Press: Dissected Corps

One thing that bothered serious, 29-year-old Leo Calvin Rosten all the while he was working for a doctorate of political science & economy at the University of Chicago was the nation’s lack of critical interest in the Washington press corps. It seemed ironic to Mr. Rosten that “we have been more concerned with the talents of men who incarcerate animals in public pounds, than with those of the men who have the license to disseminate information about the political order under which we live.”

Hopeful of mending this situation, Mr. Rosten applied for an $1,800 Social Science Research Council field fellowship, for 16 months stalked Washington reporters at work, bent elbows with them at theNational Press Club bar, came away from the Capital with a neo-scientific cross section of 127 (out of over 200) men who tell the country what the Government is doing.*

The Rosten book is not concerned with actual personalities but with the mores of the typical Washington correspondent, who, according to the author, is a 37-year-old family man who went into journalism by choice, is paid $5,987 a year to write, consciously or unconsciously, pretty much what his publisher wants to hear. This imaginary figure came from a city under 25,000, his father was a professional man, his education includes college training in liberal arts and now he feels the need of more knowledge of economics to do his job properly. Nevertheless, he would again select journalism, would prefer to remain a Washington correspondent, even though his hours are uncertain, his home office is constantly badgering him with queries for which he must scurry around to find answers, his estimate of Congressmen’scalibre is not too high, and he must occasionally run errands and lobby for his boss. Forced by competitive conditions to pool his efforts with fellow correspondents, he opposes “rugged individualism.”

Mr. Rosten discovered that among daily newspapers the New York Times is best read by the Washington corps, considered most reliable, most desirable to work for. Hearstpapers and the Chicago Tribune are rated least fair and reliable. Among the weekly magazines, TIME and the Nation tallied first and second in readership.

The Author. The serious, sociological tone of Leo Calvin Rosten’s study belies his creation of the comic character, Hyman Kaplan, in the New Yorker, where he uses the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross. Polish-born, short, dark-eyed and heavy-lidded, Mr. Rosten at two was taken to Chicago where he soon began to fight poverty with animated ingenuity. A University of Chicago scholarship started his education and he earned Phi Beta Kappa honors. After a year of browsing in Europe, unable to find the newspaper job he wanted when he returned to Chicago, Author Rosten lectured in the Midwest, taught in a night school where he got the idea for the twisted-tongue Education of H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n which he wrote to pay the costs of his wife’s illness in the winter of 1936.

*THE WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENTS—Harcourt, Brace ($3).