fake telegraph or cable dispatches. At present, this is a universal custom in newspaper offices; the most respectable papers do it continually. They clip an item from some other newspaper, re-write it, and put it under a "telegraphic headline." They will take the contents of some letter that comes to the office, and write it up under a "London date-line." They will write their own political propaganda, and represent it as having come by telegraph from a special correspondent in Washington or New York. In "Harper's Weekly" for October 9, 1915, there was published an article, "At the Front with Willie Hearst." Mr. Hearst's "Universal News Bureau" was shown to be selling news all over the country, purporting to come from "more than eighty correspondents, many of them of world-wide fame." Every day, if you read this "Universal Service," you became familiar with the names of Hearst correspondents in London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Berlin, Petrograd. All these correspondents were imaginary persons; all this news was written in the Hearst offices in New York, being a re-hash for American afternoon papers of the news of the London morning papers. This is obvious fraud, and the law should bar it, precisely as it bars misbranded maple syrup and olive oil and strawberry jam.
Such laws would help; and I could suggest others that would help; nevertheless, the urging of such laws is not the purpose of this book. It is a problem of cutting the claws of a tiger. The first thing you have to do is to catch your tiger; and when I undertake the hard and dangerous job of invading a jungle and catching a tiger and chaining him down, am I going to be content with cutting off the sharpest points of the beast's claws, and maybe pulling one or two of his teeth? I am not!
