PM: AN EXPERIMENT IN A FREE PRESS
Rodell, Fred
PM: An Experiment In A Free Press By FRED RODELL WAY BACK in 1940, when the newspaper known as PM was born—sired by psychoanalysis out of Marshall Field's fabulous millions—liberals and...
...McCormick of the Chicago Tribune...
...because for many months Izzy Stone's dispatches—which PM seems to be burying of late—represented the finest and bravest reporting coming out of wartime Washington...
...PM reported that the bill was passed, that it was vetoed by the President, that it was re-passed over his veto— all of which was true...
...that he could easily have stopped it from becoming law with no more than a phone-call or a one-line note to any of his henchmen, asking that his veto be upheld...
...ostrich than eat crow...
...Uninfluenced and unafraid, PM could and would tell all...
...Then there was the more recent PM story about Phil La Follette's letter to Col...
...it gave F.D.R...
...MacArthur's staff, had been written to thank McCormick for his continuing editorial efforts to get more of the tools of war allotted to MacArthur's command...
...The Paper's Three Tenets Now these three examples of PM's "news-slanting" were not chosen at random...
...For, no more than they has PM been willing to trust its readers with the whole truth about matters on which it takes—as is, of course, its proper privilege —a strong editorial stand...
...The second PM tenet is that everyone in or out of public life who opposed our entering the war before Pearl Harbor is, per se and permanently, a slob, (and you can omit the letter "1" if you wish...
...I have read PM pretty regularly since its first issue, three and a half years ago...
...Rather Play The Ostrich For PM, itself afraid to face these facts, does not want its readers to know them...
...PM expressed its dislike of the bill and its backers...
...And in doing so, it betrays the high hopes that hovered about it at birth and makes a mockery of those standards of editorial honesty which it purports to uphold...
...Hasn't Trusted Its Readers If- so, PM might prove that the press could still be truly free...
...Its pages are rife with proof of this mistrust, this less-than-candor...
...That a man should lie or half-lie to make money is deplorable but understandable...
...He will get the anti-business stuff that advertisers don't like to see printed—-and that is all to the good...
...The first tenet is that Franklin D. Roosevelt can do no wrong...
...It would rather play the...
...that he made no effort whatsoever to stop the bill from becoming law...
...considerable credit for his wasted veto...
...In the first place, each represents one of three tried-and-true types of journalistic dishonesty...
...Untrammeled by advertising pressures, it might become a beacon of honest reporting, of that complete journalistic integrity on which freedom of the press, in a modern democracy, ought to be predicated and built...
...He will get the special scoops that underlie PM's constant and commendable little crusades, dealing mostly with racial and civil libertarian issues—and that is all to the good too...
...But, more than that, each of these three'examples illustrates one of PM's most preciously and prejudic-edly held tenets—tenets in fanatical defense of which PM has been willing to twist or kill not merely the three little pieces of news here mentioned but almost any item that might raise a question-mark in the mind of a reader, that might plant a seed of skepticism in one of the faithful...
...What Readers Don't Get What it all boils down to is that the man or woman who gets his news exclusively from PM—and to many it has become a bible—knows no more and frequently knows a great deal less about what is really going on in the nation and the world than does the reader of almost any regular newspaper...
...But PM, by quoting sentences of the letter out of their context and surrounding them with unquoted innuendo, managed to give the impression that La . Follette was suddenly embracing the entire political creed of the Chicago Tribune as well as actively joining its campaign for MacArthur for President...
...The same goes for a newspaper...
...And one final matter...
...Here there is space for only a few examples: Its Story On Phil LaFollette There was the story of the enactment of the Smith-Connally anti^strike bill a few months ago...
...What PM conspicuously failed to make clear to its readers was that the President's veto was merely a political gesture...
...Thus, in reporting the recent series of conferences abroad, PM has not even been content to conclude that, at any rate, no news is good news...
...It has insisted that no news is news...
...From the standpoint of sheer journalistic integrity, I should not rank it far above its scorned enemy, the Chicago Tribune, or the senile and reactionary New York Sun, or any Hearst paper you may care to name...
...That this category happens to include.by far the majority o: the American people has never bothered PM...
...I wonder if it has never occurred to PM that the foundation-stone of democracy is an informed electorate...
...did not care to have its readers confused, for instance, by one typical Army comment on the Moscow declaration : "I don't see that it says anything startling or very new...
...I have read it for a variety of reasons: because it does indeed report a great deal of the type of news that lies too close to the heart and the pocket-book of the average advertiser and so can be found in no other daily...
...PM: An Experiment In A Free Press By FRED RODELL WAY BACK in 1940, when the newspaper known as PM was born—sired by psychoanalysis out of Marshall Field's fabulous millions—liberals and left-wingers from Boston to Baltimore shouted hosan-nas and subscribed in advance...
...because of its excellent maps and, in all frankness, because of a classic comic strip called "Barnaby...
...The first involves concealment of the significant facts by a straight-faced and unem-broidered account of meaningless surface facts...
...The letter, coming from an officer on Gen...
...that it is of the essence of democracy to trust the people with the whole truth, not just part of it, in confidence that they will act upon it wisely...
...and that whoever is afraid to give the people the full facts is displaying, deny it as he may, a deep-seated lack of faith in the people and the people's judgment...
...or of the bickering back-biting Donney-brook Fair that official Washington has become since F.D.R...
...That a man should lie or half-lie merely to prove to others he is right is a weaker and cheaper thing to do...
...It leads also to the warping of straight news stories in an often desperate effort to protect the Chief from even the implication of blame...
...I could have written it myself without going to Moscow...
...Here at last was to be a big city newspaper completely free of the commercial curse of advertising...
...PM is forever flaunting all over its pages its belief in democracy and the democratic process...
...This totalitarian tommyrot leads not only to all sorts of editorial squirming, as when PM blasts Administration policies or personnel but holds its fire short of the White House, where ultimate responsibility lies...
...or of the deepening mistrust of British postwar plans—to which our plans seem now to be tied—not only in the whole United States west of the Appalachians but in Asia, in Africa, and all around the world...
...PM has long held dear to its editorial heart all the palaver about postwar plans...
...In fact, PM's offense against journalistic integrity, its abuse of freedom of the press, strikes me as in a sense far greater than that of the so-called "venal" or "kept" newspapers, for all their advertising-bred inhibitions...
...And here too, in a larger sense, was to be a test of freedom of the press in the 20th Century...
...it blamed the bill in large meas^ ure on the mine strike and John L. Lewis...
...or of the resurgence of nationalist, as opposed to internationalist, sentiment in the plain people at home and in the troops abroad...
...Apparently PM...
...The second involves out-and-out distortion of the facts in a manner that can scarcely be anything but deliberate...
...The third tenet is that whatever Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin may be cooking up in the way of postwar plans is to be taken on blind faith as sure to be all for the best and sure to produce the best of all possible worlds...
...So it might have seemed that an Associated Press dispatch from Algiers on the average soldier's reaction to the Moscow conference would have been treated as big and possibly front-page news...
...But he will get next to nothing of the ground-swell of disgust with the Administration that has rolled across the country and been reflected in every election since 1940...
...With the bulk of the press dependent for its very life on big business and actually a branch of big business—with big business anxious to fool or blind, the reading and voting public on innumerable issues touching business profits—had not old-style freedom of the press become, to a dangerous degree, freedom to distort rather than report a large part of the news...
...The third example does not involve a, PM story at all...
...wrote finis to the domestic New Deal...
...Here at last was to be a journal whose editors/ with never a fear of losing some whopping account, could joyfully report the truth and the whole truth about those touchy subjects—labor news, business skulduggery, antitrust activities, tax facts, to name a few—which the entire advertising-supported press, left and right, had always avoided or played down...
...It involves the strange absence of a story from PM's columns...
...it has also made a special fuss about recording the thoughts and desires and ideas of the men in the armed forces...
...I looked through PM for days for that story, and if it was there at all it was certainly well curtailed and concealed—for I never found it...
...La Follette had even reminded McCormick of the vast political gulf between them, a gulf marked by many bitter battles in the past...
...The third simply involves suppression (or, at the*very least, burial) of a good news story...
...For thoughtful men had long wondered whether the good old concept, dating from the days of the small news sheet and the personal pamphlet, did not perhaps need re-stating and re-bolstering in this mechanized age of 100 pages and 1,000,000 copies a day...
...Yet, despite these bright spots, there is no blinking the fact that PM has failed and failed miserably to live up to its high promise and its literally unprecedented opportunity...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 51
