Arizona Scandal

Arizona telephone poles, from the Grand Canyon to the Mexican border, blossomed out last fortnight with posters that screamed:

"Big Arizona Scandal:

$200,000 Phoenix Graft!"

Advertisements in Arizona daily papers repeated the outcry, paid for by the loud Los Angeles Examiner to sell its issue of Sept. 24. The advertisements were an implied wager that no Arizona newspaper would print the scandal story. The Examiner was right.

The Examiner's story alleged that 15 unnamed Phoenix "politicians, businessmen and others" had been paid $200,000 by unnamed contractors, before the awarding of a $2,000,000 pipeline contract. The Examiner sketched the efforts of a former U. S. District Attorney to lay before a grand jury information obtained by U. S. Internal Revenue investigators. Still no Arizona newspaper followed up the story.

When the Examiner promised more details in its next Sunday edition, the Tucson Star did publish an interview with former U. S. District Attorney John Gung'l, which said that the Examiner's story was substantially correct. This was the only indication that Arizona's Press knew it was being scooped. Last week, the Examiner printed more stories on the scandal, reported that U. S. District Attorney Clifton Mathews was investigating the matter.

To Arizona newsreaders it might have seemed that the real "Arizona scandal" was the fact that an outside newspaper could advertise for a week in advance a local news sensation without danger of having its scoop spoiled by local courage and enterprise. Leading Arizona papers are Phoenix's two dailies, the Republic and the Gazette, owned by the same company.

The late Dwight Bancroft Heard brought the Republic (then the Republican, a "progressive independent newspaper") into affluence, willed a large block of stock to his favorite employe, Charles A. Stauffer who, with Mrs. Heard, later purchased the Gazette. Since Publisher Heard's death, the Republic has ceased to champion any cause except the 18th Amendment.

Next in importance in Arizona are Tucson's two papers, the Arizona Daily Star and the Daily Citizen. The Star is part-owned by the estate of the late Ralph Everett Ellinwood, whose father is counsel for Phelps Dodge Corp. Arizona mining interests. The Tucson Citizen is owned and managed by onetime (1909-13) Postmaster-General Frank Harris Hitchcock. Last year Publisher Hitchcock abruptly discontinued the Citizen's editorial page, recently resigned as Republican National Committeeman for Arizona. At Bisbee, Phelps Dodge copper mining centre, the Review and the Evening Ore are both controlled by Cochise Publishing Co., a Phelps Dodge subsidiary. At nearby Douglas--named for Dr. James Douglas, who discovered the Copper Queen mine and whose grandson is President Roosevelt's Budget Director Lewis Douglas--the Daily Dispatch is independent but fully as conservative as its rivals.

The archconservatism of the Arizona Press, due to mining influence, has left the field open to outside papers like the Examiner and even the far-away Denver Post. Actually it was competition with the Post, whose makeup it copies in rural editions, that lay behind the Examiner's splash, which it did not print at all in its home editions.

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