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Show THE SEARCHLIGHT Deseret News (Continued from: preceding page) specific industries, financial groups, and social problems. Its steady advocacy of the worst aspects of commercialism and social retrogression has become a menace to or derly progress that can be counteracted ‘Twenty-five years only ago by exposure. sister corporations of the Deseret News, the Utah-Idaho and Amalgamated Sugar companies, associated with certain individual. buccaneers, were engaged in a.campaign. of extermination of independent sugar companies, including the Pio- neer, Beet Growers, and Gunnison companies. In the. Beet Growers case the Utah:Idaho and its allies were convicted by the Federal Trade Commission—Docket 303—of: numerous unfair trade practices including: intereeption of telegraph messages, banking pressure, bribing newspapers, spreading direct hes regarding the character of individuals: engaged in independent sugar enterprises, and numer- ous other offenses.. The Utah- Idaho. sent out a letter to newspaper editors informing them that the volume of advertising their. papers would receive from the Utah-Idaho would depend upon the attitude of their papers toward the Sugar Company and its associates. More the now than two defunct thousand Beet stockholders Growers Sugar of Com- pany were harrassed and beaten down’ until their property was lost, and was taken over by the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company. Did the Deseret Evening News utter a single word of condemnation of the murderous assault on the independents by the Utah-Idaho and Amalgamated? It did not. Instead, it excused and condoned. It suppressed sugar news and doctored virtually all adverse news it did publish. The true picture of the raping of independent enterprises was never brought home to the people of Utah and Idaho. The News fashioned bright shiny halos for the perpetrators, and even tried to fit them with newspaper-made angelic wings. Why? Because the Deseret News is a part of that predatory combine. | When the sins of the sugar barons finally caught up with them, the Deseret News em- Editorials barked on an editorial policy of pleading for a friendlier policy ‘toward ‘‘the sugar industry’’—a policy that continues to this day. Indeed, on an average of once a month the News publishes an editorial plea for more and more vovernmental concessions for the ‘‘sugar industry’’. Of course, the News does not urge ereater payments: “bel made to farmers beets. It doesn’t: express that farm that for the editorial opinion investments in beet growing lands far exceed Utah-Idaho ‘investments in factories and equipment, and‘ ‘therefore should have more than a fifty-fifty division received of the money from sugar siles. The News merely calls for benefits for ‘the sugar industry’’. It _implies that everybody will benefit. But the. eravy is always channeled toward the Utah- Idaho and Amalgamated companies. Little or none of it trickles down to the man, woman or kid who actually thins or hoes the bee s. The companies are the ‘sugar industry’? /in/ the eyes of the News. Why? Because they are sister corporations, and for all practical purposes, the News is their house organ. The News is equally careful about refraining from any advocacy of more pay for refinery workers. Indeed, it believes they are adequately blessed as it is. The News seems totally unperturbed about the fact that the base wage of Utah-Idaho refinery workers is O7¥2 cents an hour or $4.60 for an eight-hour day, as compared to a base rate of 85e an hour or $6.80 for an eight-hour day* for Califor- nia refinery workers That difference in pay rates seems right and proper to the Deseret News. Indeed, one of the reasons it hates labor unions is that labor foreed the base pay of refinery workers in Utah and Idaho wp to 57%e an hour in the last pre-war year—1941. “Those base preceding Pearl rates were Harbor. No since that time. ably holds true. In more glaring rates, ent. even But in the effect figures same differentials immediately are available disparity above differences were prob- the base appar- |