The Press: Lost Cause

Facts Forum, the most expensive personal propaganda mill in the U.S., came to a halt last week. Launched five years ago by Dallas’ Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, 67, whose oil, natural-gas and farmland interests give him an income of $200,000 a day, Facts Forum billed itself as a “nonpartisan, nonpolitical educational organization.” But in its monthly Facts Forum News (reported circ. 100,000), a clutter of radio and TV shows, e.g., Reporters’ Roundup, Topic of the Week, and widely distributed “public-opinion” polls, Hunt’s nonprofit—and tax-free—foundation promoted a far-right, McCarthyist line that saw “dangerously radical tendencies” in the Republican Party (TIME, Jan. 11, 1954). As he folded all the projects, paid off employees and bought up outstanding contracts, publicity-shy Hunt kept mum as usual. But his programs were plainly victims of acute public indifference. Said one of his associates: “He just got tired of useless and lost causes.”