I

The question of suppressed or tainted news has in recent years been repeatedly agitated, and reformers of all brands have urged that the majority of the newspapers of the country are business-tied—that they are ruled according to the sordid ambition of the counting-house rather than by the untrammeled play of the editorial intellect. Capitalism is alleged to be playing ducks and drakes with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of a free press.

The most important instance of criticism of this kind is afforded by current attacks upon the Associated Press. The Associated Press, as everybody knows, is the greatest news-gathering organization in the world; it supplies with their daily general information more than half the population of the United States. That it should be accused, in these times of class controversy and misunderstanding, of being a “news trust,” and of coloring its news in the interest of capital and reaction, is therefore an excessively grave matter. Yet in the last six months it has been accused of both those things. So persistent has been the assertion of certain socialists that the Associated Press colors industrial news in the interest of the employer, that its management has sued them for libel. That it is a trust is the contention of one of its rivals, the Sun News Bureau of New York, whose prayer for its dissolution under the Sherman law, as a monopoly in restraint of trade, is now before the Department of Justice in Washington.^[5]

To the writer, the main questions at issue, so far as the public is concerned, seem to be as follows:—

1. Is the business of collecting and distributing news in bulk essentially monopolistic? 2. If it is, and if it can not be satisfactorily performed by an unlimited number of competitive agencies (that is, individual newspapers), is the Associated Press in theory and practice the best type of centralized organization for the purpose?

The first question presents little difficulty to the practical journalist. A successful agency for the gathering of news must be monopolistic. No newspaper is rich enough, the attention of no editor is ubiquitous enough, to be able to collect at first hand a tithe of the multitudinous items which a public of catholic curiosity expects to find neatly arranged on its breakfast table. Take the large journals of New York and Boston, with their columns of news from all parts of the United States and the world. Their bills for telegrams and cablegrams alone would be prohibitive of dividends, to say nothing of their bills for the collection of the news. A public educated by a number of newspapers with their powers of observation and instruction whetted to superlative excellence by keen competition would no doubt be ideal; but a journalistic Utopia of that kind is no more feasible than other Utopias. Unlimited and unassisted competition between, say, six newspapers in the same city or district would be about as feasible economically as unlimited competition between six railway lines running from Boston to New York. The need for a common service of foreign and national news must therefore be admitted. To supply such a service, even in these days of especially cheap telegraph and cable rates for press matter, requires a great deal of money, and a press agency has a great deal of money to spend only if it has also a large number of customers.

As the number of newspapers is limited, it is clear that the press agency has strong claims to be recognized as a public service, and to be classed with railways, telephones, telegraphs, waterworks, and many other forms of corporate venture which even the wildest radical admits cannot be subjected to the anarchy of unrestricted competition. Thus the simple charge that the Associated Press is a monopoly cannot be held to condemn it. But, to invert Mr. Roosevelt’s famous phrase, there are bad trusts as well as good trusts. That the Associated Press is powerful enough to be a bad trust if those who control it so desire must be admitted offhand. It is a tremendously effective organization. Its service is supplied to more than 850 of the leading newspapers, with a total circulation of, probably, about 20,000,000 copies a day.

The Associated Press is the child of the first effort at coÖperative news-gathering ever made. Back in the forties of the last century, before the Atlantic cable was laid, newspapers began to spend ruinous sums in getting the earliest news from Europe. Those were the days in which the first ship-news dispatch-boats were launched to meet vessels as they entered New York harbor, and to race back with the news to their respective offices. The competition grew to the extent even of sending fast boats all the way to Europe, and soon became extravagant enough to cause its collapse. Then seven New York newspapers organized a joint service. This service, which was meant primarily to cover European news, grew slowly to cover the United States. Newspapers in other cities were taken into it on a reciprocal basis. The news of the Association was supplied at that time in return for a certain sum, the newspapers undertaking on their part to act as the local correspondents of the Association. A reciprocal arrangement with Reuter’s, the great European agency, followed, whereby it supplied the Associated Press with its foreign service, and the Associated Press gave to Reuter’s the use of its American service.

Even so, the Associated Press did not carry all before it. In the seventies a number of Western newspapers formed the Western Associated Press. A period of sharp competition followed, but in 1882 the two associations signed a treaty of partnership for ten years. They were not long in supreme control of the field, however. The Associated Press of those days, like its successor to-day, was a close corporation in the sense that its members could and did veto the inclusion of rivals. As the West grew, new newspapers sprang up and were kept in the cold by their established rivals. The result was the United Press, which soon worked up an effective service. The Associated Press tried to cripple it by a rule that no newspaper subscribing to its service should have access to the news of the Associated Press; but in spite of the rule the United Press waxed strong and might have become a really formidable competitor had not the Associated Press been able to buy a controlling share in it. A harmonious business agreement followed; but in accordance with the business methods of those days the public was not apprized of the agreement, and when, in 1892, its existence became known, there was a row and a readjustment. The United Press absorbed the old Associated Press of New York, and the Western Associated Press again became independent. Reuter’s agency continued to supply both associations with its European service.

But the ensuing period of competition did not last. Three years later, the Western Associated Press achieved a monopolistic agreement with Reuter’s, carried the war into the United Press territory,—the South and the country east of the Alleghanies,—got a number of New York newspapers to join it, and effected a national organization.

That national organization is, to all intents and purposes, the Associated Press of to-day. The only really important change has been in its transference as a company from the jurisdiction of Illinois to that of New York. This change was accomplished in 1900, owing to an adverse judgment of the Supreme Court of Illinois. To grasp the significance of that judgment, and indeed the current agitation against the Associated Press, it is necessary to sketch briefly its rules and methods.

The Associated Press is not a commercial company in the sense that it is a dividend-hunting concern. Under the terms of its present charter, the corporation “is not to make a profit or to make or declare dividends and is not to engage in the selling of intelligence or traffic in the same.” It is simply meant to be the common agent of a number of subscribing newspapers, for the interchange of news which each collects in its own district, and for the collection of news such as subscribers cannot collect singlehanded: that is, foreign news and news concerning certain classes of domestic happenings. Its board of directors consists of journalists and publishers connected with subscribing newspapers, who serve without payment. Its executive work is done by a salaried general manager and his assistants. It is financed on a basis of weekly assessments levied, according to their size and custom, upon newspapers which are members. The sum thus collected comes to about $3,000,000 a year. It is spent partly for the hire of special wires from the telegraph companies, and partly for the maintenance of special news-collecting staffs. The mileage of leased wires is immense, amounting to about 22,000 miles by day and 28,000 miles by night. Nor does the organization, as some of its critics seem to imagine, get any special privileges from the telegraph companies. Such privileges belonged to its early history, when business standards were lower than they are now.

The Associated Press has at least one member in every city of any size in the country. That in itself insures it a good news-service; but, as indicated above, it has in all important centres a bureau of its own. Important events, whether fixed, like national conventions, or fortuitous, like strikes or floods or shipwrecks, it covers more comprehensively than any single newspaper can do. Its foreign service is ubiquitous. It no longer depends upon its arrangement with Reuter’s, and other foreign news-agencies: early in the present century the intelligence thus collected was found to lack the American point of view, and an extensive foreign service was formed, with local headquarters in London, Paris, and other European capitals, Peking, Tokyo, Mexico, and Havana, and with scores of correspondents all over the world.

Enough has been said to show that its efficiency and the manner of its organization combine to give the Associated Press a distinct savor of monopoly. As the Sun News Bureau and other rivals have found, it cannot be effectively competed against. Too many of the richest and most powerful newspapers belong to it.

Is it a harmful monopoly? Its critics, as explained above, are busy proving that it is. They urge that, being a close corporation, it stifles trade in the selling of news, and that it is not impartial.

The first argument is based upon the following facts. Membership in the Associated Press is naturally valuable. An Associated Press franchise to a newspaper in New York or Chicago is worth from $50,000 to $200,000.^[6] To share such a privilege is not in human or commercial nature. One of the first rules of the organization is, therefore, that no new newspaper can be admitted without the consent of members within competitive radius. Naturally, that assent is seldom given. This “power of protest” has not been kept without a struggle. The law-suit of 1900 was due to it. The Chicago Inter-Ocean was refused admission,^[7] and went to law. The case went to the Supreme Court of Illinois, which ruled that a press agency like the Associated Press was in the nature of a public service and as such ought to be open to everybody. To have yielded to the judgment would have smashed the Associated Press, so it reorganized under the laws of New York, with the moral satisfaction of knowing that the courts of Missouri had upheld what the Illinois court had condemned. Its new constitution, which is that of to-day, keeps in effect the right of protest, the only difference being that a disappointed applicant for membership gets the not very useful consolation of being able to appeal to the association in the slender hope that four-fifths of the members will vote for his admission.

The practical working of the rule has undoubtedly been monopolistic; not so much because it has rendered the Associated Press a monopoly, but because it has rendered it the mother, potential and sometimes actual, of countless small monopolies. On account of the size of the United States and the diverse interests of the various sections, there is in our country no daily press with a national circulation. Newspapers depend primarily upon their local constituencies. In each journalistic geographic unit, if the expression may be allowed, one or more newspapers possess the Associated Press franchise. Such newspapers have in the excellent and comparatively cheap Associated Press service an instrument for monopoly hardly less valuable than a rebate-giving railway may be to a commercial corporation. It is also alleged by some of its enemies that the Associated Press still at times enjoins its members against taking simultaneously the service of its rival.

It is easy to argue that, because the Associated Press is a close corporation, it cannot be a monopoly, and that those who are really trying to make a “news trust” of it are they who insist that it ought to be open to all comers; but in practice the argument is a good deal of a quibble. The facts remain that, as shown above, an effective news-agency has to be tremendously rich; that to be tremendously rich it has to have prosperous constituents; and that the large majority of prosperous newspapers of the country belong to the Associated Press. In the writer’s opinion it would be virtually impossible, as things stand, for any of the Associated Press’s rivals to become the Associated Press’s equal, upon either a commercial or a coÖperative basis.

III

The tremendous importance of the question of the fairness of the Associated Press service is now apparent. If it is deliberately tainted, as the socialists and radicals aver, there is virtually no free press in the country. The question is a very delicate one. Enemies of the Associated Press assert in brief that its stories about industrial troubles are colored in the interest of the employer; that its political news shows a similar bias in favor of the plutocratic party, whatever that may be; that, in fact, it is used as a class organ. In the Presidential campaign of 1912, Mr. Roosevelt’s followers insisted that the doings of their candidates were blanketed. In the recent labor troubles [1914] in West Virginia, Michigan, and Colorado, the friends of labor have made the same complaint of one-sidedness in the interest of the employer.

Not only do the directors of the Associated Press deny all insinuations of unfairness, but they argue that partisanship, and especially political partisanship, would be impossible in view of the multitudinous shades of political opinion represented by their constituents. They can also adduce with justice the fact that in nearly every campaign more than one political manager has accused them of favoritism, only to retract when the heat of the campaign was over. The charge of industrial and social partisanship they meet with a point-blank denial. It is impossible in the space of this paper to sift the evidence pro and con. Pending action by the courts the only safe thing to do is to look at the question in terms of tendencies rather than of facts.

The Associated Press, it has been shown, tends to be a monopoly. Does it tend to be a one-sided monopoly? The writer believes that it does. He believes that it may fairly be said that the Associated Press as a corporation is inclined to see things through conservative spectacles, and that its correspondents, despite the very high average of their fairness, tend to do the same thing. It could hardly be otherwise, although it is possible that there is nothing deliberate in the tendency. Nearly all the subscribers to the Associated Press are the most respectable and successful newspaper publishers in their neighborhoods. They belong to that part of the community which has a stake in the settled order of things; their managers are business men among business men; they have relations with the local magnates of finance and commerce: naturally, whatever their political views may be (and the majority of the powerful organs of the country are conservative), their aggregate influence tends to be on the side of conservatism.

The tendency, too, is enhanced by the articles under which the Associated Press is incorporated. There is special provision against fault-finding on the part of members. The corporation is given the right to expel a member “for any conduct on his part or the part of any one in his employ or connected with his newspaper, which in its absolute discretion it shall deem of such a character as to be prejudicial to the interest and welfare of the corporation and its members, or to justify such expulsion. The action of the members of the corporation in such regard shall be final, and there shall be no right of appeal or review of such action.” The Associated Press rightly prides itself upon the standing of its correspondents. The majority of them are drawn from the ranks of the matter-of-fact respectable. In the nature of their calling, they are not likely to be economists or theoretical politicians. In the case of a strike, for instance, their instinct might well be to go to the employer or the employer’s lieutenant for news rather than to the strike-leader.

Whether the Associated Press is a monopoly within the meaning of the anti-trust law, whether it actually colors news as the socialists aver, must be left to the courts to decide. The point to be noticed here is that it might color news if it wanted to, and that it does exercise certain monopolistic functions. That in itself is a dangerous state of affairs: but it seems to be one that might be rectified. The Illinois Supreme Court has pointed the way. The news-agency is essentially monopolistic. It has much in common with the ordinary public-utility monopoly. It should therefore be treated like a public-utility corporation. It should be subject to government regulation and supervision, and its service should be open to all customers. Were this done, the Associated Press would be altered but not destroyed. Its useful features would surely remain and its drawbacks as surely be lessened. The right of protest would be entirely swept away; membership would be unlimited; the threat of expulsion for fault-finding would be automatically removed from above the heads of members; all newspapers of all shades would be free to apply the corrective of criticism; and if its news were none the less unfair, some arrangement could presumably be made for government restraint.

The Press Association of England is an unlimited coÖperative concern. Any newspaper can subscribe to it, and new subscribers are welcome. Especially in the provincial field, it is as powerful a factor in British journalism as the Associated Press is in the journalism of the United States, yet its very openness has saved it from the taint of partiality. To organize the Associated Press on the same lines would, of course, entail hardship to its present constituents. They would be exposed to fierce local competition. The value of their franchises would dwindle. Such rival agencies as exist might be ruined, for they could hardly compete with the Associated Press in the open market. But it is difficult to see how American journalism would suffer from a regulated monopoly of that kind; and the public would certainly be benefited, for it would continue to enjoy the excellent service of the Associated Press, with its invaluable foreign telegrams and its comprehensive domestic news; it would be safeguarded to no small extent from the danger of local or national news-monopolies and from insidiously tainted news.

Such a reform, if reform there has to be, would, in a word, be constructive. The alternatives to it, as the writer understands the situation, would be destructive and empirical. The organization of the Associated Press would either be cut to pieces or destroyed. There would thus be a chaos of ineffective competition among either coÖperative or commercial press agencies. Equal competition among a number of coÖperative associations would, for reasons already explained, mean comparatively ineffective and weak services. Competition among commercial agencies would have even less to recommend it. The latter must by their nature be more susceptible to special influences than the coÖperative agency. They are controlled by a few business men, not by their customers. Competing commercial agencies would almost inevitably come to represent competing influences in public life; while, if worse came to worst, a commercialized “news trust” would clearly be more dangerous than a coÖperative news trust. The great reactionary influences of business would have freer play upon its directors than they can have upon the directors of an organization like the Associated Press. If it be decided that even the Associated Press is not immune from such influences, the public should, the writer believes, think twice before demanding its destruction, instead of its alteration to conform with the modern conception of the public-service corporation.