Press: Cat-Trap

The unknown hoodlums who winged District Attorney Buron Fitts of Los Angeles last fortnight (TIME, March 15), unwittingly gave the Los Angeles Times a long-awaited chance to detect a rival in a shabby deception.

For more than a year the Times high command has suspected the Hearst Examiner of reprinting its pictures without credit as though taken by Examiner men. Though the Examiner had no Associated Press Wirephoto Service, more than once it ran what looked like exact duplicates of Times Wirephotos of deaths & disasters. So when Times Photographer George Strock showed up at the hospital week before last to snap pictures of Fitts as he was wheeled into the operating room, he noted with interest that none of the Examiners 16 photographers was on hand. Snick! went the shutter of Photographer Strock’s camera and away he ran with a shot of the wounded District Attorney on a stretcher, a half-smoked cigaret in hand.

The Times art editor proceeded to set a trap for the Examiner by carefully painting out Fitts’s cigaret before printing it. Sure enough, in its final edition, the Examiner appeared with a similar picture, not credited to any photographer or paper, but simply billed as a view of the victim “taken before he was operated upon.” The Examiner’s, picture of Fitts was exactly like the Times’s in every detail, even to the telltale vanished cigaret. A check on the fact that Fitts actually was holding a cigaret as he went to the operating room came from a picture in the Illustrated Daily News, which its man had snapped from another angle at the same moment the Times man got his shot.

Assembling all these pictures, and its own original unretouched photograph, the Times next day fell upon its rival. Heading the half-page layout: “HERE IS A STUDY IN PICTORIAL JOURNALISM PRACTICE FOR PEOPLE WHO THINK,'”* the Times crowed: “All of this shows how a Times photograph was copied by the Examiner — an astonishing procedure, but not an unusual one. . . . The Times retouchers set a trap and caught — we might say, a copy cat.”

*Like many a morning Hearstpaper, the Examiner so styles itself.