• U.S.

The Press: Truth Unsought

2 minute read
TIME

The Associated Press prizes objective reporting of the news so highly that at times its spare, fact-packed stories are downright dull to read. Thus it was something of a surprise to 500 newsmen gathered in Atlanta last week for the annual A.P. managing editors’ meeting to hear the A.P. accused not only of bias but of left-wing bias at that.

A.P.’s critic was Charles Hazen of the Shreveport (La.) Times, who cited 58 stories, many of which dealt with the Red-hunting activities of Wisconsin’s Senator Joe McCarthy.

Hazen suggested that the bias which he found in the dispatches stemmed from A.P. reporters who were members of the C.I.O. American Newspaper Guild. But Hazen’s charges got no support from the other editors. When the Indianapolis Star’s Robert Early asked for the appointment of a committee to check A.P. stories for possible bias, the majority of the editors agreed with the St. Louis Star-Times’s Norman Isaacs who denounced the idea. Said Isaacs: “The effect of such would be an SS committee peeking over the shoulder of every A.P. man in the country. If this group passes a motion like that, I don’t want to be part of any such organization.”

If an A.P. story appeared to be biased, the editors agreed, it was due rather “to a rigid adherence to a too narrow and frustrating definition of objectivity, which shackles initiative and leaves many questions unanswered and truth unsought.”

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