Objectivity

The proceedings of the United Nations get full and objective coverage in the full and objective pages of the New York Times. There are occasions, however, when objectivity can be misleading.

Last month, the U.N. Economic and Social Council heard charges that the economy of Soviet Russia is based on slave labor. Next day, the Times front page carried the charges under a two-column headline. Later, a special U.N. committee on slavery listened to a report asserting that certain practices of forced contract labor and the plight of immigrant Mexican and West Indian laborers in the U.S. added up to slave labor in the U.S. Next day, the front page of the New York Times, in exactly the same spot where the earlier story appeared, and in exactly the same size type, carried the charges against the U.S. with another two-column headline.

The report on slave labor in the Soviet Union had asserted that slave labor forces, supervised by the secret police, accounted for 12.5% of Russia's timber production, 10% of her furniture and kitchenware and 40% of her chromium ores. It also said that the categories of persons listed by the M.V.D. as criminals to be used for forced labor included: liberals, members of Jewish organizations, mystics, industrialists, owners of large houses, persons who have been in the diplomatic service and relatives of persons who have escaped abroad.

The charges against the U.S. had cited cases of peonage and labor under forced contracts in Maine, Connecticut, Texas, Arkansas, Georgia and California. They had revealed that thousands of "wetbacks" (i.e., Mexican laborers who wade the Rio Grande in search of work in the U.S.) lived in squalor and poverty, sometimes were paid as little as $8 a week.

Last week, the New Leader's William E. Bohn read the New York Times a forceful lesson in the dangers of mechanical objectivity. Said Bohn: ". . . Nobody in any country ought to be asked to work or be allowed to work in the camps where these people (i.e., the Mexican immigrants) are herded together . . . This mode of oppression should be attacked energetically and continuously, [but] the Times's . . . two headlines equate the system of contract labor in the U.S., which sends a few hundreds of thousands of workers across the country under admittedly evil conditions, with the Soviet system of concentration camp slavery which means death to millions . . . The Mexican wetbacks entered the United States illegally to work on farms and orchards. They swam the Rio Grande seeking this 'slavery.' But there is no record of anyone crossing any body of water to reach a Russian concentration camp. To pretend that the two evils are at all comparable is to perpetrate an enormous and dangerous falsehood . . ."

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