Panders

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Last Thanksgiving, Roy W. Howard, head of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, breezed into Denver fresh from the East, where he had just bought the Knoxville Sentinel and the Memphis News-Scimitar, and bought the Rocky Mountain News and a microscopic Denver Times (TIME, Nov. 29). Denver already had a Scripps paper, the Express, knocking along since 1905. Mr. Howard pitched the Times in with the Express to make an Evening News. In these transactions he relinquished Denver's morning Associated Press rights. Publisher Fred G. Bonfils of the Post quickly snapped up these rights and announced the new Morning Post in terms which showed clearly that he recognized a strong newcomer in what the Post likes to regard as its private territory.*

The Post represented Mr. Howard's action in dropping the A. P. rights, a simple business expediency, as malicious: "This greatest city of the West, this largest city between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean, east and west, and from the North Pole to the City of Mexico [sic] north and south in this longitude, has been belittled, humiliated and wantonly and willfully disgraced by the selfishly bringing about of the abandonment of the morning Associated Press service in Denver."

Was this uncharacteristic of Denver journalism? Not at all. Only last autumn, during the gubernatorial campaign, the Scripps-Howard paper called the Post "... a blackmailing, blackguarding, nauseaus [sic]; sheet which stinks to high heaven and which is the shame of newspapermen the world over." It had applied to Publisher Bonfils himself epithets which would scarcely gain credence in the &"Gents'" compartment of a railroad car—"lottery," "shame," "disgrace," ";bandit," "brigand," "lawless," "prostitution," "rapacity," "bunco," "scaly monstrosity," "mountebank," "hybrid ogre." Nor had there been any libel suit. Colorful talk is simply still the mode in Denver, as witness pandemoniac self-descriptions of the Post, the echoes of which, were the Rockies only a little higher, would have bounced off and been heard in Nome, Antofagasta, Timbuctoo and Reykjavik: " . . gladiator invincible, fearless, determined, with a giant's strength, a philosopher's mentality. . . . The champion of every good, and pure, and noble, and holy, and righteous cause; and the faithful and unceasing defender of righteousness, justice, decency, law and order . . . the opponent of every wrong and evil thing, of every form of crime, oppression, greed, selfishness and lawlessness." And this more earthy advice to readers: "Kick like a bay steer if you don't get what you're entitled to!"

What manner of thing is Denver journalism?