George Seldes (1890-1995)
(Page 2 of 2)
May/June 1996
Jay Walljasper, Utne Reader
Seldes finally called it quits with the mainstream media in 1928, when his dispatches for the Chicago Tribune about the final stages of the Mexican revolution were published only when they concurred with the U.S. State Department's assessment of the situation. He proceeded to write a series of influential books attacking press barons who twist the news to serve their own economic interests. In 1940 he founded In Fact, a weekly newsletter that pioneered both investigative reporting and press criticism. He uncovered major stories that no other publications would touch, like American corporations' lucrative deals with Hitler and Mussolini that continued even after the war began, and the links between smoking and cancer. The fact that most Americans never heard about the dangers of smoking until the surgeon general's report in 1964--decades later--is a testament to the power of tobacco companies and other big advertisers to dictate what appears (and doesn't appear) in the news.
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In Fact ceased publication in 1950, the victim of an FBI red-hunting campaign against its subscribers. Seldes moved to Vermont and slipped out of the public eye for many years. But then, in an ending worthy of a Hollywood movie, Seldes found new acclaim for editing the landmark reference books The Great Quotations and The Great Thoughts as well as for his fascinating 1987 autobiography, Witness to a Century: Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs.
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