Worker Windfall

Nobody is quicker to recognize a useful piece of Communist propaganda in the capitalist press than the sharp-eyed editors of Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker. Last week they found an unexpected windfall in the good grey New York Times. They clipped out a series of dispatches on life in Russia by Times Moscow Correspondent Harrison Salisbury and reproduced parts of them. Crowed the Worker: "The articles [were] a refreshing, vivid contrast to the daily diet of highly imaginative bunk which the Times and its journalistic cohorts generally feed their readers" and "completely undermined" the "official line" of the U.S. that it is arming only against aggression by Russia.

Unconnected Logic. The Worker had good reason to crow. Though Salisbury's dispatches were supposed to be a factual report on economic progress in the Soviet Union, Salisbury used what facts he had to draw some remarkably naive conclusions. For example, he said that "foreigners long resident in Moscow" took the "cleaning, painting and construction" going on in Moscow as a sign that Russia was not expecting atomic bombs would soon be falling on Soviet territory. He interpreted "a steady increase in the quantity of pots and pans, copper and brass samovars" as evidence that "the Kremlin does not anticipate requiring these basic materials for war production."

Though Salisbury reported that the Soviet Union was already armed to the teeth, he could find "no substantial changeover of the economy from its predominantly peacetime aspect." Moreover, Correspondent Salisbury, whose sources of information are rigidly restricted, was impressed by the fact that he had "heard of no Russian who in private ... or publicly" has suggested that the Soviet Union should attack the U.S.

Unsolved Problem. The Times had walked into the Worker's sneak punch with more than a suspicion that it was bound to catch one some day. Although no news gets out of Russia which does not please the Kremlin's censors, the Times had sent Salisbury, ex-foreign editor of the United Press, to Moscow nearly two years ago on the theory that some "news" out of Russia is better than none. But week after week, as the Times printed long --and censored--dispatches from Salisbury which more or less echoed Pravda and Izvestia, the Times had worriedly wondered whether its readers should not be warned about such "news." Wouldn't readers otherwise grant it the same respect they did to factual, uncensored stories?

When the Salisbury series came in from Moscow three weeks ago, the Times held them up until it could query Salisbury for additional facts to guide the reader (e.g., a 6% decrease in automobile prices was 6% of what?). As might have been expected, the answers were not forthcoming. And while the Times waited several days for them, Manhattan's party-liners spread the rumor that the paper had "suppressed" the Salisbury series. (Columnist Walter Winchell fell for it all, and darkly asked: "Why were they killed?")

Finally, the Times printed the series, but with a warning italic precede (which the Worker left out of its reproductions). Salisbury had to get his stories by the censors, said the Times, and had written them with "that fact in mind." But the warning was no effective counter-balance to the heavy pro-Soviet propaganda which the Worker had gleefully quoted. Nor did the warning paragraph solve for the Times the problem besetting every U.S. newspaper which still pursues the never-never-land ideal of "objectivity." In simpler days, there was probably no particular harm for readers (if no particular benefit) in the broadside scattering of "facts" without interpretation or perspective. But as the Worker last week took pains to show the Times, that day was past.

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