e newspapers welcome them when
they represent such well-known philanthropic institutions as the Peace
Society, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the
People's Institute, because the copy they "turn in" requires little or
no further editing before it is sent to the printer. But when they are
employed to promote financial ventures, wars on labor unions,
anti-municipal ownership campaigns, or other private and class
interests, then the editors discount what they provide and they
actually do more harm than good to the cause they are intended to
promote.

Press agents, however, are sometimes enabled to get illegitimate matter
into our best papers. I recall to your memory the reports favorable to
the companies sent out during the great insurance investigations in New
York. "Collier's" has told the whole story.[2] One of the agents
employed testified on the witness-stand that a great insurance company
agreed to pay a dollar a line for what he could get into the papers. He
made his own arrangements with the journals that took his stuff, and
the difference between the price he had to pay and the dollar a line he
got from the insurance company was to be his private rake-off. He
succeeded in securing the publication of six dispatches of about two
hundred and fifty words, in such well-known newspapers as the St. Paul
"Pioneer Press," the Boston "Herald," the Toledo "Blade," the Buffalo
"Courier," the Florida "Times-Union," the Atlanta "Constitution," and
the Wilmington "News." It is only fair to state, however, that there
was nothing in the evidence to show whether the papers went into the
arrangement on a business basis, or were fooled into thinking the
dispatches they published were genuine reports of the proceedings
before the committee.

[2] _Collier's_, Nov. 11, 1905.

Examples of the use of press agents for both legitimate and
illegitimate purposes could be extended almost indefinitely. The
Standard Oil Company, I understand, now issues all its manifestoes to
the public through a trained press-representative; and the fight
against Messrs. Gompers, Mitchell, and Morrison, in the Buck Stove
controversy, was conducted with the aid of a press bureau, as one of
the lawyers in the case informed me. Whenever such a question comes
before the people as the choice between the Nicaragua and Panama routes
for the interoceanic canal, a press bureau is usually an important
factor in the campaign. The big navy c