Montana's Copper Press

Corporate News at its Worst

By Jonathan Weber , 1-14-07

"Copper Chorus: Mining, Politics and the Montana Press, 1889-1959," is an excellent piece of scholarship – and a media junkie's delight. The book by University of Montana journalism professor Dennis Swibold examines a fascinating episodes of press corruption - the Anaconda Copper Company's 50-year run as owner of almost all the larger newspapers in Montana – and in doing so provides some great insight into both the press of yore and the early history of Montana.

It's certainly a timely work. The press today is undergoing a monumental transformation as new forms of Internet-based media undermine traditional newspapers and magazines, and questions about media ownership and influence are very much of the moment. Whether it's Fox News shilling for the Bush Administration or big corporate chains like Tribune and McClatchy allegedly destroying what's good and local about newspapers, journalists and readers alike are very ready to attribute perceived failures of the press to the nature of its ownership.

The Anaconda Company, as a press steward, certainly had nothing to brag about. The so-called Copper Press was well-produced, with excellent art and some fine writing and good national and international coverage. But ultimately its purpose was not to inform the citizenry, or even to serve advertisers and make money, but rather to advance the political and economic interests of the mining firm and its affiliates. For a while, it did this by relentlessly bashing its rivals; eventually, once its near-monopoly on the media was assured, it did it by ignoring local issues altogether.

In paging through Swibold's account of colorful press feuds and newspaper buying-and-selling and the shameless influence-peddling that passed for politics on the industrial frontier, it's striking at first is just how different the press of late 19th and early 20th century America was from what we have come to know. As any student of media history is well aware, newspapers of that epoch were highly partisan, and highly opinionated, and entirely free of the notion that their job was to convey some kind of "objective" truth about events in the world. They engaged in vitriolic argument, often with one another, that makes the language of today's blogosphere seem tame.

I mean, I've had some fun at the Missoulian's expense, but I've never worked myself up to anything like what the Helena Herald had to say, in 1868, about the rival Rocky Mountain Gazette:

"The organ of 8th St. rises from its foul nest, as much refreshed after its week's labor as a sow crawling from its mire, or a buzzard after feasting upon carrion. Its feathers were ruffled by the rude hand of the Herald on Saturday last, and like the gorged condor of South America, it vomits the disgusting contents of its stomach in the faces of its several readers, in a manner which is enough to sicken a dog."

Rhetorical style aside, it's remarkable how directly connected the early Montana newspapers were to the political interests and ambitions of their owners. It wasn't simply a question of companies or capitalists owning newspapers to advance their economic interests; newspapers were part-and-parcel of the political game. If you were thinking of running for office, a good start (and one that would raise no eyebrows) would be to buy a newspaper. Sort of like forming an "exploratory committee."

In fact, when it comes to local politics at least, the real analogy is not between newspapers 100 years ago and newspapers today, but rather between the newspapers of yore and the televised political advertising that so heavily influences modern elections. Instead of writing a check to a TV station, you would write a check to an editor (or publisher). Favorably coverage was bought and paid for, as a matter of course, and in fact in Swibold's telling this was the basic underpinning of newspaper business models. Advertisers were fickle, and understandably shy about such a splenetic press, but industrialists and political operatives had plenty of money to spend.

In this context, the Anaconda Company's newspaper efforts seem less like an aberration than a marker of their times. In the brutal battleground of early 20th-century Butte, it would have seemed peculiar if the biggest power-broker around didn't have its own newspapers. Why wouldn't it have? Politicians, corporations, and political interest groups today all spend lots of money on TV advertising; the Anaconda Company was simply using the tools of the day.

The Copper Press certainly worked to keep a tight lid on mining taxes, and ruthlessly attacked labor organizers and all efforts aimed at enhancing worker health and safety or protecting the environment. Later, Swibold recounts, copper papers including the Montana Standard, the Missoulian, the Billings Gazette, the Livingston Enterprise and the Helena Independent did their best to ignore local issues altogether. They refused to report on things like mining deaths, and devoted their pages to comparatively innocuous national and international news and features. The Anaconda Company didn't sell the papers until 1959, and Montana thus lagged well behind much of the country in the transition to a more professional genre of journalism.

Yet the non-Anaconda press in Montana had a lot to answer for too. Support for the state's Sedition Act, which criminalized anti-government speech during World War I and remains to this day one of the most egregious attacks ever on the First Amendment, was shockingly widespread among Montana newspapers. One searches in vain for any recognition among editors – Anaconda-employed or otherwise - that freedom of speech was important for the press if nothing else. There were a few crusading newspapermen, but for the most part one isn't left with the sense that the Anaconda company was successfully crushing popular debate, at least not in the first few decades of the century.

Indeed, the question that gradually emerges is why the company bothered owning newspapers at all, once the political battles of 1900-1930 were won; overt support of company agendas sometimes backfired, and covert support could have been purchased much more cheaply.

What lessons are we to take from all of this? I'm not really a big fan of corporate ownership of the media, but neither would I single that out as one of the pressing issues of the day. The best newspapers in this country, namely the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, are owned by family-controlled companies. But that's not a prescription: there's no reason to think any particular private owner would have the vision and the integrity of the Sulzbergers or the Grahams, and in general chain ownership has been no better or worse than individual ownership when it comes to supporting quality journalism.

Of course the real political power today is in the broadcast media, but that too defies easy formulas. The networks, with the consent of the FCC, have arguably abandoned their obligation to provide respectable news coverage of our complicated world, but they are simply giving the people what they want. And when an upstart like Google can turn the entire media industry upside down in five years, it's hard to assert that corporate control is unassailable.

For me the issues surrounding control of the press come down to choice, and whether readers have any. The sad thing about the Copper Press for much of its run was that it did indeed preclude competition – you can't compete as a business if your rival is in a different and more lucrative business, and is determined to either buy you out or spend you into the ground. And newspapers, in those days, were the only source of news in town.

Today it's a much different game. The economics of the news business aren't easy, but not because corporate ownership is precluding competition. In a world full of entertaining choices, the challenge is creating news offerings that connect with the concerns of the intended audience at a price they are willing to pay.

The key to a healthy media environment is diversity. It was the monolithic and monopolistic dominance of the Anaconda papers that made them a threat, at least for a time, rather than the identity of the ownership. The Internet, for now, is enabling a thousand media flowers to bloom, and that is all good. We should do what we can to make sure that continues.

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