Anaconda's Newspapers: When a Mining Company Owned the Press

For roughly sixty years, if you read a daily newspaper in Butte, Anaconda, Helena, Billings, Missoula, or Great Falls, you were reading a paper owned by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. The company built its newspaper empire beginning in the eighteen eighties, initially as a weapon in the War of the Copper Kings, where controlled newspapers were as useful as controlled judges. Marcus Daly used Anaconda-owned press operations to document William Andrews Clark's Senate bribery so thoroughly that the United States Senate itself was forced to investigate. What began as a tactical tool became something more durable: a statewide editorial system that kept uncomfortable stories out of Montana papers for six decades.

Company editors killed unfavorable coverage of copper-industry labor practices. They shaped coverage of mining disasters. They supported company-aligned political candidates and suppressed reporting on labor organizing. The Montana Newspaper Association, the industry's own trade body, did not publicly acknowledge any of this while it was happening.

In nineteen fifty-nine, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company sold its newspaper chain. The transformation of Montana political journalism that followed was immediate and visible to anyone watching. The Helena Independent Record, the Missoulian, and other papers became editorially independent for the first time in living memory. Reporters who had worked for years under implicit restrictions began reporting on the mining and corporate interests that had constrained them.

Montana historians consider the press monopoly the key reason the state's political culture remained so shaped by extractive industry for so long. When the same company owns the copper mine and the newspaper that covers the copper mine, the newspaper is not really covering anything. Montana's press independence is sixty-seven years old. The copper empire it replaced lasted three times longer.