person:john swinton

JOURNAPUTE
À New York, lors d’un banquet, le 25 septembre 1880, le célèbre journaliste John Swinton se fâche quand on propose de boire un toast à la liberté de la presse.
« Il n’existe pas, à ce jour, en Amérique, de presse libre et indépendante. Vous le savez aussi bien que moi. Pas un seul parmi vous n’ose écrire ses opinions honnêtes et vous savez très bien que si vous le faites, elles ne seront pas publiées. On me paye un salaire pour que je ne publie pas mes opinions et nous savons tous que si nous nous aventurions à le faire, nous nous retrouverions à la rue illico. Le travail du journaliste est la destruction de la vérité, le mensonge patent, la perversion des faits et la manipulation de l’opinion au service des Puissances de l’Argent. Nous sommes les outils obéissants des Puissants et des Riches qui tirent les ficelles dans les coulisses. Nos talents, nos facultés et nos vies appartiennent à ces hommes. Nous sommes des prostituées de l’intellect. Tout cela, vous le savez aussi bien que moi ! »

John Swaiton, Rédacteur en chef du New York Times.
Cité dans : Labor’s Untold Story, de Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, NY, 1955/1979.
▻http://www.constitution.org/pub/swinton_press.htm

▻http://www.mai68.org/ag/1296.htm

John Swinton - Wikiquote
▻https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Swinton

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/30/Swinton-John.jpg

There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

E. J. Schellhouse: The New Republic. Founded on the Natural and Inalienable Rights of Man (1883) pp. 122-123 archive.org, quoting - “copied from an Eastern paper” - what “was uttered by a prominent New York journalist at a press dinner a short time since”, when “the hackneyed and ridiculous toast, ’The Independent Press,’ was proposed”.

The journalist’s name is disclosed as John Swinton in [Edward Hewes] Gordon Clark’s Shylock: as Banker, Bondholder, Corruptionist, Conspirator, Author’s Publisher, c/o the American Bimetallic League, Washington D.C. 1894, p. 111

#médias #presse #USA #histoire