George Seldes

Henry George Seldes (November 16, 1890 – July 2, 1995) was an American investigative journalist, foreign correspondent, editor, author, and media critic best known for the publication of the newsletter In Fact from 1940 to 1950.

He was an investigative reporter of the kind known in early 20th century as a muckraker, using his journalism to fight injustice and justify reform.

Influenced by Lincoln Steffens and Walter Lippmann, Seldes's career began when he was hired at the Pittsburgh Leader at the age of 19.

Henry George Seldes, named after economist Henry George, was born on November 16, 1890, to Jewish émigrés from Russia in Alliance Colony (now Pittsgrove Township), an agricultural community in rural southern New Jersey.

His mother, Anna Saphro, died in 1896 when he and his younger brother, Gilbert, were still young.

George's father, George Sergius Seldes, was a pharmacist and a strongly opinionated and radically philosophical man who was a libertarian and corresponded with Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, being interested in the latter's ideas on mutual aid.

He influenced every aspect of his sons' lives, pushing them to "read books that you will reread—and that you will never outgrow," and refusing to force religion upon children who were "too young to understand it," instilling a free-thinking attitude in his sons.

When he was 19, Seldes went to work at the Pittsburgh Leader.

An early scoop of his for this paper was when three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan expelled Seldes from Bryan's hotel room.

He also interviewed a saleswoman who had filed a rape complaint against the son of the owner of a large department store, but the story was not published, and Seldes became outraged when the advertising department of the newspaper blackmailed the owner into buying more advertising.

In 1914, he was appointed night editor of the Pittsburgh Post.

In 1914, he was appointed night editor of the Pittsburgh Post.

In 1916, he went to the United Press in London.

In 1916, Seldes moved to London where he worked for the United Press.

In 1917, during World War I, he moved to France to work at the Marshall Syndicate, where he was a member of the press corps of the American Expeditionary Force.

After the War, Seldes spent ten years as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

When the United States joined the First World War in 1917, Seldes was sent to France where he worked, first briefly as the managing editor of the Army edition of the Chicago Tribune, based in Paris, then as the war correspondent for the Marshall Syndicate.

He became a member of the press corps of the American Expeditionary Forces in France, section G-2D, and as such was commissioned as an officer, as were all journalists in that group.

At the end of the war, he obtained an exclusive interview with Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German Army, in which Hindenburg supposedly acknowledged the role America had played in defeating Germany.

"The American infantry," said Hindenburg, according to Seldes, "won the World War in battle in the Argonne."

Seldes and the others were accused of breaking the Armistice and were court martialed.

They were also forbidden to write anything about the interview and it never appeared in American news media.

Seldes believed that blocking publication of this interview proved tragic.

Unaware of Hindenburg's direct testimony of Germany's military defeat, Germans adopted the Dolchstoss or stab-in-the-back myth that Germany had only lost the war because it was betrayed at home by "the socialists, the Communists and the Jews," which served as Nazism's explanation for Germany's defeat.

"If the Hindenburg interview had been passed by Pershing's censors at the time, it would have been headlined in every country civilized enough to have newspapers and undoubtedly would have made an impression on millions of people and became an important page in history," wrote Seldes.

"I believe it would have destroyed the main planks on which Hitler rose to power, it would have prevented World War II, the greatest and worst war in all history, and it would have changed the future of all mankind."

As a young journalist, he was influenced by the investigative journalism of muckraker Lincoln Steffens, whom he met in 1919; he was also influenced by Walter Lippman.

Just before World War I, he'd study for a year at Harvard University, at the instigation of his brother Gilbert.

However, it was Hindenburg himself, who in a hearing before a committee of the German National Assembly investigating the causes of the World War and Germany's defeat, on November 18, 1919, a year after the war's end, declared, "As an English general has very truly said, the German Army was 'stabbed in the back'," grossly misrepresenting General Frederick Maurice's book, The Last Four Months. It was particularly this testimony of Hindenburg that led to the widespread Dolchstoßlegende in post-World War I Germany.

In 1922, he interviewed Vladimir Lenin.

He was twice expelled from countries he was reporting from: in 1923 from the Soviet Union, along with three colleagues, for disguising news reports as personal letters, and in 1925 from Italy, for implicating Benito Mussolini in opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti's murder.

He would leave the Tribune when he battled with its owner and publisher, Robert R. McCormick, over the paper altering his 1927 articles on Mexico criticizing the use of their mineral rights by American companies, which he considered to be censorship.

In 1929, Seldes became a freelance reporter and author, subsequently writing a series of books and criticism about his years as a foreign correspondent, and the issues of censorship, suppression and distortion in the press.

During the late 1930s he had one more stint as a foreign correspondent, on a freelance basis, in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

In 1940, Seldes co-founded a weekly newsletter, In Fact, where he attacked corporate malfeasance, often using government documents from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

He exposed the health hazards of cigarettes and attacked the mainstream press for suppressing them, blaming the newspapers' heavy dependence on cigarette advertising.

He cited J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI for anti-union campaigns, and brought attention to the National Association of Manufacturers' use of advertising dollars to produce news stories favorable to its members and suppress unfavorable ones.

Having both staunch admirers and strong critics, Seldes influenced some younger journalists.

He received an award for professional excellence from the Association for Education in Journalism in 1980 and a George Polk Award for his life's work in 1981.

Seldes also served on the board of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).