"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
An anonymous New York journalist, quoted in Hamilton Holt's
Commercialism and Journalism, 1909.
Comments
"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
An anonymous New York journalist, quoted in Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, 1909.
https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...
IRL that would be John Swinton! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_(journalist))
Thank you!
Holt didn't attribute the quote, and I'd not attempted to track it down.