“The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
To declare that the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes — would bring terrible retribution.”
Louis D. Brandeis
‘An investigation later discovered that business journalists for at least eight papers promoted stocks in their writing in return for bribes. The most embarrassing were at the Wall Street Journal, where reporters who wrote “Broad Street Gossip” and “Abreast of the Market” took payoffs for stock tips in the 1920s.
The revelations about the Journal reporters came out during hearings by the Senate Banking and Currency Committee in 1932, more than three years later, when Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia produced cancelled checks written to the Journal reporters from publicist A. Newton Plummer. The stories based on the bribes had gone as far back as 1923. The Journal ran the story about the testimony before the committee on page 11 the next day.
University of North Carolina, History of Business Journalism
“I would say that practically all the financial journals were on the take. This includes reporters for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Herald-Tribune, you name it. So if you were a pool operator, you’d call your friend at The Times and say, “Look, Charlie, there’s an envelope waiting for you here and we think that perhaps you should write something nice about RCA.” And Charlie would write something nice about RCA. A publicity man called A. Newton Plummer had canceled checks from practically every major journalist in New York City.”
Robert Sobel in PBS, The Great Crash of 1929
