A Letter From The Publisher: Oct. 25, 1963

The more you can hammer against the tendency of the press to exaggerate simple facts and “dress up” essentially unimportant news, the more you will receive applause. It will take courage to laugh at the press of the United States, but I think that you will gain readers by doing so occasionally in a perfectly good-natured way.

SO wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt in a letter to Editor Henry R. Luce, 40 years ago when TIME itself was but a few months old.

We’ve sometimes had occasion to laugh at some of the press some of the time—”in a perfectly good-natured way”—but to laugh at all the press of the United States, as the young Roosevelt urged, requires not so much courage as an incapacity for making distinctions.

Still, the future President was right in foreseeing that both ill will and applause are to be expected in making judgments on our contemporaries—and in insisting that the job had to be done. We were the first to make reporting on the press a weekly concern, and though we now have imitators in this as in so much else, we conceive of our job in a very special way.

In this field, we have intimate knowledge, personal enthusiasms and inevitable prejudices, since we are, in a way, colleagues and competitors of all the other journalists and news organizations we write about. We are mindful of the situation but try not to be tongue-tied by it. Naturally, since we’re in the same craft, envy is apt to show in our enthusiasm for a journalistic job well done, and irritation or anger at a job that is not. Press Editor John Koffend is charged not only with reporting the news in his area, but with casting a critical eye over it—over the success or shortcomings of a paper and the performance of its editors and correspondents, over the birth of a new magazine or the response of the press to a new Prime Minister.

“The press sees its own function as being critical of all aspects of U.S. life,” says Richard Seamon, the senior editor of the section, “but is itself peculiarly sensitive to criticism.” And since the press regards itself as alone equipped to criticize its own performance, but in public rarely does, it is a very windswept corner where Seamon and Koffend sit.

This week it is our duty to record the death, by financial strangulation, of the daily newspaper with the second largest circulation in the U.S. No one takes pleasure in the task, but no journalist can avoid assessing what makes some papers succeed and others fail, in a day when there is such competition for a reader’s attention and affection.