The Press: Columnist’s Pup

When somebody sells a columnist a “pup” —a story based on distorted facts, half-truths, or inventions—the writer can follow one of three courses. He can hunt desperately for more facts with which to prop up the original lie; he can say nothing more about it and rely on his readers to forget the blunder; or he can frankly admit his mistake and correct the injustice.

Thus, last week, opened a column by the New Deal’s most doctrinaire supporter among columnists, mousy, 44-year-old “Jay Franklin” (real name: John Franklin Carter). Columnist Franklin then almost gluttonously ate the words of his column of a few days earlier. In it he had attacked “the machinations of certain ‘dollar-a-year men’ on the OPM,” particularly * Here Am I (Random House; $3). John D. Diggers, Knudsen’s head of Production, whom he accused of being the worst of “a certain element in the OPM to play corporation politics with the national defense and to use the boring-from-within technique of the Communists.: “Now,” confessed Franklin, “after conferences with Mr. Knudsen and Mr. Biggers, with the support of others in the defense commission … I am convinced that the story was grossly unfair to Mr. Biggers.”Earnestly he now saluted OPM as “a strong and competent board.” Noteworthy in Columnist Franklin’s confession was not the fact that a columnist had based a know-it-all expose on a “pup”— that has happened too often before in the type of column which makes a business of scandalmongering about public affairs. More unusual was the frank and honest confession of error and its correction. So often have such tales appeared uncorrected, and so serious might be their consequences in critical times, that some observers in Washington had begun to wonder whether responsible publishers might not be forced to demand the same respect for fact from columnists that is demanded from other reporters.