The Press: Whammed Again

There were well over 100 newsmen present, plus a sprinkling of goggling visitors. The President was in his shirt sleeves. At first it was just like almost any other semiweekly press conference. Then a reporter remarked that there had been a lot of talk going around about the report that Chief of Staff George C. Marshall would soon get a new job.

This was what Franklin Roosevelt had been waiting for. Now the President rolled up his verbal shirt sleeves, whammed one segment of the U.S. press smack on the end of its nose-for-news.

First he read a clipping from Eleanor Patterson’s Washington Times-Herald. It was a story by dapper, opinionated William K. Hutchinson, chief of the Hearst-owned I.N.S. Washington bureau. His story’s gist: 1) that “a group of influential White House advisers” was conspiring to kick General Marshall upstairs “to a glorified but powerless world command over Anglo-American forces”; 2) that the motive “is to use the Army’s vast production program . . . as a political weapon in the 1944 Presidential campaign.” As the President read he bore down jeeringly on the more purple key phrases.

Ready-Made Answer. Next he read from two New York Herald Tribune editorials. They discussed “the mixture of unauthenticated ‘news,’ rumor, guesswork and innuendo which has exploded a teapot tempest around . . . General Marshall.” They labeled such speculative reporting obstructionism and “whispering gallery journalism.”

They accused the Washington Times-Herald and its sister papers (Joseph Patterson’s anti-New Deal, anti-British New York Daily News and Robert McCormick’s ditto Chicago Tribune) of being “sleepless” in their efforts “to spread disunion among the Allies.” As he read on, the President, obviously enjoying his ready-made answer, paused once to interpolate that the Herald Tribune is (accented) a respectable newspaper and to smile benignly at the HT’s Washington correspondent, comfortable, spectacled Bert Andrews.

“The best newspapermen,” read the President, “resent this sea of hint and rumor. . . . The worst and most irresponsible deliberately exploit it—as the Patterson and McCormick newspapers are constantly doing.”

By adroit emphasis and inflection Franklin Roosevelt managed to turn the words of others into words of his own. And he left no doubt that he thought some U.S. newspapers have sunk to dismal depths. Not since the famed “dunce cap” and “chronic liar” press conferences had he delivered so hard a pitch.

Argumentum. Into the fray next day jumped the News, to bat for itself, its sister papers and the Hearst Press, to bat at the Herald Tribune. Said the News in the best Joe Patterson manner: “The President’s purpose, obviously, was double-barreled: 1) to intimidate all newspapers and magazines in the United States into subservience to his will; 2) to further his ambition for a fourth term.”

The News, with a knowing eye on its “common man” circulation (2,050,000 daily, 3,950,000 Sunday), also recalled with a sneer and a gloat the President’s respectability: “Respectable, but not popular. [It] is the smallest, as to circulation, of the four New York City morning newspapers. . . . Its daily circulation [is] 293,304; its Sunday circulation 546,705. The paper is the mouthpiece of the New York-and-vicinity genteel moneyed crowd —the select coterie which feels that things British are superior to things American. . . . How did the Herald Tribune get to be an Anglomaniac newspaper?

“Well, its titular head is Ogden Reid, son of the late Whitelaw Reid and brother of Lady Jean Templeton Ward. . . . Of Whitelaw Reid, the Encyclopaedia Britannica says: ‘. . . In 1897 he was special ambassador of the United States on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s jubilee; in 1902 he was special ambassador . . . at the coronation of King Edward VII; and in 1905 he became ambassador to Great Britain. . . . ‘ These salient details . . . may throw light on the question why today the New York Herald Tribune worships everything connected with Britain.”

* * *

Not alone from Franklin Roosevelt did newspapers take a pasting last week.

>Earl Browder, U.S. Communist Party head, in a Chicago speech enunciated what he called “an American opinion” (and his own)—that the U.S. could not expect help from Russia in defeating Japan. When not a single U.S. paper of general circulation reported it more than sketchily, Communist Browder wailed: “. . . a new low in irresponsibility.”

> In England, Labor Minister Ernest Bevin reportedly told an audience of 6,000 war-worker women, after an off-the-record speech, “Don’t say anything to the press. I don’t trust the press.” The National Union of Journalists angrily demanded a retraction.

> In Northern Italy, Puppet Premier Mussolini’s “official” radio blamed Italian newsmen for the fall of Fascism: “The poisonous atmosphere of general suspicion that made possible the treachery of [Premier Pietro] Badoglio and the triumph of defeatism . . . was largely due to shortcomings in the field of . . . journalism.”

But in U.S. Newspaper Week (last week) there was one friendly pat for the press. It came from the church.

Said the Episcopal Church’s Bishop Henry Tucker: “The American press has been one of our most effective influences for good.” Said the Roman Catholic Church’s Msgr. Michael Ready: “. . . our press generally has a deep attachment for right statement.” Judaism’s Dr. Israel Goldstein found an “extraordinarily high level of public responsibility” in U.S. newspapers.

The press went on publishing.