Who's Pushing?

In 1941, when Manhattan's volcanic, volatile little PM was a red-faced ($2,000,000 deficit) one-year-old, mewling in the arms of its editor-nurse, Ralph Ingersoll, he denned for an interviewer just how Backer Marshall Field felt about the prodigious infant. "Mr. Field," he explained, "compares PM in some ways with the Philharmonic Orchestra. No one thinks of disbanding the Philharmonic merely because it doesn't now support itself. . . ."

Last week his PM Philharmonic was emitting strange cacophonies. Of its instrumentalists, 26 had quit or been laid off in an economy drive, the remaining 200 were in uneasy confusion. Field denied persistent rumors that he had given Ingersoll until next fall to put the paper back into the black.

The dissonance dated from Ingersoll's return from the Army three months ago (see BOOKS). An editorial board headed by Managing Editor John P. Lewis had been running the paper, had put it briefly in the black last year. When Lewis' restless boss came back, many of Lewis' people (including the ones he hired during the war) were the first to go. Next to go was PM's standoffish attitude toward scandal.

PM, which once abhorred sensational crimes and lectured its competitors for trading in them, has lately shocked its readers--and amazed many of its staff--by its ogle-eyed handling of rape cases, sodomy trials, abortions, prostitution. It glossed its coverage slightly with Freudian patter, but it spared no details.

You'd Never Know Us. In another week or so Editor Ingersoll plans to unveil a PM drastically restyled typographically, with less foreign and more local news. Along with the shake-up will come an advertising campaign to boost circulation (now 145,000, the lowest of Manhattan's nine dailies). Theme: it's a new PM, not the newspaper you think it is. Says Ingersoll: "If you're always crusading, you get to be a bore."

Fortnight ago, as part of his economy program, Ingersoll ordered his able young (30) Washington bureau chief, Jimmy Wechsler, to move three of his staff to Manhattan. Rather than do it, Wechsler resigned, and Ingersoll fired the three. One of them was Milton Murray, president of the American Newspaper Guild, whose Washington and New York chapters promptly took up their cudgels against the editor of the loudest organ of the leftist press.

To Guildsman Murray, "economy" was not the issue, since the three Washington PMers had been offered the same salary to work in the New York office. Ingersoll had insisted, to outsiders, that he was purging his staff of Communist-liners. But Murray, who became National Guild president in 1941 on a drive-the-Commies-out platform (and whose politics is several degrees to starboard of Ingersoll's), guessed that he had not followed Ingersoll's party line enthusiastically enough. Said he last week: "I'm going to take PM's prospectus, particularly that part about not 'pushing other people around,' and rub it under Ingersoll's nose."

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