Newspapers represent the harmful effects of misinformation and media bias. Abner reads the newspaper every evening, but he doesn’t recognize how newspapers—which are often funded by banks—can be biased, misinformed, and misleading. So in an election year, when newspapers report that “hard times came when the Democratic party got in,” Abner takes this assessment as fact, even though he prefers the Democratic candidate that year—proving how newspapers can shift people’s opinions and actions, even against their own interest.
Ford’s own newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, affirms the problems with misinformation, as he reports anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for three years without verifying this information. Abner then changes his attitude towards Jews based on this reporting and even joins the KKK as a result, demonstrating the power of the media and misinformation. Sinclair also demonstrates how inescapable this influence can be: when Abner is too poor to afford a newspaper, he thinks that he has no means of finding out what’s wrong with the country. Newspapers therefore become not only a source of information, but the only source of information for many, reinforcing how they make people susceptible to false reporting because there is nothing to counter them.
Newspapers Quotes in The Flivver King
All the nations had hard times, the newspapers assured him; it was a law of nature and there was no way to escape it. But now prosperity was coming back, and America remained the greatest country in the world, and the richest; if you worked hard, and lived a sober and God-fearing life, success was bound to come to you.
It was the year of a presidential election. There was a college president by the name of Wilson running on the Democratic ticket, and he tried hard to win Abner away from his staunch Republican principles, making eloquent speeches about “the New Freedom.” Abner read some of his golden words in the newspapers; but also he read that hard times came when the Democratic party got in, and he was more afraid of hard times than of any tyrant.
He loathed war as a stupid, irrational, and altogether hideous thing. He began to give less and less of his time to planning new forges and presses, and more and more to writing, or at any rate having written, statements, interviews, and articles denouncing the war and demanding its end. To other business men, who believed in making all the money you could, and in whatever way you could, this propaganda seemed most unpatriotic; the more so as many of them were actively working to get America into the conflict, and multiply their for- tunes overnight.
The matter was not stated thus crudely in the American newspapers; but their tone and contents began to change to meet this situation. Whereas in 1916 Abner and Henry had read about the horrors of war, in 1917 they read about the horrors of submarine war. Also they began to read about the glories of French civilization, and the humane ideals for which the British ruling classes had always stood. So presently Abner Shutt began to say to all his fellows in the shop, “By Heck, them Huns ought to be put down!” And in February the pacifist Henry Ford was telling a New York Times reporter about a bright idea he had for a “one-man submarine,” which he described as “a pill on a pole”—the pole being fastened in front of the submarine and the pill being a bomb.
He showed how Jews, controlling stage and screen, were depraving American morals; they were doing this, not because it paid, but as a deliberate plot to break down American civilization. Drunkenness was spreading, and it was not because the Jews were making money out of liquor, but because they wanted America drunk. Jews controlled the clothing trade, and so American girls were wearing short skirts. Jews controlled music, and so the American people listened to jazz and danced themselves crazy.
The Ford empire was not a metaphor but a fact, not a sneer but a sociological analysis. Henry was more than any feudal lord had been, because he had not merely the power of the purse, but those of the press and the radio; he could make himself omnipresent to his vassals, he was master not merely of their bread and butter but of their thoughts and ideals.
Newspapers Symbol Timeline in The Flivver King
