The Press: Pink Shoestring

The four newsmagazines* in the U.S.

are about to be joined by a fifth. Its

name: National Guardian. Its aim: to

bring “the facts” to “all who are sick of

confusion and artificially created fear.”

Said its staff-written manifesto this week:

“A hundred kinds of censorship have come

between the people and the facts.” An

“independent progressive” newsweekly,

National Guardian will begin publication

next month with a press run of 50,000 and

a masthead with a heavy list to port.

“We’re starting out very modestly on the shortest possible shoestring,” explained General Manager John T. McManus, former TIME and PM writer and leftish ex-president of the New York local of the American Newspaper Guild. He was mum on who supplied the shoestring. Top editors will be British-born Cedric Belfrage, onetime cinema critic for the London Daily Express, and James Aronson, New York newsman. Among the contributors: Author Louis Adamic, Dr. Guy Emery Shipler, editor of the Churchman; Roger (American Past) Butterfield, Sportwriter John Lardner and his screenwriter brother Ring Jr. (one of Hollywood’s “unfriendly ten”); Max Werner, Anna Louise Strong, untiring apologist for Russia, and ex-New Masses Cartoonist William Gropper.

National Guardian’s prospectus was vague, but a tabloid preview edition printed last month (as the National Gazette) by Publisher J. W. Gitt of the York (Pa.) Gazette & Daily gave the general idea. Smartly made up (Gitt regularly wins typographical awards for his own paper), it gave six columns to Henry Wallace’s politicking, and brushed off the Battle of Berlin as something “fought mainly by the newspapers whose reports scared the daylights out of some Americans.” (Gitt has since withdrawn as a sponsor.) It looked as if the Guardian’s complexion would be somewhere between pink and rosy red.

*TIME, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Pathfinder.