THE ONE-INTEREST PRESS

...Indeed it is difficult to believe that Committee will forever be permitted to evade the duty of investigating the very clear and present dangers embodied in the violent lawlessness of the segregationist mob...

...but most of the daily press, including, I regret to say, the New York Times, never mentioned the matter in its editorial pages...

...trusteeship—guaranteed against Communist seizure...

...But to discuss that subject out loud is deemed an act of disloyalty to Chiang Kai-shek because it implies acknowledgement of the existence of a regime whose oppressive internal structure is intolerable to us...

...for the majesty of democracy is that the truth does out—finally...

...This article is adapted from an address he gave recently at the 10th annual convention of Americans for Democratic Action in Washington, D.C...

...Hoover's accomplishments...

...newspapers are owned and ruled by conservative Republicans and that this tended to explain the unfailing partiality of most of the press toward Republican candidates for President and Vice-President...

...journalists into Red China...

...The day will come when the shameless intrusion of oil in the affairs of government will be revealed as a national scandal...

...Let us have no sacred cows, elephants or donkeys...

...1. This list of invulnerables would be lacking in respect for the high office of the Presidency if it did not begin with the President...

...eminent liberals have contributed their testimonials...

...let there be only one animal for whom we display special affection—-that species known in all eras as the underdog...

...those newspapers to whom it does not apply will recognize themselves, and those to whom it does will assure themselves that I must be talking about other papers...

...But how long will the press let it lie around...

...and that, to the best of my knowledge, he has always worked very hard at his job...

...Yet this is the forgotten subject of most editorial pages...

...I refer to the censorship of movies, books, even plays...

...Perhaps it is the Committee that is sacred, and the sanctity passes from elephant to donkey whenever the chairmanship changes...

...Dulles has an extraordinary capacity for irritating those whom he appeases, and inflaming those whom he irritates...

...I had never realized everything was so coincidental, and that Republican newspapers only supported Republicans when they are superior...

...surely the record of history needs no elaboration from me at this juncture...

...Look at the contortions some essayists are now going through trying to explain that the President and his Secretary of the Treasury are both right about the budget...

...I refer to Senator James Eastland...

...A few columnists—notably Thomas L. Stokes, Doris Fleeson, and Marquis Childs—have tried to keep the subject alive...

...What concerns me about the American press is not what most of these papers stand for, but what so many of them refuse to stand for...

...Consider the nightmares that confront Republican editorialists...

...Perhaps more serious than the business of sacred cows is the suppression or evasion of great issues...

...7. Now of course this list could be multiplied...

...Surely the McClellan Committee could not have terminated its alleged study of the oil ring so swiftly if there had been a general press demand for more...

...Hoover rewarded them for their faith by issuing his dismal attack on "pseudo liberals," meaning anyone who questions the infallibility of the anonymous informer...

...Not too many years ago any discussion of sacred elephants would have been headed by references to Senator McCarthy...

...A book immortalizing him is now the number one best seller...

...Hoover could proclaim that American participation in the war to destroy Nazism and fascism was a dreadful mistake without forfeiting his role of counselor to the nation...

...It is not Mr...

...there is always the danger that sacred cows will disagree...

...The reason that most newspapers supported the Republican candidate, it was explained, was that it was perfectly apparent to any naked eye that the Republican candidate was the superior candidate...

...Is there, come to think of it, any issue that future historians—if there are any—will regard as more crucial rx> our time...

...And here, too, is my central point...

...Last year we found in a survey that a startling majority of the press had entirely failed to comment on his press inquiry...

...It is true that the American Newspaper Publishers Association has attacked his position vis-a-vis coverage of Red China, and that the Society of Newspaper Editors found its voice after the publishers spoke out, proving once again that an editor is a man who possesses the courage of his publisher's convictions...

...Had Mr...

...CBS had only a few weeks earlier banned a script by Eric Sevareid because he had allegedly editorialized in criticism of Secretary Dulles' ban on the entry of U.S...

...But I cannot avoid asking what the Republican essayists would have done to a Democratic administration which let down the valiant people of Hungary as coldly and callously as this one did when they began to practice some of the old Republican preachments on "liberation...

...What I plead for is the restoration of our great tradition of free debate, fair argument, a readiness to discuss all issues on their merits, a responsiveness to fresh, unorthodox ideas...

...it would, of course, vary from region to region...

...I trust that liberals have said farewell to the day when business operators who disguise themselves as labor leaders achieve the status of sacred cow...

...press— and I understate the figure—Mr...

...Hoover is above and beyond criticism...

...Thus was art forbidden to imitate life...

...Here then indeed is the sacred cow, elephant, and donkey united in a single being...

...What concerns me is not the attempted censorship, but the censorship of debate about censorship...

...Yet I must nominate him because of the way a high percentage of newspapers has allowed the press to be pushed around by him...

...Far Eastern policy...

...Here is the classic proof that the phrase "one-party press" is a misnomer and that the term "one-interest press" would be more accurate...

...But it seems to me that the monstrous folly of this ban would long ago have been the subject of a nationwide press storm— rather than a mild shower—if imposed under a Democratic regime...

...2. My second nominee, Secretary Dulles, is of course intermittently chided in the Republican gazettes...

...Much of what I have to say applies most plainly to those unhappy one-newspaper cities and towns, and those other communities where an afternoon paper competes with a morning paper owned by the same Republican...

...There were Jewish groups that tried to suppress Oliver Twist and Negro groups that tried to suppress Birth of a Nation...

...Let us pray that those of us who edit non-Republican papers will never in our later years accord Mr...

...What other man could exact from me this rare display of fairness and objectivity...

...I rejoice that Dave Beck has been exposed...

...To document the point with shocking brevity, let me merely refer to JAMES A. WECHSLER is the editor of The New York Post...

...But what Democrat of this century—except Senator Harry Byrd —has won so much recognition in the Republican press as a true statesman who recognizes that his party's actions are seldom to be confused with its principles, and that what is good for Texas is good for General Motors, and vice versa...

...yet some members of my profession may well be going to jail because they challenged his right to investigate the political opinions of newspapermen—especially when most of his targets turned out to be on the New York Times and when the vindictive, punitive nature of his inquiry seemed entirely plain...

...It is not what they say that seems to me most alarming...

...8. I suppose that Herbert Hoover must be ranked as the elder statesman of our animal farm...

...But against the voluminous record of error I submit that the criticism has been remarkably subdued...

...Martin Luther King had to travel the same distance to get an audience with him about the life-and-death ordeal confronting Negroes in Alabama...

...I do not mean to say that he has never been criticized by any Republican journal...

...The proof of his awesome sanctity is that I feel obliged to say at this point that he has been unjustly maligned by the Communists...

...Shortly afterward Mr...

...Was it forever ended when President Eisenhower rejected Mr...

...4. Next in rank is the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation— the Hoover who survived Hoover as well as Coolidge, Roosevelt as well as Truman...

...Clearly any resolution of that deadlock will involve a reappraisal of our relations with Red China, and hard bargaining with that regime...

...It portrays him as a man who has never been guilty of major error, yet there has been only a fragment of criticism of the work and a vast chorus of adulation...

...The book is as dispassionate as an FBI handout listing Mr...

...Here surely is the sacred donkey, revered by elephants and in trouble only with those of us old enough to be bull-moosers...

...His name is attached to one of the most inhumane, intolerant—yes, un-American —legislative documents on our national books—the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act...

...When a Presidential adviser recently hinted that we may have to face the issue, the shock and chagrin of the Republican editorialists were so profound that most of them could not even bear to admit that they had read the indiscretion...

...I refer to the issues that have become unmentionables in many newspaper offices—and many legislative bodies...

...There is progress in the land...

...Let me emphasize that mine is not a blanket denunciation...

...Life can be difficult...

...On a national scale the Vice-President must at least be ranked as a sacred calf, and aging rapidly...

...Truman such obsequious reverence on his bad days...

...Hoover's relations with Senator McCarthy...

...And this, I think, goes to the heart of our modern disease, which is the reluctance to engage in "controversy," or to become a "controversial figure...

...But how many papers across the land cried out against the indecent haste with which the Mc-Clellan Committee buried its investigation of the oil barons...

...I have not dealt with all the complexities...

...Some are more sacred than others, and some, by the grace of God, are hybrids...

...it is what they fail to say, and what they refuse to debate...

...This rather reduced the whole problem to absurdity...

...now, it is reported, he is playing the role of baby-sitter, an occupation calculated to mellow the angriest man...

...My thesis was that the great majority of U.S...

...Any pronouncement he recites is certain to invite the acclaim and gratitude of much of the newspaper fraternity, regardless of what he may be saying...

...Hoover and the FBI that I fear...

...But let us not despair...

...I do say that he is the beneficiary of a generous standard of criticism not commonly accorded Democratic Presidents...

...Instead I marvel at the equanimity with which most of my Republican colleagues accept the view that what goes right is an Act of Eisenhower and what goes wrong is an Act of God...

...it was uncritically serialized by scores of newspapers...

...It was a serious speech and, much to my joyous consternation, it was taken with a deadly seriousness by a number of colleagues of the press...

...He has probably never thought of himself as a sacred donkey...

...The debate rages in every area of the free world—except the United States...

...the ugly truth, however, is that a new crisis could explode any day over two islands known as Quemoy and Matsu...

...Yet the sad fact is that most editorial pages can attain a degree of passionate indignation about Beck's bad boys that is equalled only by their lack of zeal for exposure of the men of oil...

...They are not, of course, sacred everywhere...

...Now, lastly, let me refer to the creeping censorship that formalizes much of our national timidity...

...Let us live by the rule of political irreverence...

...Stevenson's views during the 1956 campaign...

...3. Next, and as concrete evidence of my non-partisanship, I am obliged to list the Senate majority leader...

...but rather the failure of the press to treat him as an ordinary mortal, subject to the frailties that beset other bureaucrats...

...The censors are not restricted to any group...

...The irony is that various Catholic publications discussed the problem freely...

...the gingerly terms in which American fumbling in the Middle Eastern crisis has been discussed in most of the Republican gazettes...

...Who but Lyndon Johnson has inspired the New York Times' Arthur Krock, at least in this century, to such peaks of rhetorical tribute...

...What issue deserves greater free debate than the efforts of such organizations as the Legion of Decency to strangle such creatures as Baby Doll} But when the controversy arose in New York, there was almost uniform editorial silence...

...The American Society of Newspaper Editors Bulletin graciously republished my remarks, making me, however, the target of a critical retort...

...What ever happened to the debate over the possible radiation dangers involved in the continuance of H-bomb explosions...

...What ever happened to the debate over U.S...

...There are many responsible men who believe that in the end Formosa must achieve some status of U.N...

...Truman and Dean Acheson been responsible for a fraction of the empty double-talk and futile triple-threat and four-square confusion with which we have confronted these matters, even the Christian Science Monitor, a notoriously unbloodthirsty publication, would have demanded that heads roll on Pennsylvania Avenue...

...The truth, however, is that in more than 90 per cent of the U.S...

...Among the other facts of life from which the children of Republican gazettes must be spared is the fantastic power of the oil lobby...

...His recent trip to the Gold Coast was certainly appropriate...

...You may have recently noted that the CBS network has banned a television show based on the plight of a commentator who was found guilty of editorializing...

...6. Doubtless it is by similar osmosis that Chairman Francis E. Walter of the House Un-American Activities Committee retains immunity from attack and exposure in a large area of the nation's press...

...Our eyes are focused on Gaza...

...but how many newspapers editorially noted the irony that Rev...

...Who but Mr...

...That Lyndon Johnson is a Democrat will surely not be disputed here...

...I have in my hand a list of sacred cows, and/or elephants and donkeys...

...I find it hard to understand how a Senator engaged in inciting insurrection against the Supreme Court's desegregation decision is permitted to retain chairmanship of a group known as the Senate Internal Security Committee...

...It evades all the great issues of controversy— such as Mr...

...Yet when, as chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he comes to New York and unfolds the revelation that the editor of the Daily Worker is a communist—and that his paper has a circulation of 7,635 (including, I assume, FBI agents and editors of the Wall Street Journal)—he is treated as a serious sleuth and hardly a voice is raised to question his fitness for the role of guardian of our political morals...

...Such things will always happen in a democracy...

...The dismal fact is that he is getting away with it—because there has been too little outcry from the press and public...

...The general theme of the response was that I was a confused character who had missed the obvious point...

...5. My fifth choice may surprise you, for we do not ordinarily think of him in the lofty category of those whom I have mentioned...