The Press: Fair Play

With imperturbable mien, Soviet Ambassador Mikhail A. Menshikov last week told Washington newsmen that he hoped the American press would treat Russia’s national exhibition in the New York Coliseum this summer with “a spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation.” While the ambassador was making his pitch for fair play—which he would have got from the bulk of U.S. journalists without asking—the Soviet press was whipping up its severest attack since the Stalin era on life in the U.S. The new campaign was obviously the Soviet welcome to the six-week, $5,000,000 American National Exhibition that will open in Moscow on July 25.

“Hungry Children.” Painting their picture of American depravity, degeneration and despair, Soviet journalists used the propagandist’s familiar technique of the half-truth and the fact wrested out of context. One recent article cited the high cost of U.S. medical care, but made no mention of compensating health insurance programs. The author also deplored the high tuition at Harvard, said nothing about tuition-free state and municipal schools, left the impression that only the children of the rich can go to college.

Prime target of the campaign is U.S. unemployment, which Pravda claims is so severe that American streets are “typically” clogged with people queued up for charity because their unemployment compensation has run out. Wrote one Russian professor about an encounter in the heart of Manhattan. “I can almost see standing in front of me now a man of 35, unshaven, in a soiled, rumpled raincoat, hunched over, and in a whisper asking for only a cigarette.” Pravda this month gleefully printed an Associated Press picture (see. cut) of the tattered family and the shack of a striking Kentucky coal miner to il—lustrate its claim that millions of children in capitalist countries suffer from poverty. From such isolated instances, it is no trick for the Soviet press to jump to the sweeping generalization and, if necessary, to the outright lie (“While hungry American children look for a slice of stale bread, the stores are crammed with food which is left to go bad”).

“Generation of Murderers.” Occasionally, the Soviet anti-American campaign slips to patent idiocy. A 65-page pamphlet entitled “Their Morality” carries the publishers contention that it portrays “bourgeois morality in its true likeness,” then opens with prize exhibit No. i: Denver’s Jack Graham, who sought his mother’s insurance in 1955 by filling her luggage with dynamite, killed her and 43 other plane passengers. Graham was executed for the crime—a fact omitted in the account. To show that bourgeois morality prepares for war, the pamphlet falsely quotes U.S. Draft Boss Lewis Hershey: “We need a generation of murderers.”

The purpose behind the coordinated attacks on the U.S. by the Soviet press is clear: it is an effort to cut the U.S. exposition down to U.S.S.R. size before it opens and to give Russians the impression that it is sheer propaganda with no relation to reality.