AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, The Exception to the Rulers. I’m Amy Goodman.

GEORGE SELDES: We all shook hands and said, “Let’s take an oath that the rest of our lives will be devoted to telling the truth and the whole truth about what wars are like, instead of writing these glorious stories that we’d been writing up to now.” And after all, war is murder, you know.

AMY GOODMAN: Pioneering journalist George Seldes may not be as well known as a Walter Cronkite or an I.F. stone, but he is arguably one of the most important journalists of the century. In his 80 years in journalism, 10 years as a Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent, Seldes witnessed many of the events that shaped the 20th century. In the 1930s, Seldes became an outspoken critic of the media, decrying the lords of the press who allowed big business and politicians to distort news coverage. In the decade that followed, he published a muckraking weekly called In Fact, which pioneered American press criticism. He published reports linking cigarette smoking to cancer and heart disease decades before the major dailies. Because of his criticism, Seldes found himself a pariah in his profession. Ostracized and marginalized by the mainstream media, he was nonetheless an inspiration to three generations of journalists and pundits.

Now a remarkable new documentary is airing across the country which chronicles the life of George Seldes. Tell the Truth and Run examines domestic and international news coverage, raising questions about journalism, public citizenship and the democratic process.

We’re joined now by Rick Goldsmith, who’s the producer and director of Tell the Truth and Run. It’s airing at KQED in San Francisco on April 17th, Maryland Public Television on April 16th. It’ll be airing in Los Angeles on May 24th. And we wanted to get a chance to talk more extensively about George Seldes’s life.

So, welcome, Rick Goldsmith. And can you tell us who this man, George Seldes, was?

RICK GOLDSMITH: George Seldes was probably the most remarkable American reporter of the 20th century. That may seem like an overstatement, but he covered some of the events that shaped the century — World War I, the rise of communism and fascism in the 1920s. He got kicked out of the Soviet Union by the Bolsheviks, expelled from Italy for exposing Mussolini — and he nearly paid for his life for that one. And then he went a step further. He began a new career as a press critic, while still being an investigative reporter, in the 1930s. He had muckraking books such as Freedom of the Press and Lords of the Press. And in 1940, he started his own weekly newsletter of investigative reporting and press criticism. The weekly was called In Fact and subtitled An Antidote to Falsehoods in the Daily Press. I.F. Stone, who modeled his own newsletter after In Fact a decade later, he called Seldes the granddaddy of us investigative reporters.

AMY GOODMAN: The film begins by giving us a brief introduction to George Seldes and then talks about him becoming a part of the U.S. military, in a sense, in covering World War I. And then it goes into his coverage of Mussolini.

RICK GOLDSMITH: Right. Well, Seldes began his career, first of all, in the age of the muckrakers, the first decade of the century. And as a reporter in World War I, he was part — he became part of the war propaganda machine, really, where the reporters basically were out there at the front with the troops, but came back and glorified the war. They didn’t tell the horrible stories of the guts and the people dying and the horrible deaths, the millions in World War I, that were happening. And it was only at the end of the war that Seldes really realized what a travesty his and the other reporters’ reporting was and what a detriment it was to the truth.

He went on to report from Europe, in Russia and then in Italy. When he got to Italy, Mussolini had just come to power a couple of years earlier, in 1922. Seldes got there in 1924. And most of the reporters, the Western reporters, from the United States and the other Western countries, gave fairly glowing accounts of fascism. Fascism was a new concept, and it seemed like here was a strong leader, and it was very efficient. The trains ran on time. Seldes was one of the few reporters, and definitely the most aggressive reporter, in showing the violent underbelly of fascism, how Mussolini was really involved in the assassination of his political opponents, in the crushing of labor unions, in the crushing of any political opposition at all. And for his troubles, he was threatened by the Mussolini government, and eventually expelled and chased out by the fascist squadristi on a train.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was the response of the other media as he tried to expose the truth early on about the fascists, the Italian dictator Mussolini?

RICK GOLDSMITH: His reporting against Mussolini was somewhat of a lonely cause. The top reporters in Italy, the dean of the press corps was a fellow named Salvatore Cortese from the Associated Press, and his son also reported from The New York Times. And they were very protofascist. In fact, Salvatore Cortese wrote material, press material, for Mussolini. So, Seldes got no support from his fellow reporters. And in fact, his own publisher at that time, Colonel McCormick, who owned the Chicago Tribune — Seldes was reporting from the Chicago Tribune — McCormick gave him no support, as well. McCormick was a supporter of Mussolini. And he generally was hands-off on his reporters in Europe. But when push came to shove, as it did in this case — and in this case, Seldes was expelled — McCormick did not raise a stink, and, in fact, sent a replacement reporter for Seldes who was more pro-Mussolini.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, I think we saw it with Hitler and Mussolini, the way the press worked at that time, not what we remember today. Today, people would think that the U.S. press was very much against fascism, certainly against Nazism, but if you look back at the press in that time, in fact, it wasn’t.

RICK GOLDSMITH: It’s very important to remember that our view of fascism and Nazism is colored by the fact that we fought a war against it in the 1940s and we won that war. But in the 1930s, and in Seldes’s case, in Italy, even going back to the 1920s, fascism was viewed as fairly friendly by the U.S. government, certainly by the U.S. corporations, and, unfortunately, by the U.S. press.

AMY GOODMAN: So, George Seldes is expelled July 1925 from Italy. His publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick, didn’t protest. The U.S. government didn’t protest. What happened after he left?

RICK GOLDSMITH: It’s fascinating to look at the newspapers of that time. Between July of 1925, when Seldes was expelled, and January of 1926, an interesting course of events happened. We saw more and more glowing reports in the newspapers about fascism, about Italian fascism. The New York Times, particularly, wrote editorials very supportive of Mussolini, comparing him with our Founding Fathers, with George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. And then, by 1926, we saw what all the fuss was about. The U.S. government basically bailed out fascist Italy with — by forgiving their war debt. And J.P. Morgan, the bank of J.P. Morgan, floated a one million — excuse me, floated a $100 million loan — and in that time, that’s some money — to the Italian government, keeping the fascist government afloat. And this was a critical moment in the history of Italian fascism, when it could have gone either way. The Italian government could have fallen because of many pressures, including financial pressure, and it really was the United States government and the Morgan loan that bailed them out.

AMY GOODMAN: Incredible. Well, after he came back from Italy, he ended up quitting the newspaper, but not because of what happened in Italy and the lack of the paper’s support there, but because of his series of articles on Mexico. What was he writing about?

RICK GOLDSMITH: He was writing about a crisis in Mexico in the late 1920s. It involved oil rights. It involved the Catholic Church. It involved labor unions. And Seldes, being a veteran reporter, thought that the best way to get the news to the Chicago Tribune was to write a series of articles and concentrate half of the articles on the U.S. government viewpoint and half the articles on the Mexican viewpoint. So he wrote kind of a side-by-side series, five articles of this, five articles of that, turned them in to the newspaper and went about his business. Several weeks later, when the newspaper — when the Tribune started printing the articles, he found out that they printed the U.S. government articles, but they did not print the Mexican side. And to Seldes, this was the biggest abomination of all. To him, you print both sides of the story, and that’s what makes it a story. It makes it a complete story. And here was his own publisher giving only one side, censoring half of his work. And he felt at that point that he can no longer work for this newspaper and this man.

GEORGE SELDES: I said to the managing editor, “You can either run a pro and con, U.S. view and Mexican view, side by side, or run a series of five of the U.S. viewpoint followed by a series of five of the Mexican replies. Anyway, use your own judgment. That’s up to you. I’ve taken the five main subjects and written 10 articles. Here they are.” And the whole series of the U.S. viewpoint was on the front page. Then nothing happened. And nothing happened for a week and two weeks and three weeks. And finally, I cabled Mr. M to say, “What happened to the Mexican series?” And they said, “Oh, the colonel said, 'Put it in the waste basket.'” And that’s when I determined I won’t work for people like that. As I understand it, no editor, publisher has the right to change what their newspaperman has written. And that was the rules. And as far as I know, it was the rules of all of us. I never heard of a Times man complaining that anything had been changed or the headline was wrong or it was buried or anything like that.

RICK GOLDSMITH: But he didn’t change it. He just left it out. And isn’t that a publisher’s prerogative, or an editor?

GEORGE SELDES: He just — he just suppressed the other side. When I wrote, giving both sides to a story, he only gave one side, the American side, and suppressed the other side. That’s all he did. That’s the worst censorship possible.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, George Seldes went on to write books for a number of years. Tell us about that period and then he and his wife Helen Seldes’s attempts to cover the Spanish Civil War and covering the fall of Spain to General Francisco Franco.

RICK GOLDSMITH: In the early '30s, Seldes had been over in Europe and stayed in Europe and began writing books about the press. He had had a good 20-some-odd years as a first line reporter, and he knew what could and couldn't be printed in the daily newspaper. He spoke from experience. And he wrote about the pressures on the newspapers, the big money interests, the big oil companies or the public utilities, and the governmental interests that influenced and distorted and suppressed and censored the news. He wrote a book called Lords of the Press, which profiled every major publisher of the day, William Randolph Hearst, Sulzberger of The New York Times, the Associated Press, Scripps, Howard, and gave background on these publishers, where their interests lie, how they presented the news. And he gave, you know, chapter and verse. He gave textbook examples of how they presented the news.

While being in Europe, the — in the 1930s was a tremendous time, was an exciting time, and also a very ominous time, because fascism was gaining favor. It had already taken hold in Italy. It was now gaining favor in Germany. And then it threatened to take over Spain in 1936. 1936, Spain had a democratically elected government, and a bunch of generals, led by General Franco, with support from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, launched an attack on the Spanish Republic. And the Spanish Civil War, what’s known as the Spanish Civil War, followed. Seldes always scoffed at that phrase, “Spanish Civil War.” “It wasn’t a civil war at all,” he said. It was the Spanish people against the fascists. Well, Seldes was already one of the top foreign correspondents of the day, even though he had left daily reporting at this point. So he went to the New York Post, which at that time was a fairly liberal paper, and he asked if he could report from Spain. And his — now his wife, Helen, who was also a reporter, the two of them went over there and sent dispatches back to the Post, which were printed, at least for a while, until he got into censorship problems there, as well.

But what was unique about Seldes’s reporting, there was a handful of reporters in Spain who — I guess they were generally on the left, or at least they had a worldview of the conflict. And by that, I mean they did not see it, as many of the mainstream press reporters in the United States saw it, as a faraway conflict, a battle between communists and fascists, you know, because the Soviet Union was supporting the republic, so it was seen by some as a conflict between Russia and Germany, or Russia and the fascists. So, what did it concern us? But Seldes and a few other reporters thought, “No, this was a prelude to a much greater war.” And as early as 1937 — and you can see the articles that he wrote — he said this is the first in a battle of a world war of invading fascism against democracy. And he proved to be right.

AMY GOODMAN: Rick Goldsmith, our guest, he is the filmmaker who produced and directed and co-wrote and edited the documentary of George Seldes’s life called Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press. Tell us where you got the title, Tell the Truth and Run.

RICK GOLDSMITH: Tell the Truth and Run came from — the title Tell the Truth and Run came from the title of one of Seldes’s books. But beyond that, that title came from his experience as a foreign reporter. He worked for one of the great foreign correspondents, Floyd Gibbons, who was the chief of the foreign desk, the Chicago Tribune European foreign desk. And it was pretty tough reporting. There weren’t a lot of rules back in those days. I’m talking about the early '20s. And reporters would go into countries where there was tremendous political conflict and try to report on the stories, and they would get threatened by the host governments. Well, Floyd Gibbons said, “Look, don't worry about that. Tell the truth and run, if you have to. I can send in another reporter if you get thrown out. The important thing is to get the story and not to compromise on the story.”

AMY GOODMAN: Rick Goldsmith, we have to break for stations to identify themselves, producer and director of Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press. We’ll be back with him here on Democracy Now! in just a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. When the pioneering and controversial journalist George Seldes was pressed by other journalists not to tell the truth about fascism, this is what he had to say.

GEORGE SELDES: They all said to me, “Look, you’ve got a good job here. It pays well. You’ll live better than anywhere else. Why don’t you just — just overlook these things, you know, like we do? And someday, when we leave the country, we’ll write the whole facts then, and we won’t suppress them. But don’t do it now every day.” And I said, if a story comes up, no matter what it is, and it’s straight news, and they can’t deny a word of it as false, I’ll send it. Well, that’s how I was — that’s how I was brought up to be a reporter, you know.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about fascism abroad. He also dealt with corporate power here at home. One of the major issues he took on was the health hazards of cigarettes and the power of the tobacco corporations. He did that through his newsletter, which you can tell us about, called In Fact, a newsletter that actually had a tremendous circulation when compared to other left magazines, yet very few people know about it today.

RICK GOLDSMITH: Seldes began In Fact in 1940. It was a combination, investigative reporting and press criticism. And one of his most prominent stories was the tobacco story, which was a multifaceted story. The basic story, of course, was that cigarettes killed you. And the medical reports showing that they shortened the lifespan, that they caused heart disease, later in the decade showed that they caused lung cancer, they were being published throughout the 1940s, but the mainstream press did not publish those stories. So, number one was the story itself: Cigarettes kill you. Number two was the fact that the mainstream press wasn’t reporting this story. Why not? Well, to Seldes, it was fairly apparent. Cigarettes, tobacco companies were the largest advertisers in most of the newspapers across the country. And what Seldes found out even later in the decade was that they had a compact, a contract with the tobacco companies and the newspapers, that the newspapers would not print adverse news about cigarettes.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about the effects of the McCarthy era, the effects of Senator Joseph McCarthy on Seldes’s publication, In Fact, and on his life. We hear a lot about people who got destroyed during the McCarthy period, but I don’t think there have been a lot of faces and names put to that destruction. Can you tell us what happened to George Seldes as a result of the witch hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

RICK GOLDSMITH: Well, Seldes was a reporter who truly practiced journalism without fear or favor. So, he wasn’t — he was going to call a spade a spade, wherever it was. If he saw abuse of power, if he saw corruption, and if he saw witch hunting, he was going to report it as such. This did not endear him to the halls of power. And as early as the early 1940s, Seldes was being investigated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. And Seldes fired back and wrote about Hoover infiltrating labor unions, subverting political organizations. So, this continued all through the 1940s.

By the time that Joseph McCarthy took center stage, which was in early 1950, Seldes once again went after McCarthy. He exposed McCarthy’s pronouncements about so many reds in the State Department as lies, as fabrications that came from right-wing pamphlets that were manufactured out of thin air. And, of course, he got attacked by the McCarthyites, as well. It was a very dark time in American political life, so that anybody who was speaking out, whether you were communist or whether you were liberal and just speaking out against the witch hunters, or whether you were leftist or open-minded of any type, you would be attacked. And there was a real fear. So, while Seldes was relatively immune because he didn’t work for anybody, so he couldn’t get fired from a job, his subscribers were harassed. Other subscribers were just plain fearful to be — to subscribe to In Fact, because they thought they’d be on a list, which, in fact, they were. Other subscribers were caught up in the anti-communism of the time. And Seldes was not an anti-communist. So he didn’t join the McCarthy line, and people started dropping his magazine. Eventually, they lost so many subscribers that Seldes had to close down operations of In Fact in late 1950.

AMY GOODMAN: In Fact reached its peak circulation in 1947 with more than the combined sales of _The Nation and The New Republic, the two leading liberal left weeklies of the day.

RICK GOLDSMITH: That’s right. Seldes had a great appeal to the average working person, the average man and woman, the straphanger, as Victor Navasky says. He spoke a newspaperman’s language. The other left liberal weeklies of the day were a little bit more intellectual. Seldes had a wider audience. Union members subscribed by the thousands to Seldes’s news weekly, and it had a circulation of over — of almost 200,000 in 1947, which was very large at that time.

AMY GOODMAN: He took on the National Association of Manufacturers, which was, to say the least, extremely anti-labor.

RICK GOLDSMITH: The National Association of Manufacturers was a collection of the most conservative right-wing businessmen of the day. It was a collection of very wealthy, very powerful businessmen who used their money to influence legislation. And the anti-union legislation that came out in the late 1940s, in 1947 and 1948, was sponsored, in most part, by the National Association of Manufacturers, and they were able to get it through their friends in Congress. Seldes reported on the big money that influenced Congress, and he was really the first reporter to do so. And he did so once again. He did so because he read the government documents. And the laws governing disclosure of lobbyist contributions first took effect in the 1940s. Seldes was a document rat. He would pore over the government documents and find all sorts of goodies about lobbyist contributions, about Federal Trade Commission reports, and these cited the crimes of the big corporations. So, Seldes really was exposing a lot of corporate crime and corporate misdeeds in the 1940s, decades before his colleagues.

AMY GOODMAN: When he finally decided to close down his paper, In Fact, with circulation plunging in 1950, what did he then do? He was 60 years old. He didn’t die until he was 104, which is so absolutely incredible. But what did he do in between?

RICK GOLDSMITH: Well, when he left In Fact, he went up to — he went back up to his house in Vermont, where he had been living before he published the newspaper out of New York. And he didn’t stop. He didn’t stop working. He slowed — he admittedly slowed down a bit. And the McCarthy — the whole McCarthy atmosphere — the whole McCarthy atmosphere dealt a blow to him. But he continued to write. He wrote a book called Tell the Truth and Run, that was published in 1953, but, again, he had trouble finding a publisher for that one because of the political atmosphere of the time. He continued to write books. He collected quotations and published a couple of books of quotations that differed from Bartlett’s in that they were more quotations about freedom, about democracy, about the press, about issues that Seldes held dear to his heart. And his last book, he published at age 97. He always said that — you know, he said that “retirement” was the dirtiest 10-letter word in the English language. He felt like life with a purpose was the only way to live.

AMY GOODMAN: Rick Goldsmith, you got a chance to meet him when he was maybe moving on in years. I guess you met him, what, at the age of 98?

RICK GOLDSMITH: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: And that’s when you did this documentary. Can you tell us about your personal impressions of him and what it was like to go through the 20th century with him, chronicling with him on film?

RICK GOLDSMITH: Well, it’s interesting. You know, you look at a headline from the front page of the Chicago Tribune in 1925, when Seldes was kicked out of Italy, and it says, you know, “Fascisti-ousted Seldes refuses to glorify Mussolini.” And Seldes’s photo stares out at you from the front page. You know, it’s very imposing. And then you visit this man. And he was 98 at the time, and he lives in a tiny — or, he lived then in a tiny, two-room brick house in rural Vermont. He greets you himself and takes you into his kitchen and makes you a taco. And he was this gentle, unassuming character. He was funny. He was charming. He didn’t put on airs. But it fits, because, you know, his niece, Marian Seldes, in the film, said he was full of rage, but that was a rage against ideas that were damaging. The man, the human being, didn’t have rage. He had compassion. He had understanding. And that was really true.

Colman McCarthy, he’s a syndicated columnist who then wrote for The Washington Post, and he’s in my film, and when I interviewed him, we were discussing when George Seldes finally got his first journalism award. And Colman said to me, he said, Journalism” — how did he say it? “Journalists, we love to give ourselves prizes. We’re the most vainglorious profession on Earth. We make Hollywood look like small potatoes. If you read the obit of a United States journalist, “prize-winning journalist,” you can’t fail to have that as the first line of your obit.” And, of course, we’re talking about a man who exposed Mussolini and William Randolph Hearst and J. Edgar Hoover. And he never got an award from his own profession 'til the age of 90. So, anyway, Colman says, “It occurred to me, Seldes getting this award, that there's really only one prize that matters in journalism. And it’s the one when a reader sees a column or an article or an essay you wrote and says, 'Well, if you didn't write that, I wouldn’t have known it.’ And George got that award every article he wrote,” McCarthy says, “because he was giving the reader not only something that was true, but something you couldn’t get elsewhere.”

AMY GOODMAN: One last question before you go, Rick, and that is, well, broadcasting today, journalism today. Have you had trouble airing this documentary, that was nominated for an Academy Award, but, more importantly than that, just tells an incredible story of this pioneering journalist, George Seldes, the documentary Tell the Truth and Run? How easy is it to get aired on public television around the country?

RICK GOLDSMITH: Very difficult, actually. I spent over a year trying to get it on television in any venue, but I thought that it was really particularly appropriate for public television. But the main, what you would think would be the — what you would think would be the predictable venues, like American Experience, didn’t take it. Public television system has — the public television system has been corrupted. Most of what you see on public television is sponsored, in part or in whole, by the corporate world — Archer Daniels Midland, AT&T, Pepsi-Cola, the oil companies, the brokerage houses. They sponsor everything, from the news shows, you know, like MacNeil/Lehrer to Wall Street Week, to American Experience to NOVA.

So, why is Tell the Truth and Run on public television? Well, it’s definitely not due to PBS per se. It’s on television, thanks to a small syndicator called APS, American Program Service, and, more importantly, thanks to local program directors at each station, so at WNET in New York or KQED in San Francisco or KTWU in Topeka, Kansas, or Maryland Public Television in the D.C. area. Eighteen public television stations have picked it up. But it’s largely because the local program directors have said, “Hey, this is something that addresses something important. It’s compelling. It’s entertaining. And it’s something that deserves to be on television.” And if it’s not going to be in your area, call up your public television station — after all, it is public television — and let them know how you feel.

AMY GOODMAN: On that note, I want to thank you very much for bringing us something we couldn’t have gotten elsewhere at this time in the 20th century, and that is the story of this great journalist, George Seldes.

GEORGE SELDES: We all shook hands and said, “Let’s take an oath that the rest of our lives will be devoted to telling the truth and the whole truth about what wars are like, instead of writing these glorious stories that we’d been writing up to now.” And after all, war is murder, you know.

AMY GOODMAN: George Seldes. And the documentary about his life is called Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press. And you can call your public television station and ask them to run it, or when they are. In fact, this week, George Seldes and the American Press, the title, Tell the Truth and Run, will be airing on KQED in San Francisco on April 17th, on Maryland Public Television on April 16th. In Los Angeles, it will run on KCET on May 24th. And I want to thank Rick Goldsmith for being our guest, the producer and director of Tell the Truth and Run.

Tomorrow on Democracy Now!, we’ll be looking at war tax resistance. Yes, tomorrow is Tax Day, April 15th. We’ll also be talking with some of the pioneering journalists from the African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. They’re coming to New York to receive the George Polk Award. We’re going to find out about this newspaper, that has been going on for decades.

If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can call the Pacifica Archives at 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. And this one bookkeeping note: Earlier on the show, we talked to Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire about the Northern Irish peace accord. Well, she talked about Phil Berrigan and recently visiting him at the federal penitentiary in Virginia, and the fact that he is no longer allowed to see relatives or friends because of her protests there. Well, you can call the warden — his name is Steven Dewalt, at FCI Petersburg; his number is 804-733-7881 — to let him know how you feel about the fact that Phil Berrigan, for the rest of his time in prison, is not allowed to see friends or family because of a protest of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire. The number of warden Steven Dewalt, 804-733-7881. Democracy Now! is produced by Dan Coughlin; our director, Jeremy Scahill; our engineer, Errol Maitland. Thanks to KPFA in Berkeley for their support during the Rick Goldsmith interview. Democracy Now is — our email address is democracy@pacifica.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.