The Press: The Sporting Thing

Sometimes even Russians go too far. Vadim Siniavsky did. Reviewing the Moscow Dynamo Club’s soccer invasion of Britain (TIME, Nov. 26), he beefed in Pioneer, a youth journal, that Britons had given the Russian champs a cool reception, had offered them a moldy, cobwebby barracks, had insisted on playing a game despite heavy fog.

For such unsportsmanlike reporting, Siniavsky last week got the sack. Also fired was the “careless editor” who passed the story. The London Daily Worker virtuously pointed the moral: “Soviet journalism, while hard-hitting, enjoys a splendid reputation for accuracy and clean, aboveboard reporting . . . the violators pay the price. . . . The world’s press would gain immensely in prestige if it were to take similar action against the daily purveyors of anti-Soviet slanders.”