Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR HEMISPHERE CRISIS There are two items in Jose Figueres' article, "The U.S. and Hemisphere Unity" (NL, October 10), which appear to have been written out of the desperation which exists...
...No group should be permitted to impose predigested "truths" upon the people, and certainly to invest this formidable power in an outlet of mass communications would be dangerous indeed...
...As a footnote, I would strongly urge that more information be given to the American people of the atrocities committed by the huge monopolies of South America...
...In his play, Die Massnahme, Brecht demonstrates an astonishing prescience and sensitivity to Stalinist trends...
...I would use American aid and loans to help subsidize investors in Latin America, insuring them a partial return over and above their normal return...
...BRECHT Sidney Hook's interesting reminscences of his encounters with Berthold Brecht, ("A Recollection of Berthold Brecht...
...New York City ELLIOT IRA MILLER THE NEW LEADER WECOME comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...The extra dimension of the truth that Lasky and all good newspapermen seek is harder to get at and is obviously a dangerous commodity in the hands of an incompetent or biased newspaperman...
...The moral: "It doesn't matter at all on whom the sun shone...
...and Hemisphere Unity" (NL, October 10), which appear to have been written out of the desperation which exists in this critical area...
...True, there was no general agreement on this issue until 1955...
...Admittedly, the press in the past, and too often even now, has concerned itself with the discernible, measurable truth: the police blotter, the statement on the floor of the Senate, etc...
...Where has Lasky been these past 10 years...
...Government encourage the abandonment of primitive industries and artificial agriculture would certainly be difficult to achieve, and is at best a long-range project...
...In one play a soldier disappears from his group, is replaced immediately, and the collective remains unchanged...
...The Nieman Reports also printed article after article by newsmen worried about the limitations of the press...
...I would suggest a policy, not of enforced reinvestment, but one more in keeping with our system of incentives...
...Brooklyn ARTHUR YOUNGER...
...They are a proper and much-needed corrective to the superficial evaluation of Brecht as a humanist...
...Nowhere are Brecht's anti-humanist, anti-humanitarian, terrorist views better revealed than in this caustic analysis...
...Lawrence, Kansas MELVIN MENCHER Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Kansas The thesis propounded by Melvin J. Lasky, if effected, would be the harbinger of thought control by a not always well-directed press...
...His article, "News and the Whole Truth," later reprinted in his book But We Were Born Free, predates Lasky's case against the press by several years...
...when "writing in depth" received ''complete enthusiasm and accord," but many editors early in McCarthy's career took measures to cope with the Senator's lies...
...his message is: There is nothing...
...One need only glance at Marx and then at South America to see some drastic parallels...
...But conscientious newspapermen and their editors have been working at the problem for years, and a reading of any responsible newspaper will disclose that to a great degree there has been some success: interpretative reporting alongside the news story, backgrounders, columnists, profiles, etc...
...In his pre-Stalinist period he "expressed his nihilism in various and bizarre forms...
...Elmer Davis told a University of Minnesota audience that " 'objective' reporting" made the newspaper a "mere mouthpiece for pretentious phonies...
...Our policy makers full back on 19th- and early 20th-century development schemes which are no longer applirable...
...These plays were not mere artistic representations of ideas and actions, but were the embodiment of Brecht's own terrorist and anti-humanitarian views...
...NL, October 10), culminating in Brecht's statement that the innocent deserve to die, are consistent with Brecht's views as revealed in his writings...
...Secondly, his proposal that the U.S...
...The play emphasizes such themes as: submission to hierarchical discipline, the introduction of terror into the Communist party, the Party's need to hide its purposes from the masses, its readiness to manipulate the masses, its willingness to form alliances with any social elements, its use of confessions and purges...
...Oberlin, Ohio MURRAY A. TUCKER TRUTH AND THE PRESS Melvin J. Lasky ("The Truth, the Lie and the Press," NL, October 3) writes with considerable urgency of the necessity for an "Emancipation Proclamation which would guarantee [the reporter] the right of interpretative comment in the due process of fact gathering...
...From the outset of McCarthy's maneuverings, the press began to question itself...
...First, Figueres suggests that the Federal Reserve Bank develop two different lending policies...
...What is necessary in Latin America is capital formation...
...Our present need is to meet a crisis situation, to meet the onslaught of political Communism...
...Surprisingly, the ability of the American people to discern journalistic wheat from chaff has managed to sustain our democracy for many years, and the first sign of its disintegration would be the acceptance of an editor's mandates as '"the truth...
...Over the past decade the press has been examining itself, asking itself the same questions Lasky poses...
...This is no defense of the press' failings...
...The flaw here is that the capital lent would ultimately return to the domestic economy and thus hamper any tight money policy which the Reserve might be attempting...
...Brecht, Miss Fischer relates, reacting against his own sense of futility, and attracted by the discipline, the hierarchical order and the totalitarian and terrorist features of the German Communist party, joined it in 1930, after its domination by Stalin had been established...
...The Associated Press concerned itself with the matter in 1952...
...I n 1950, Richard L. Strout of the Christian Science Monitor questioned "the business of 'straight reporting.'" In that same year...
...We are hampered by traditions and a consequent lack of imagination...
...During his Stalinist period he emphasized "the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, the substitutability of any individual for another, the non-validity of individual morality with respect to the collective, the necessity and the inflexibility of the hierarchical order, the inevitability and the strange beauty of terror...
...To suggest that newspaper owners and advertisers serve as the arbiters of truth, good and learning manifests a distressing lack of faith in the American body politic...
...And in the invention of a chorus that symbolizes the intervention of the GPU in Party life, Brecht manifests unusual creative talent...
...For too long entrepreneurs have been able to extract in South America and build elsewhere...
...Written in 1931, it approvingly anticipates the Moscow Trials and the worst features of Stalinist terrorism...
...For him, there are no forms of society, past or present or future, no values, no goods...
...Similarly, the first sign of a newspaper's arrogance would be the presumption that its truths are universal...
...He cites the press coverage of Joe McCarthy as proof that the press cannot tell the public the truth because it is chained to the superficial truths that objective journalism sees...
...Moreover, responsible newspapers have taken measures to guarantee that as far as possible, within the obvious limitations of newspaper production, a demagogue will not again find the press so easy to manipulate...
...Another—and a more detailed—corrective, based not only on personal experience but on an examination of Brecht's career and dramas as well, may be found in Ruth Fischer's Stalin and German Communism, pages 615-625 (Harvard University Press, 1948...
Vol. 44 • October 1960 • No. 41
