Honolulu Record, August 19, 1948, vol. 1 no. 2, p. 8
W.K. Bassett an Independent Voice
In efforts to impress their readers with a sort of independent thinking on matters of political and economic interest, and at the same time stick to the capitalist party line for the sake of advertising income, both the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin are always amusing and ridiculous.
For instance, take the Star-Bulletin's prize columnist, Drew Pearson. Notice that every once in a while the Editor calls attention, in a black-face box on Page One, to what Pearson has to say that day on the editorial page. This page-one blurb only comes when Pearson hits out at somebody or something coincidental with the Star-Bulletin's party-line editorial-and-advertising-department policy. When his barbs find their mark in the soft flesh of the Star-Bulletin's sacred cows, you can read him if you want to, but there will be no front-page suggestion that you do so—and the editorial-advertising hope is that you won't.
How Propaganda is Made
An example: While on his quite sensational tour of the West recently, President Truman lambasted the Republican 80th Congress and declared it to be the worst Congress in American history. The Star-Bulletin printed his charges in its news columns and gave due prominence to the articulated wrath of the Republican representatives and senators. A few days later, in his column oh the editorial page, Drew Pearson gave facts and figures to prove that the Republican 80th Congress was without doubt the worst Congress in American history.
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At well-timed intervals you find in the Advertiser editorials that paint Harry Truman as about the lowest of the low in the list of President of the United States; weak, incompetent and generally a wash-out. On the same page you read Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard columnist, commending the sincerity of purpose, nobility, efficiency and general ability of this same Harry S. Truman.
And thinking readers of the Advertiser will quite sensibly conclude that Mr. Stokes, being what he is and where he is, forgets more every night about the political situation in America than the editorial writer of the Honolulu Advertiser will ever know.
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Business Always Cashes In
And here is something that is interesting in view of the harrowing conditions of the sugar plantations of Hawaii which, according to their own gasping breaths, are on their last legs.
A Washington dispatch, sent by the Associated Press to the Star-Bulletin this past week, says that the Department of Commerce, on July 26, reported cash dividends by U. S. Corporation "were a record high of $1,350,500,000 for the second quarter of this year."
Then this significant line: "Publicly reported dividends, the Department said, account for about two-thirds of all cash dividends paid."
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And, according to Drew Pearson in the Star-Bulletin of Thursday, August 5, Philip Murray of the CIO told President Truman that the steel corporations gave labor a wage increase amounting to $160,000,000 a year and then raised prices to the consumers by more than $630,000,000; the coal mine operators gave labor a wage increase amounting to $150,000,000 - and then raised the price of coal to consumers $500,000,000 a year.
American industry is starving to death is it?
Phooey!