The Cincinnati Reds

For nine months, Reporter James Ratliff of the Cincinnati Enquirer, a World War II captain in counterintelligence, investigated Communism in Cincinnati. Last month the Enquirer finally began an expose under Ratliff's byline, charging that there were 178 members of the Communist Party in Cincinnati, including 16 labor leaders and a local disc jockey. The Enquirer's chief source for its accusations was an unidentified turncoat Communist. Angrily, Cincinnati's disc jockeys and labor leaders insisted that the Enquirer "name names," but the paper declined.

Last week Reporter Ratliff turned up in Washington for a secret session with the House Un-American Activities Committee. He planned to have his tipster put the names of the 178 alleged Cincinnati Reds into the official record so that the Enquirer might print them without fear of libel suits. But the Scripps-Howard Cincinnati Post spread an expose of its own on Page One: the Enquirer's tipster was one Cecil Scott, and he had been an inmate of a Cincinnati mental institution at intervals between 1927 and 1932. The red-faced House committee ruled that Scott was an unreliable witness, refused to give him or Reporter Ratliff a hearing. At week's end, while the Post crowed, the unblushing Enquirer insisted that Tipster Scott was an "unsung hero."

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