Montana knows as well as any state in the union what it looks like when millionaires decide to control the narrative. When Marcus Daly and William Clark, and later Augustus Heinze, were competing for who had the biggest mine shaft, one of their primary weapons was control of the press. Each man spent millions to buy or start newspapers, hire top-notch writers, editors and cartoonists from back East, and then buy up competing publications.

At first, their reasons for pouring all of this money into these papers was to badmouth the other guy, or dispute whatever propaganda was coming out against them. But once Daly died and Heinze left the state, the newspaper industry in Montana came exclusively under the control of Amalgamated Copper Company, which used its power to fight against every effort the miners made to gain a foothold in the fight for better working conditions, workable wages and more safety regulations. So rather than take care of the workers, these men spent millions fighting each other, and then fighting the truth, when it probably would have cost them a lot less money to simply give everyone a reasonable raise.