NARROW MINDED REPORTING

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In the fall of 1953 the CRIMSON editorially supported Adlai Stevenson for president. Although he was defeated approximately one year ago, the CRIMSON has been and still is fighting the Republican party--both editorially and on its selection and reporting of news items. A newspaper has the right to print anything it wishes on its editorial page: but when the reporting of the news becomes biased in favor of editorial policies, them the newspaper is guilty either of ignorance or mockery of its duties.

The latest evidence of the CRIMSON's slanting of the news is manifested in the treatment of the Harry Dexter White case. On Monday, November 16, Harry Truman spoke nationally defending his position in the case. The CRIMSON gave this story a center column on the first page. On Tuesday, November 17, Herbert Brownell Jr. and J. Edgar Hoover appeared in front of the Senate Internal Security Committee and refuted a major part of Mr. Truman's speech. The report of this testimony, which was headline news in almost every other newspaper in the country, was carried by the CRIMSON only in the AP wire dispatch. And yet a three-column front page spread was given to the HLU telegram signed by 441 students congratulating Truman.

You, the editors of the CRIMSON, who are so sensitive to the narrow-minded tactics of McCarthy, Jenner, et al, are guilty of the same narrow-mindedness in your reporting. By glaring misuse of your journalistic powers and privileges you have conspired to mold the opinions of your readers. Political leanings belong on the editorial page alone. Abuse of this principle reflects an unwillingness to accept your responsibility to the reader, or, at best, immature your responsibility to the reader, or, at best, immature journalism. Victor Friedman '54

In general, the CRIMSON does not play news of national rather than local significance anywhere but in the Associated Press column. Usually, this policy is amended only in the case of certain elections or deaths of national of international figures of more than ordinary importance. Sometimes it happens, however, that because of a lack of local stories, a national story is forced into another spot. This happened in the instance of the Truman speech. The next day there were enough important local stories to fill the regular columns. Besides this, the Truman speech was broadcast late at night, while the senate hearings took place in the afternoon and were no longer as timely for the next morning's paper. The HLU telegram, though perhaps a bit overplayed, was local news, and it had a higher priority than the Brownell-Hoover story, which, by the way, had a bigger headline and as many column inches devoted to it as the Truman speech.

Mr. Friedman's overall criticism of using the front page to promote editorial policy is a bit naive. Every newspaper, when faced with a choice of giving a more important position to one of two significant stories, will pick the one which it feels most reflects its own subjective idea of which is the better of the conflicting sides of an argument. Just as we play a statement by Pusey on McCarthyism over a statement by McCarthy on Harvard, we will continue to make this kind of decision on a subjective basis. If one looks back on last fall's national election reporting, he will see in a paper like the New York Heraid Tribune that an Elsenhower speech always get the play over a speech by Stevenson. This is in no way objective, and it is even more blased than we would care to be. The CRIMSON is in no way a Democratic party organ. Last year, we supported Henry Cabot Lodge and Christian Herter in their election fights, as well as a number of other Republicans in state and city elections. We have decided to advocate a number of principles, which we think do not necessarily denote any kind of partisanship. And we do respect the opinions of certain men above those who have proven that they will make any kind of unsubstantiated statement for the sake of publicity. We feel strongly, therefore, that every paper has a responsibility to be intelligently subjective, to discriminate among various statements by different men, and to give to most news space and therefore, If you will, the most support, to those who base their utterances on fact not sensationalized fiction.--Ed.