PEACE AND THE PRESS

...Yet in view of all the pious words that have been written about the desirability of cracking the Iron Curtain, the millions of dollars we have spent on "The Voice of America" to achieve this very purpose, and the obvious advantages of establishing a two-way news channel between this country and Russia, the negative reaction of our own free press to the turn of events in Moscow was more than a shade disappointing...

...Meet with them...

...Arguing that "we cannot afford to ignore any honorable offer of peaceful settlement," the Oregon Daily Journal of Portland urged that we ask Russia for "a bill of particulars regarding the proposed five-power peace pact" and cautioned that "unless we do . . . Russia will tell the world that she wants peace and the United States blocks it...

...The Kremlin, of course, distributed to the Russian people, along with the American messages, the reply sent President Truman by Nikolia Shvernik, president of the Supreme Soviet, and the resolution passed by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet answering our own McMahon resolution...

...Peace and the Press By Dorothy Dunbar Bromley THE American press could hardly have been expected to cry "Peace, it's wonderful," when the chief puppeteer of the Kremlin surprised the world by permitting the people of Russia to hear and read the full texts of President Truman's letter and the accompanying Congressional resolution expressing friendship for the people of the U.S.S.R...

...Another editor, reporting failure to print, wrote either in irony or chagrin, "I hope you won't deduce from this set of circumstances that October, 1951 15 Pravda has more freedom of the press than we do...

...Louis' morning and evening papers, the Globe-Democrat and the Posf-Dispatch...

...7, while the Detroit News, the Pittsburgh Press, and the Cincinnati Times-Star ran Shvernik's letter...

...Because the Kremlin had tipped its hand just a little and because the dissemination of such an exchange between Moscow and Washington was unprecedented, the event was dramatic and of genuine reader interest from this journalist's viewpoint...

...But why, every time the ball of peace propaganda is tossed in our direction must we drop it with a thud...

...the Washington Star, an evening paper, in all but its final 'Okay—What Do We Build Next?' Herblock in The Washington Post edition, and almost in their entirety by the Philadelphia Inquirer, a morning sheet, which did its readers an added service by reprinting the month-old American messages...

...The retaliatory acts our government has felt it necessary to take, the Dallas paper added, "certainly can be interpreted to the Russian citizen as evidence of American bad faith...

...Remember that President Truman's message and the Congressional resolution were forwarded to Moscow and published in this country July 7. Followed a month of silence from the Kremlin while the "Voice" tried to drill the messages through the steel curtain of interference...

...The Christian Science Monitor, also an evening paper, ran generous excerpts from both texts, amounting to more than half of their contents...

...The Kremlin had neglected to pass along the word that the full exchange was to be broadcast and published immediately in the U.S.S.R...

...On this score the Kremlin's timing could not have been more blundering...

...It would be a great error," the Washington Post said, "to dismiss the Russian statement as mere propaganda...

...Qualified gratification over "an important, but still very limited advance" in free communication between Russians and Americans was expressed by the New York Times, which had been invited by the new English-language publication, the Moscow News, to contribute to its columns...

...A relatively small number of editorial writers chastised the State Department for its hasty brushing aside of the Russian messages...

...The majority of papers used the AP story, which contained almost as much official Washington back-talk as Russian quotes—a practice we deplore when followed by the Moscow press...

...Significantly, the Presidium's resolution listed 11 instances of alleged discrimination by this country against the U.S.S.R., as though to admit that our trade warfare were beginning to hurt and as though to suggest that Moscow might be willing to give up, if we were, the endless game of tit-for-tat...

...The Minneapolis Srar ran the text of the Presidium's resolution on Aug...

...We know this is not true...

...In Chicago, Marshall Field's Sun-Times, supposed to be still a liberal paper, came up with so ringingly patriotic an editorial that it was reprinted as an advertisement by the International Latex Corporation...

...But the editors of our evening papers knew before they went to press Aug...

...But most American editors were either too cynical, or too lacking in vision, or cared too little about informing their readers to print the full texts from Russia...

...The most regrettable omission in the AP and most other stories was a summary of the 11 specific charges made against our government...

...Time and again," the Cleveland Plain Dealer observed, "seemingly irreconcilable differences have been resolved at the conference table...

...Once More We Seem Destined to Fumble a Peace Bid," the Kentucky paper headed its Aug...

...My rueful deduction is that while we are blessed with freedom to print or not to print in this country, we could do with more editors who think independently of the State Department where Russia is concerned...

...Secretary Acheson's analysis of the Soviet proposal, the Christian Science Monitor remarked, "however lucid and accurate, was as totally lacking in dramatic appeal to the peace-hungry peoples of the world as the Soviet bid is full of it...

...At this juncture, so far as the editors of morning newspapers knew, the American messages were still being kept from the Russian people...

...8 editorial...

...Possibly more papers would have, had they known that Moscow was simultaneously releasing the American messages to the Russian people...

...7 by the New York Times...

...But we make it constantly harder for our impoverished, weary, and war-sick allies to know it . . ." One could wish that many voices over the country would echo the Courier-Journal's cool counsel of wisdom—and that the American press will show itself more adroit the next time the Iron Curtain is lifted a crack...

...But they are of minor significance beside the main effort...

...1. Outside New York the full exchange appeared only in scattered papers, among them the Washington Star, the Des Moines Register, and the Denver Post, which came to and printed them, quite sensibly, a full week after their release...

...Back copies of 35 papers were examined and letters of inquiry were addressed to the editors of the remaining 29, all but five of whom replied...

...State rushed them into translation and released them the afternoon of the same day with the recommendation that newspapers carry them in full...

...This, then, is the box score on the handling of the Truman-Shvernik and Congress-Presidium exchanges: only 11 papers showed either the journalistic statesmanship that the occasion demanded or a sense of responsibility to readers who might have wished to judge for themselves all or at least some of the content of the Soviet overture...

...The full texts were printed on Aug...

...Now," the editorial continued, "we have nothing to say except for the usual 'spokesman' repeating the usual cries of 'trap' and 'propaganda.' Obviously, the Russian proposal is as much propaganda as our message to the Russian people was...

...Iii The Courier-Journal recalled Ambassador Bedell Smith's 1948 assurance to Foreign Minister Molotov that "the door was always open for full discussion . . ." and the State Department's quick rejoinder that it was "a propaganda trap" wlien Molotov tossed back the ball and suggested that Stalin and Truman have a talk...

...The Russian messages, which characteristically ran about 2,500 words, or four times as long as the American documents, were spiced with the same old hard-to-believe affirmations of peaceful intent...

...Free Trial/* She has been columnist and staff writer for two New York dailies, the World-Telegram and the Herald-Tribune, and has served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union for 14 yean...

...Yet in New York City only the Times printed the two texts on Aug...

...While the Communists were doing all they could to tie up truce negotiations in Korea and trumpeting hatred of the United States at the Berlin "Peace" Festival, the Kremlin's half-friendly move in another direction was bound to be suspect...

...The propaganda battle," the New York Herald-Tribune commented, "has its importance and it is not necessary that the West should always lose all its skirmishes...

...One would almost deduce from the treatment given the affair by most of our papers that Moscow's move was more unwelcome than welcome—looked at askance as a dangerous device that might slow down our rearming for an atomic war...

...New York time, in a box, but in their longer news stories on the Shvernik and Presidium messages stated incorrectly that the American texts were still a secret to the Russian public...

...Of the country's 73 metropolitan dailies with a circulation of at least 150,000, only five published the two full texts, so far as I have been able to learn...

...Other morning papers were either too indifferent or too conventional to do as much...

...America," the Sun-Times cautioned, "should beware of being fooled by the Russian government's latest tactic in the cold war...

...II By way of excuse for having printed none of the texts in question one editor laid the blame on "the price and scarcity of newsprint," an alibi frequently used these days to cover various sins of omission from news columns...

...let us be realists rather than stubborn fools...

...But since editors are human like the rest of us, you would think every last one of them would have been pleased to print the full texts of the journalistic debate between Pravda and Great Britain's Foreign Minister Herbert Morrison, who scored so neatly on the U.S.S.R., pointing to its curtailment of freedoms, that the New York Daily News took off its hat to him...

...So, in our new role in world affairs, we must not fall into the state of mind that war is inevitable...

...Is it too much to ask that they strike a fairer balance than they always do between trivial or sensational but fundamentally insignificant stories, and news that has a bearing on the possible prevention of an atomic war...

...There must inevitably come a point," Paul Block's Pittsburgh Posr-Gazette observed, "at which diplomacy begins to function effectively or an arms race must result in a universally disastrous war...

...7 that the American messages had been broadcast by the Russian radio at the dinner hour to an estimated 200,000,000 Russians, and were to be published the following day...

...Very few of the other papers made up for skipping textual matter by adequate treatment of the news story, although several redeemed themselves by printing noteworthy editorials...

...to the American people...

...Most papers started the story on Page 1, a good number using a streamer headline, although the Kansas City Times relegated it to Page 13, and the Denver Post quaintly buried the news as an insert in a report on a speech given in that city by Anthony Eden...

...Knowing what had happened, the morning papers could have published one or both Soviet texts on Aug...

...The influential Baltimore Evening Sun found it "hardly surprising that the British, French, and American governments wasted little time" on Moscow's latest peace move...

...If our American editors could get over their false pride about never publishing basic material that has appeared in print anywhere in the U.S.A., their readers would be much better informed...

...Yet our metropolitan dailies find space for copy they consider vital, in the national interest, or circulation-building...

...And there was the chance that if our uncontrolled press played ball on this first exchange, more might ensue...

...A number of evening papers did carry this Associated Press item from Moscow...

...When will the State Department learn that Soviet propaganda, however outrageously false, is not to be countered by a supercilious, negative analysis, by mere pooh-poohism . . ." Most cogent of all comment was printed by Barry Bingham's Louisville Courier-Journal, which deserves but will not get a Pulitzer Prize for its well-founded criticism of the State Department...

...The State Department will be criminally remiss in its duty if it fails to study the Russian reply carefully for any basis upon which to begin discussions...

...Five other papers, all evening publications except for the Washington Posr, printed one text or the other...

...Our invariably negative, sullen reception of such gestures as these strengthen a widespread fear that our feet are set irrevocably on the path of war...

...Making another telling point, the Dallas News said, "The bitter complaint on embargo against trade with the Soviet and the satellites indicates a pinch that might itself do much for continued peace...

...It takes cool objectivity, if you're an American editor, to print in full an indictment drawn up by the Russians listing the retaliatory actions our government has taken while expressing friendly feelings for the Russian people...

...Most editorials echoed the departmental spokesman's off-the-cuff charge that the Russian move was only "another propaganda trap...

...8. This the Washington Post did, running the Presidium's resolution, the longer of the two documents, in full on that day...

...Talk with them, but be ready for a double cross and be prepared to shoot from the hip...

...6, the Soviet Embassy delivered to the State Department the two Russian replies containing the request that they be made known DOROTHY DUNBAR BROMLEY began her writing career for Harper's Maga-zine, to which she returned recently with an article, "Free Press vs...

...Then suddenly, on the morning of Monday, Aug...

...Knowing that the next war will be three strikes and out for civilization, enlightened editors will seek to abate, not build up, war hysteria...

...A few ran the intelligence, which was moved by the AP at 1:45 p.m...