Complete Story
04/23/2015
The time a newspaper stared down the country’s largest advertiser
Editor's Note: The news last week that Buzzfeed had deleted posts critical of advertisers got some of us at ProPublica wondering about any instances when news organizations stood up to advertiser pressure. As it turns out, ProPublica president Richard Tofel wrote a whole chapter of a book about one of those cases: In 1954, the Wall Street Journal and its publisher, Barney Kilgore, confronted General Motors. The little-remembered incident helped establish the notion that news organizations could and should preserve their independence from advertisers.
Here is an adaptation from the book, "Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism."
In 1954, General Motors was the largest company in the world. Its CEO was Harlow ("Red") Curtice. Curtice's world was a sheltered one. He made more money than any other salaried employee in the country. He lived, as he had since 1914, in Flint, a city where nearly two-thirds of the workforce was employed by the company he ran, and flew back and forth on corporate aircraft each week to work in Detroit.
