The Press: Unfair Enough

“I have never yet retracted a word of . . . fair comment,” boasted Columnist Westbrook Pegler one day last week. Next day, in the New York Journal-American and 249 other papers carrying his column, he retracted a thousand words of unfair comment. As a legal settlement of several multimillion-dollar libel suits, Pegler published a 98-word apology to Delaware Businessman Abram N. Spanel for implying that he was “a Communist or fellow traveler.”

Effusive Abe Spanel, board chairman of the International Latex Corp. (baby pants, girdles, pillows), likes to buy space in newspapers to print his own opinions and those of people he admires (e.g., Sumner Welles, Robert M. Hutchins)—and incidentally to plug his company. In March 1945, Pegler took off on Businessman Spanel and his ads, saying one was “a poetic construction well expressing the attitude of some demagogues of the extreme left … A native of Russia and an admirer of the Soviet system might be pardoned in the error.” The Journal-American headlined the column: AMERICAN PAPERS SELL ADVERTISING SPACE TO PRO-RED EDITORIALISTS.

When Spanel, born in Russia but a U.S. citizen for about 35 years, won court rulings that it was libelous to imply that a man was a Communist and that the suits should go to trial, Pegler quit. Wrote he: “I gladly concede that the editorial advertisements … were not Communist inspired and that Mr. Spanel is not and never has been a Communist or fellow traveler.”