Title: Never tire of protesting
Description: Truth suppressed, truth distorted, truth triumphant - truth is the theme of this book by a fearless journalist who has made a lifelong crusade for truth in the mass media.
In this book George Seldes tells how the facts in the tobacco-and-death, cigarets-and-cancer story have been twisted and falsified and hidden for nearly three decades.
He reveals why Reader's Digest isn't a digest, how some members of Congress are bought, how a great university practiced anti-Semitism and lied about it.
Through these pages march the heroes and scoundrels of mankind's fateful years - the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Korean conflict, the bitter, controversial Vietnam war, and the brief uneasy peacetime years between the wars. From his unusual vantage point in history, Seldes gives his personal reminiscences and judgments of Heywood Broun, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Sokolsky, Bruce Minton, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, Arnold Gingrich, the Press Lords and the Guild reporters, the Communist Party and the John Birch Society.
Seldes chronicles the life and death of the courageous newsletter In fact, which he co-founded and edited. He tells how In fact scooped the world press with the expose of a tie between Wendell Willkie and the J.P. Morgan interests; he reveals some of In fact's secret sources; he discusses the In fact revelations about the American Medical Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the House Un-American Activities Committee (including how In fact defeated Martin Dies). And he discloses the fascinating, tragic inside story behind the beginnings of In fact that even co-founder George Seldes himself did not know until many years later.
In a carefully documented study, the author charts the role of the Vatican in world affairs - the vast influence of its wealth, its international political intervention, its censorship activities, its Vietnam lobby.
What are the best - and the worst - newspapers in the world? Seldes lists them in his unique Honor Roll and Dishonor Roll of the Press.
"Tell the truth and shame the devil" - this is what George Seldes urges. And he offers simple, practical proposals for securing truthful journalism that will appeal to every reader who treasures a free and fearless press.
Subjects: Press, Politics and government, World politics, Freedom of the press
Places: United States
Time periods: 1945-, 1945-1989