ews-ticker. For this service the offices pay the bureaus from $1 to $2
a day. News bureaus form an important cog in the machinery for making
stock-markets, as it is through the news they furnish to the Stock
Exchange and to the offices where investors and speculators gather
together that the big operators affect the market. A decision to buy,
sell, or "stand pat" is often based on the _on dits_ of these printed
slips.

The first step toward "moulding public opinion" is taken when the
"System's" votaries send for the dishonest chief of a news bureau, a man
usually up in every trick of the trade. I will later describe one of
them, a scoundrel so able and experienced that, to use the vernacular of
the gutter of "the Street," he can give cards and spades to the
frenziedest of frenzied financiers. To this man the "System's" votary
will say something like this: "We are going to work off blank millions
of blank stock; it costs us thus and so, and we want to sell for so and
so many millions." Nothing is kept back from this head panderer and
procurer, for it would be useless to attempt to deceive him, and, to
quote his always picturesque language: "Never send a sucker to fish for
suckers or he'll lose your bait, so spread out your bricks and I'll get
the 'gang' to polish up their gildings." After the quality and amount
the "System" intends to work off in exchange for the people's savings
are explained, that part of the plunder which is to come to the head
news-bureau man is settled upon. The amount varies with the size and
quality of the robbery to be perpetrated. In some cases as high as a
million dollars in cash or stock or their equivalent has been paid to a
"moulder of opinion" for simply so shaping up a game that the people
might be deceived into thinking one dollar of worth was four, six, or
eight dollars.

The head of the news bureau, having taken the contract to lay out and
carry through the deceptive part of the scheme by which the people are
to be buncoed, now begins operations. First, bargains are made with
conscienceless financial editors of the daily and weekly newspapers,
whereby for so much stock or for "puts" or "calls" or both,[17] they
agree to insert in their paper's financial column whatever yarns are fed
them by the bureau man, regardless of their truth or falsehood. To
justify the attention paid the subject by each editor, a certain amount
of money is spent in advertising, in the newspaper that employs him