YOUR HOME-TOWN PAPER, SIR

Observe in one corner the Communist organ, the Daily Worker, and in the other, the New York Times. The slogan of the former: "People's Champion of Liberty, Progress, Peace, and Prosperity" and of the latter: "All the News That's Fit to Print". Quoth the Worker on December 1 and 2, "The newspapers of this country are giving the American people a heavy dose of war propaganda," and "Twenty-five thousand newspapers lied to their readers yesterday . . . . . the respectable New York Times showed them how to do it." But the accused hat! answered a month before in an editorial on September 6, saying, "We in this country must expect shortly to be deluged with propaganda, and some of that propaganda will be news. In such cased the Times propaganda will be news. In such cases the Times will see that it is properly described and labeled."

Those were the challenges. New follow the fight.

On November 30 a front-page Daily Worker feature read, Another Soviet clarion call for peace was made today by Joseph Stalin." The next day, December 1, the Worker's headline was, RED ARMY HURLS BACK INVADING FINNISH TROOPS, CROSSES BORDER, while the Times said, FINNS' CABINET RESIGNS AS SOVIET MOMBS CITIES; NEW GOVERNMENT EXPECTED TO SEEK A TRUCE; 200 ARE KILLED. The next day a feature headline in the Worker asked, "Why did the Times censor the facts on Finland?"

On December 3 the Times wrote, FINNS REPORT SOVIET DRIVE HALTED, while the Worker replied with, SOVIET CEDES KARELIA, Six days later when Worker claimed, RED ARMY SWEEPS THROUGH SHATTERED MANNERHEIM LINE, the Times observed, FINNS REPORT FOR HURLED BACK ANEW ON KARELIAN FRONT. The Worker outdid itself, however, on December 5 when the first paragraph of its lead story referred to the ". . . . perfidious military clique, the Mannerheim-Cajander vermin . . . . . " and at the same time declared in a front-page editorial entitled, "The American Press--the Lowest Yet," that "the intelligence of the American people is being assaulted with a campaign of vile, hypocritical lies about the Soviet Union . . . the one great power where the people govern . . . the one great power that can have no imperialistic aims. . . . .

Probably not one of the headlines above or of all those which have appeared during the two weeks of the Finnish war can be branded as completely false. But the wording of headlines and the rating of "news" stories make a mockery of the impartiality promised by newspapers. It is under these conditions that each morning millions of Americans who are uneducated to the poison of propaganda sit down to read their daily papers.