The Press: Joan of Arc at the Trib

In its bid to regain lost quality (TIME, Sept. 23), the New York Herald Tribune appeared last week with such innovations as an unsigned column of prophecy called “Radar Screen” and, most notably, 24 additional news columns daily. One day the Trib splurged no fewer than ten of its new columns on a single story: the Trib’s considered defiance of a federal judge’s order that its TV-Radio Columnist Marie Torre identify one of her news sources.

Though newsmen claim a classic right to protect their sources−and have gone to jail to do so−only twelve states* guarantee it by law, and the Federal Government has no such statute. Judge Sylvester Ryan warned attractive, hard-working Columnist Torre, 33, that she was risking a sentence of 30 days for contempt if she persisted. Sympathetically, the judge called her “the Joan of Arc of her profession.” The Trib promptly staked her out on Page One in a blaze of pictures, plastered most of an inside page with sidebars, ran a fat lead editorial sounding the tocsin of the freedom, of the press and invoking the shade of Woodrow Wilson. The Trib’s young (32) Editor-Publisher Ogden R. (“Brownie”) Reid vowed that the paper would carry the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. Said Columnist Torre: “I feel like Dred Scott today.”

The Trib editorial permitted itself a single understatement: “The case itself is a relatively trivial one.” It grew, explained the editorial, out of “certain remarks” about Judy Garland that Columnist Torre attributed to “a CBS spokesman.” Now that Singer Garland is suing CBS for $1,000,000 for those remarks, her lawyers need to know−and the Trib will not say&8722;who the spokesman was. Nowhere in its ten-column coverage did the paper report what the CBS spokesman said. The nub of his remarks: Judy “won’t make up her mind about anything. We just think she doesn’t want to work . . . because something is bothering her [and] I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s because she thinks she’s terribly fat.”

*Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania.