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Montana's history gives insight into controlling the narrative by controlling the press • Daily Montanan [1]

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Date: 2025-05-06

Montana knows as well as any state in the union what it looks like when millionaires decide to control the narrative. When Marcus Daly and William Clark, and later Augustus Heinze, were competing for who had the biggest mine shaft, one of their primary weapons was control of the press. Each man spent millions to buy or start newspapers, hire top-notch writers, editors and cartoonists from back East, and then buy up competing publications.

At first, their reasons for pouring all of this money into these papers was to badmouth the other guy, or dispute whatever propaganda was coming out against them. But once Daly died and Heinze left the state, the newspaper industry in Montana came exclusively under the control of Amalgamated Copper Company, which used its power to fight against every effort the miners made to gain a foothold in the fight for better working conditions, workable wages and more safety regulations. So rather than take care of the workers, these men spent millions fighting each other, and then fighting the truth, when it probably would have cost them a lot less money to simply give everyone a reasonable raise.

We have seen echoes of this pattern play out ever since, as it has become part of the playbook of every autocrat who ever walked the earth. One of the first pages in the playbook is to control the narrative, and we see it playing out now, with the most recent maneuver by our current commander-in-chief who signed an executive order to eliminate funding for National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System, two entities that President Donald J. Trump has always targeted as enemies of the state, simply because they don’t fawn over him, but actually do their due diligence and strive to tell the truth.

Pat Harrison, the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which includes both NPR and PBS, made a statement pointing out that “In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision or control over educational television or radio broadcasting or over CPB or any of its grantees or contractors.”

Katherine Maher, the President of NPR, stated that “America’s founders knew that an informed public is essential to a functioning democracy, and that commitment to serve an informed public is the heart of NPR’s mission.”

So what we have is a another classic example of a person in power trying to find a way around the law and intimidate the press into silence. It’s been part of Trump’s strategy from the beginning, and it has also played out in the way he has handled the press corps during White House press conferences. We all know about how he banned the Associated Press, one of the most highly regarded journalism organizations in the country, after it refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

As the newspaper industry continues to suffer the worst gutting in its history, we have seen too many of these publications fall into the hands of Trump’s fellow oligarchs, with Jeff Bezos taking over the Washington Post, and Rupert Murdoch taking over the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Murdoch is of course the brainchild behind the one news organization that has served Trump more faithfully than anyone, Fox News. And then there is the most powerful oligarch of them all at the moment, Elon Musk, who reinstated Trump to Twitter when he first bought the company. Not only did he dump millions of his own dollars into the Trump campaign, but that earned him a place on the public stage where he has dismantled many of the institutions and government agencies toward which he held a personal grudge, under the auspices of “waste, fraud and abuse.” In Trump’s world, anything that goes against his agenda qualifies, and that includes the arts, which have taken a beating under Musk’s DOGE.

Meanwhile Congress, which has clearly fallen under the Trump spell, does nothing about any of this, leaving most of America in the same position as miners during the early 20th century in Montana.

When the Speculator Mine Disaster struck in 1917, killing 169 men, the Amalgamated press machine shifted into high gear, beating away any suggestions that they were responsible for the accident, or that they were obligated to make any changes to their safety standards. This precedent, of doubling down when you’re wrong, has become standard fare in today’s America, and once again, it is the people who have been impacted most, by DOGE, and by the most egregious of Trump’s policies, who are suffering the most. And it is also those people who are most likely to support the man.

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[1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2025/05/06/montanas-history-gives-insight-into-controlling-the-narrative-by-controlling-the-press/

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