The Free Press | Page 9

inconvenient
doctrine have reached in the great Capitalist Press for some time past in
England, is at least dangerously high.
There is no one in public life but could give dozens of examples from
his own experience of perfectly sensible letters to the Press, citing
irrefutable testimony upon matters of the first importance, being
refused publicity. Within the guild of the journalists, there is not a man
who could not give you a hundred examples of deliberate suppression
and deliberate falsehood by his employers both as regards news
important to the nation and as regards great bodies of opinion.
Equally significant with the mere vast numerical accumulation of such
instances is their quality.
Let me give a few examples. No straightforward, common-sense, real
description of any professional politician--his manners, capacities, way
of speaking, intelligence--ever appears to-day in any of the great papers.

We never have anything within a thousand miles of what men who
meet them say.
We are, indeed, long past the time when the professional politicians
were treated as revered beings of whom an inept ritual description had
to be given. But the substitute has only been a putting of them into the
limelight in another and more grotesque fashion, far less dignified, and
quite equally false.
We cannot even say that the professional politicians are still made to
"fill the stage." That metaphor is false, because upon a stage the
audience knows that it is all play-acting, and actually sees the figures.
Let any man of reasonable competence soberly and simply describe the
scene in the House of Commons when some one of the ordinary
professional politicians is speaking.
It would not be an exciting description. The truth here would not be a
violent or dangerous truth. Let him but write soberly and with truth. Let
him write it as private letters are daily written in dozens about such folk,
or as private conversation runs among those who know them, and who
have no reason to exaggerate their importance, but see them as they are.
Such a description would never be printed! The few owners of the
Press will not turn off the limelight and make a brief, accurate
statement about these mediocrities, because their power to govern
depends upon keeping in the limelight the men whom they control.
Once let the public know what sort of mediocrities the politicians are
and they lose power. Once let them lose power and their hidden masters
lose power.
Take a larger instance: the middle and upper classes are never allowed
by any chance to hear in time the dispute which leads to a strike or a
lock-out.
Here is an example of news which is of the utmost possible importance
to the commonwealth, and to each of us individually. To understand
why a vast domestic dispute has arisen is the very first necessity for a

sound civic judgment. But we never get it. The event always comes
upon us with violence and is always completely
misunderstood--because the Press has boycotted the men's claims.
I talked to dozens of people in my own station of life--that is, of the
professional middle classes--about the great building lock-out which
coincided with the outbreak of the War. _I did not find a single one
who knew that it was a lock-out at all!_ The few who did at least know
the difference between a strike and a lock-out, all thought it was a
strike!
Let no one say that the disgusting falsehoods spread by the Press in this
respect were of no effect The men themselves gave in, and their
perfectly just demands were defeated, mainly because middle-class
opinion and a great deal of proletarian opinion as well had been led to
believe that the builders' cessation of labour was a strike due to their
own initiative against existing conditions, and thought the operation of
such an initiative immoral in time of war. They did not know the plain
truth that the provocation was the masters', and that the men were
turned out of employment, that is deprived of access to the Capitalist
stores of food and all other necessaries, wantonly and avariciously by
the masters. The Press would not print that enormous truth.
I will give another general example.
The whole of England was concerned during the second year of the
War with the first rise in the price of food. There was no man so rich
but he had noticed it in his household books, and for nine families out
of ten it was the one pre-occupation of the moment. I do not say the
great newspapers did not deal with it, but how did they deal with it?
With a mass advocacy in favour of this professional politician or that;
with a mass of unco-ordinated advices; and, above all, with a mass