these standards, "Our fees are too low, sir...
...Pierre J. Huss Chief, International News Service Bureau United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y...
...Reports on Communist demonstrations are on page 3. "Also attached is a story on the announcement by the Guatemalan government that it will withdraw from the Organization of American States, denouncing the group as serving solely as a means of agitation and internal opposition...
...Curacao—for Howard Chase Associates...
...Huss who thought that the first copy was not at all favorable to the interests of the Dominican Republic...
...One year later another deal was sealed between Hearst's self-proclaimed "news service" and the Trujillo tyranny...
...It was under the imprint of the Press Association that the 1,399 papers on Taylor's list received such editorial wisdom as this: "Twenty-five years ago last August 16, Generalissimo Rafael L. Trujillo was elected to the presidency of a sick and debt-ridden Caribbean nation, engulfed in turmoil that seemed all but hopeless...
...Huss was still busy in 1955...
...Correspondents Association) received any immediate personal payment at that time, the relationship ultimately paid off for INS in a far more extensive arrangement than had been previously achieved, and with no longer any pretense about the directness of the Hearst involvement...
...This is exclusive of the "On Guard" Communist activities report offered to El Caribe...
...The wire services remained steadfastly calm...
...Taylor was asked...
...In all probability the second one, which was not sold to them but donated by us, I believe I wrote myself...
...the younger Klemfuss was called on to attest the validity of documents on which his father's name appeared...
...It must be conceded that the Hearst enterprise was enlisting in Trujillo's propaganda wars at reasonable rates...
...this was propaganda camouflaged as independent editorial opinion...
...such editorials might in fact have been prepared in the offices of a big Madison Avenue public relations firm, serving a paying client, foreign or domestic...
...In 1956, INS began producing a monthly column called "On Your Guard," written in New York by Hearst foreign editor John Martin...
...So self-deprecating was his testimony that Senator Fulbright finally observed: "Well, Mr...
...The newspaper which performs the service of publication is not even charged postage by the donors of these editorial delicacies...
...How could the harassed weekly editor on some remote prairie who received this trash know that it was simply bought-and-paid-for stuff, rather than the worldly knowledge of Mr...
...Jordan—for William F. Brooks Sc Associates, Inc...
...That, then, is the story...
...During part of the time, Mr...
...On another occasion, John Nagel, Allwell's deputy in the INS operation, wrote Klemfuss: "Thought you would like to see the attached Rio roundup which reports tightening tension in Brazil...
...opinion...
...it is a bulwark of strength against Communism and has been widely cited as one of the cleanest, healthiest, happiest countries on the globe...
...But the story concerning the involvement of the press itself failed to stop the presses in most places...
...On the day that editorial appeared, Harry Klemfuss sent the following letter to the Dominican ambassador: Dominican Republic Information Center New York, N.Y., July 23, 1957 Re Hearst editorial (Journal-American) on private investigation of Galindez Case Hon...
...Press Association, however, nowhere indicates that foreign groups may be directly or indirectly sponsoring the material...
...Press Association had among its clients the Selvage and Lee agency as well as the Dominican Republic Information Center...
...Although he wrote in 1919, it would almost seem that Upton Sinclair was commenting today on the widely suppressed disclosures of the Fulbright committee investigation...
...There was a fascinating footnote recorded to the deeds of the ubiquitous Mr...
...Jones retired, and have been performing at that stand ever since...
...I don't see how you can have it both ways...
...Fulbright then unfolded the link that exists between Selvage and Lee and the Portuguese government, and Mr...
...The UPI's special agents appear to have performed their labors with greater privacy and delicacy, merely making their copy available to clients for the latter's use without carrying the press association's trade name...
...The story involves not only the editorial pages of many rural weeklies but the Hearst International News Service and, on a somewhat different but still serious level, some strange and dubious relationships between business concerns and the present United Press-International, born of the merger between INS and UP...
...In any case, much of what is reported here will come as news to many Americans in many cities, despite the fact that most of the material is drawn from transcripts of the Fulbright committee hearings published by the U.S...
...It might have been a bigger story if the Fulbright committee had not been required to concentrate on the "foreign principal" aspect and had been able to explore more fully the degree to which domestic enterprises manage both news and opinion...
...But the Fulbright committee's documentation of the story was fresh and devastating...
...Your Honor: This is to inform you that our mutual distinguished friend, Mr...
...Taylor conceded that at least two editorials favorable to the dreary Portuguese regime had been sent out by his organization...
...There were places where some of the testimony was published, but the blackout was remarkably widespread...
...Fulbright: "Were the editors who received that editorial informed that its distribution was paid for by an agent for the Portuguese interests as part of his activities on behalf of those foreign interests...
...For the modest sum of $175 these editorials may be included by the U. S. Press Association in its "package" and republished, without even the slightest revision, on perhaps a hundred editorial pages throughout the land...
...JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post...
...The second, perhaps graver part of the trouble is that, by the very existence of a Special Services Bureau which solicits business from the major public relations firms, United Press International places itself in a position of financial dependence on these institutions whose corporate clients may well be involved in many public arguments...
...The material sent out by U.S...
...That such transmission belts for the planting of subsidized opinion exist has not been a national secret...
...Taylor's editorial devotion has not been confined to oppressive Portugal and the dead Trujillo regime, or to Selvage and Lee...
...Huss...
...Huss informed us—privately—that he succeeded in changing the wording of the original copy and that, after numerous consultations and counterproposals, the editorial came out in the final, published form in order to comply with the recommendations of Mr...
...Among the firms listed are Selvage and Lee, Hill & Knowlton, Carl Byoir & Associates, J. Walter Thompson Company, Ruder & Finn, Inc., and Julius Klein, Inc...
...This provided at least a belated signal to the pillars of the press, but somehow it still stirred only minimal interest...
...But it seems a reasonable assumption, from the nature of his sponsorship, that his editorials on home-front themes would be congenial to the American Iron and Steel Institute, or Barry Goldwater, and to the cause of the private utilities and other cornerstones of the American Way...
...Yours sincerely, Harry C. Klemfuss Director Thus, without any proud public announcement, was a major national wire service formally wedded to a Latin-American despotism...
...In my opinion, some of these things are overstated, and some of the public relations firms have been given an exaggerated idea of the importance of what is done for them...
...No exact information was available at the hearings about the extent to which Association editorials actually reached print...
...The questioning turned to the relationship between the Taylor enterprise and the public relations firm of Selvage & Lee, Inc., one of the larger wheels in the opinion-molding factories...
...Presumably it was the task of Selvage and Lee to put a mask of benevolence on this dubious face...
...Fulbright summed up the matter: "In effect, you are offering them [the public relations firms] the services of the UPI worldwide organization for a fee...
...We come, finally, to the chronicle of the Special Services Bureau of United Press International, which existed in its own right for many years before the UP-INS merger, and which absorbed some of the INS personnel when the union took place in 1958...
...Best regards...
...He is the author of five books: "Revolt on the Campus," "War Propaganda and the United States," "Labor Baron," "The Age of Suspicion," and "Reflections of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor...
...Taylor the sum of only $175 a throw to send out Portuguese propaganda disguised as syndicated editorial comment...
...Taylor did insist rather lamely that he reserved the right to refuse to send out copy prepared by clients if it did not conform to his view of "America's interests...
...Italy—for Fred Rosen Associates, Inc...
...For the hearings revealed nothing less than the purchase of favorable editorial comment in American newspapers by totalitarian foreign governments and special American interests, sometimes operating through their own agencies but more generally using large public relations firms as their intermediaries...
...Upon the introduction of this document, Klemfuss was asked: "Was he [Huss] paid for these services...
...In most newspaper offices these documents will be quickly filed and forgotten while owners and editors prepare new indictments of the Kennedy Administration's "news management" policies...
...True," replied Mr...
...yet, in fact, the so-called inquiring reporter might be fulfilling an assignment for a public relations firm representing the foreign country involved...
...A number of papers, exact figures unknown, printed these editorials without giving their readers the faintest intimation of the source or sponsorship of the material, but passing it on as their own...
...At one point the younger Klemfuss asserted that such stories were obtained merely for the Information Center's "private files...
...Spain—for Infoplau (public relations subsidiary of McCann-Erickson...
...Portugal is not the most benighted dictatorship in the world, but neither is it a pretty one, and its colonial policy remains a large disgrace and a recurrent problem for American diplomacy...
...Perhaps the Fulbright committee's misfortune was that it could not show that the Taylor enterprise had ever served any dictatorship of the Left as it has tyrannies of the Right...
...A key witness on these matters was Richard Klemfuss, former director of the Dominican Republic Information Center, whose headquarters were located in New York...
...Very respectfully yours, Harry C. Klemfuss Director There is, of course, inevitably a certain amount of boasting in the kind of operations being described here...
...Press Association had ever done for Castro or Tito a fraction of what it did for Trujillo, Salazar, or Franco...
...As you may see, I went to great pains and put in considerable more time than anticipated to produce something that will create a good impression...
...I've also . . . made it more readable, rounded corners and threw in a few more 'Trujillo plan' and embellished it...
...It is rare for a sovereign state to grant such permission to citizens of another country...
...In a supplementary statement, he revealed that he had on occasion written editorials favorable to the following countries (in accordance with the requests of their indicated U. S. representatives): West Nigeria—for Batten, Barton, Durstine, & Osborne, Inc...
...Some aspects of those hearings, especially those dealing with former government attorneys engaged in lucrative service as lobbyists to the sugar interests, among others, received reasonably wide notice...
...This so-called journalistic service, ostensibly exposing "Communist" activities in Latin America, was directly subsidized by Trujillo's New York "Information Center" which paid $2,000 a month for the product...
...Taylor: "Not in those terms, Mr...
...Instead it states that "this regular comprehensive service is made possible by established American institutions who pay an established fee to present timely business stories of free enterprise to grass-roots Americans...
...There was a rather wry interval when Fulbright observed that in one year Selvage and Lee had received $500,000 from the Portuguese government, plus a "fee of $75,000 to pay for just such editorials as these...
...False advertising is one thing...
...for the trade journal of the industry, Editor and Publisher, did devote a respectable amount of space to the disclosures...
...Taylor's enterprise...
...It was a pleasure to cooperate with you in this matter...
...Klemfuss replied: "I don't think so...
...I would also urge that such bodies as the American Newspaper Publishers Association and the American Society of Newspaper Editors designate these hearings as required reading for their members, and place them on the agenda for full discussion at their next deliberations...
...My recollection is that the first was written by a staff member of Selvage and Lee," Mr...
...These are hallowed themes of all conclaves of journalists...
...He could not recall ever having found one of their subsidized treatises unworthy of distribution...
...Many editorials in many places questioned the decision of Mr...
...The upshot of the story was as simple as it was crude...
...Huss may well have exaggerated his own role in reporting the episode to Klem-fuss, and the latter may have further embroidered the tale in his message to his sponsor...
...For, as Mr...
...Johnson further noted that the Special Services Bureau constituted only a small fragment—"perhaps one-tenth of one per cent"—of what the UPI does...
...But that could be far from the case on any given day of any week...
...One is tempted to urge that some responsible newspaper body undertake hearings to discover what happened to newspaper coverage of the hearing...
...You are representing to perform very unique services for a fee, and then when I ask you what you do, you say it doesn't amount to much, you just gather together old stories and put them together and send them to them...
...By the end of April of that year, INS correspondents in Washington and New York were soliciting testimonials for the "Trujillo plan" of hemispheric salvation from various ambassadors and emissaries of Spanish-American countries...
...An editorial hailed as "most unusual" the "agreement by the Dominican Republic to open up all its records and otherwise permit free access to an American investigating team...
...By and large, none of the testimony would indicate that the exercise performed by UPI's Special Services agency, or its UP predecessor, descended to the vulgar depths of the INS involvement with Trujillo...
...Taylor himself estimated that, on the average, approximately ten per cent of the papers on his list would publish any tract he sent out...
...The propriety of its practices— indeed, of the whole setup—is highly dubious...
...I have dwelt so far on the findings with respect to this phenomenon of the subsidized-syndicated editorial because it throws a certain light on a neglected area of the U. S. press—the "country weekly" and the smaller dailies which, with some highly notable exceptions, so often shape or reinforce the stereotypes of conservative U.S...
...Klemfuss informed Trujillo that "we have already agreed in principle that the International News Service should take charge of the proposed program of interviews in Washington—as a service to Harry C. Klemfuss since the INS would not agree to work directly for the government...
...Johnson replied with a soft answer: "Well, I don't know whether under the general moral standards of advertising we would regard it as a fraud...
...Dear Pete: This is to confirm our telephone conversation that La Voz Dominica, Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic, has accepted International News Service proposal to supply news and film coverage at a cost of $502.50 per week...
...the INS transactions were already a matter of record...
...Thus, as Senator John J. Williams of Delaware pointed out, a UPI reporter might approach him about his attitude "toward foreign aid for a particular country...
...But on July 23, 1957, the Hearst New York Journal-American, and presumably other members of the chain, took a different and more sympathetic view of the project...
...If the enterprise is that small, one parenthetically wonders why UPI should risk its reputation by these involvements...
...There is, for example, no evidence that stories selected and assigned by Trujillo's local man, or any comparable personage, crossed the UP or UPI wire...
...Again the departed Trujillo looms large in the first of these stories, but the demise of his prison state in no way diminishes the relevance and odor of the revelations...
...Yet for those who believe that Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check is obsolete, there is almost a book of revelation in these transcripts...
...Pierre Huss, was invited by the Hearst editorial chain writers to comment on or amend a draft editorial which was planned on July 22 for today's edition of the Journal-American and then to be distributed to the entire chain...
...Fulbright asked Taylor: "Prior to your being contacted by this committee, were you aware that these two clients were registered under the terms of the Foreign Registration Act . . . ?" "I assumed they were, sir," Taylor replied...
...The arrangement apparently began some time in 1953 and took varied forms...
...Since Trujillo's definition of "Communist" was a broad one, embracing all shades of criticism of Trujilloism, the scope of the service must have been almost unlimited...
...In an era when the subject of "news management" has evoked so much sermonizing and lamentation in so many high editorial echelons, one might have justifiably anticipated more extensive attention for these hearings...
Vol. 27 • August 1963 • No. 8
