The Press: Trouble in Numbers

Making the international rounds in a jet-propelled era of personal diplomacy, the world’s statesmen are necessarily accompanied by swarms of newsmen, to the extent that in their very number they have come to pose a perplexing problem. Where only three correspondents, one from each U.S. wire service, went along with Vice President Richard Nixon on his 1953 trip to Australia and Asia, last spring more than 80 followed him to Russia, eliciting from the Vice President the complaint that he could not easily hold background briefings, a Nixon practice, for so large a number. And when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev toured the U.S. this fall, so many correspondents and cameramen — 300-odd in all — dogged his trail that they sometimes seemed more to be making the show than covering it (TIME, Oct. 5).

Last week, totting up early-bird applications to cover President Eisenhower’s planned visit to Russia next spring, Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty warned the U.S. press that it stood in danger of defeating its own purpose. Some 500 newsmen, he said, including 16 from the Associated Press, 16 from the major television networks, and 150 from foreign reporters based in the U.S., have already bid for space aboard the press plane —which can accommodate 107. Also among the applicants were several correspondents’ and publishers’ wives, billed as “feature writers.”

In Moscow last spring, the Nixon-tour reporters learned to their dismay that Russia’s limited communications system could not handle the emergency load. Cable copy took ten hours or more to reach the U.S. To avoid such delays, the wire services and the big morning papers tied up overseas telephone lines, spent frustrating hours dictating their stories over circuits that were not only in painfully short supply but regularly went dead in the middle of transmissions.

A horde of 500 journalists in Moscow, said Hagerty, could only “get in the way of themselves, and throttle the entire operation.” But Hagerty offered no answers. Said he: “I don’t have the solution. It’s a problem that the news people will have to solve themselves. I have no right to decide what newsmen go with the President to Russia, and I don’t want that right. That must be decided by the news media. But unless we straighten out this problem, we’ll have nothing but chaos. And chaos can lead only to the weakening of our free press and our prestige.”