Reporter on Red Square

The New York Times, the only non-Cpmmunist newspaper in the free world with a staff correspondent in Moscow* sometimes gives as distorted a picture of Russia as the traveling U.S. journalists (see above). Though its correspondent, Harrison E. Salisbury, files only closely censored stories, the Times prints his dispatches as it gets them, assumes that the paper's readers are "intelligent enough" to know they may be reading Communist propaganda. It tries to keep Salisbury's picture of Russia in focus with separate interpretative articles and editorials.

This week in the New Leader, Associate Editor Louis Jay Herman charged that Salisbury's "rosy-hued" dispatches give a completely distorted picture of Russia.

Wrote Herman: "As one reads Salisbury's bright, cheery comments on life under Stalinism, it takes a positive effort of will to recall that this is the same country of concentration camps and secret police terror reported by other observers . . . [Salisbury] has been giving a startling practical demonstration of how to use America's sturdiest pillar of journalistic respectability as a transmission belt for the official Soviet propaganda line.

"The Times has never had much luck with its Moscow correspondents. Walter Duranty . . . waxed rhapsodic over the Soviet 'experiment' throughout the 1920s and much of the 1930s ... The 'Times man' in Moscow from 1941 to 1943, Ralph Parker, turned up shortly afterward as correspondent for both the London and New York [Communist] Daily Workers, leaving a trail of glowing red faces behind him . . .

"Some might imagine the difference between the Soviet and American press to be that between a regimented, controlled press and a free, democratic one. But Mr Salisbury dissents: 'The [Soviet] conception of the press is different. Its basic function is conceived to be one of informing and educating ... It is regarded as much more important that the Soviet public be informed effectively and correctly than that news be rushed into print .

"That the Communist press finds cause for rejoicing in [Salisbury's] reporting should astonish no one. What is considerbly less comprehensible, however is that one of the world's great newspapers should place so high a price on the privilege of maintaining a correspondent in Soviet Russia that it is content with [Salisbury]."

* The wire services have five Moscow correspondents: two A.P. men and one each for U.P Agence France Presse, and Reuters (whose man also works part time for London dailies).

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