godkin/villard

[michael <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>(by way of Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>)]

35-6: "In his more innocent days, Huntington had thought the solution to
persistently bad press was to own the papers. "It is a wonder to me," he
wrote Charles Crocker in 1870, "that you do not control the Sac.
[Sacramento] `Union' and the Stockton papers." And in the 1870s the
Associates did acquire papers, but by the late 1870s it was clear that
openly owning a newspaper lessened its value. It was expensive. It assured
attacks from rival newspapers eager to assert railroad influence over the
news. It involved entanglements with importunate editors who thought that
inside information on stocks and bonds always paid and begged, as E. L.
Godkin did of Henry Villard, to be relieved of debt when it did not. It
involved a thousand irritations. And owning a paper did not always
guarantee the desired coverage. After Crocker and Mark Hopkins obtained
control, the Sacramento Record-Union still occasionally attacked the
Central Pacific's friends in Congress. "If I owned the paper," Huntington
grumbled to David Colton, "I would control it or burn it."

--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901



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