Demand a free press.

• Author: La Follette, Robert M.
• Position: 1920 - Brief article

The people know the press is owned or controlled. They know that it is the servant of the combined groups which control Big Business, and through Big Business is rapidly acquiring the control of little business, line after line.

But foreknowledge that the press habitually misrepresents the facts, that it suppresses news, that it is unreliable on all issues involving public interest as against private monopoly--foreknowledge of all these facts cannot protect the public against its sinister influence.

So potent is the psychological effect of the printed lie, when artfully and persistently repeated, so destructive of all soundness of judgment are the deadly half-truths, the "doctored" news, the sly insinuations, the sensational falsehoods, retracted after they have served their purpose--and all the varied and multiplied forms of spurious, deceptive fabrication, willfully and wickedly printed from day to day by the Kept Press--that however thoroughly it be discredited, it is still the most...