The Pittsburgh Press (September 15, 1946)
Editor’s comment:
‘Hate press’ uses venom and malice to stir up strife
By E. T. Leech
Editor, The Pittsburgh Press
Are you hating at random, without planning or direction?
If so, why not put your hatreds on an efficient basis? Organize and direct them along well-determined lines.
Several hundred thousand Americans have systematized their hating. You, too, can be an efficient hater.
All you need do is subscribe to one or more of the papers which specialize in hatred. You will be surprised at the results. Maybe, for example, you have gone whole days without hating anybody, when just a few minutes reading might have inspired you to a day of violent rancor.
The average American would be surprised to know what a horrible land he lives in. He would be shocked and astonished to view it as it is daily pictured in what, for want of a better term, I call “the hate press.”
This “hate press” is headed by a dozen or so publications issued in New York which don’t have a very large circulation. But, unfortunately, they do have an influence out of all proportion to their readership. For the things they print are widely copied and the policies they advocate ae extensively followed by scores, perhaps hundreds of other papers.
Daily, they are pouring into our national life a stream of venom and malice that is channeled out through a wide assortment of outlets to stir up dissension, suspicion and strife. The ultimate objective of this torrent of ill will is to create revolution and bring about a Communist dictatorship.
‘Liberal’ heading
The “hate press” isn’t exclusively Communist; some of it claims to be Socialist and some of it just travels along under a “liberal” heading.
But the ring-leaders and pace-setters are out-and-out Communists. The Daily Worker in New York is the official Communist organ – the bellwether of the whole left-wing press. It is a rough-and-tumble paper full of violent names and strong, raw language. Directed primarily to the working class, its phrases and ideas crop up widely in union publications – not in all of them, by any means, but in many. Next to labor troubles The Daily Worker concentrates on Negro problems – and a good deal of what it says is echoed in some of the racial papers.
The high-brow end of the Communist publishing business is looked after by New Masses, a weekly. It goes after the “arty” left-wingers – the cocktail bar crowd, radical professors, artists and actors, the kind of reds and pinkos who are associated with Greenwich Village and Hollywood and who make much noise through such outfits as the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions.
The Daily Worker and the New Masses each has only about 20,000 circulation.
Indirect circulation
Their chief importance is not in their own circulation, but in the far larger indirect circulation which they get through other publications. Also, they have a considerable following among educators, government bureaucrats, professional people and journalists of various kinds – people who are in a position to help influence public opinion.
Their biggest echo is through union publications. There are probably not many outright Communists, for example, in the United Electrical Workers – yet the Russian party line, as set forth in The Daily Worker, is constantly and faithfully followed by the local publication of that union. The same is true in many other cases.
The Communists, who are always on the job – “they work while you sleep,” in the words of the old patent-medicine slogan – have done an efficient job of injecting their members and followers into positions as writers and editors in the labor press.
While The Daily Worker and New Masses never deviate in the slightest degree from the official Russian policy, there are numerous other left-wing publications such as The Nation and The New Republic which are less consistent.
Anti-Stalin group
Then there are other left-wing papers which, while violently revolutionist, are anti-Stalin. Chief of these is the organ of the Trotsky crowd, which calls itself the “Socialist Workers Party” and whose paper is The Militant. Believing in world-wide revolution, the Trotskyists claim Stalin perverted the Lenin revolution, and so they quarrel bitterly with the Communist publications.
There are many other internal conflicts within the ranks of the left-wing press.
But they all speak a common language; they all hate capitalism; they uniformly picture all employers as slave-drivers whose sole aim is to exploit and degrade their workers, and they all agree in damning the American system of government. Publishing solely by virtue of the American guarantee of a free press, they all want to do away with that system in favor of some sort of collective state. A state, incidentally, which as its first act would wipe out all papers and liquidate all writers who dared criticize it.
They all have another common policy; never give the other side a break. No left-wing paper prints any statement with which it disagrees. It may violently assail a speech; but it never prints the actual text so its readers can see what it is assailing.
But all these papers call themselves “liberal.”