To the foreigner who spends some time in the United States, few features of the local scenery are more surprising than the general esteem in which the New York Times is held. This sentiment appears to encompass even the paper's critics, who are many and vocal. They may dislike its politics, its ownership, its cultural ambience, even its geographical location. They will generally agree that it is dull, long-winded, badly written, and afflicted by a kind of stodgy pomposity. But they are unanimous in holding that it is “authoritative.” Whatever you may say against it, runs the refrain, you cannot deny that the Times is a truly great newspaper. Its coverage is immense. It prints more news than any other paper in the world. Above all, it is utterly reliable and independent. The rest of the profession could not get on without it. Neither, it seems, could the country as a whole.

To a reader brought up on papers such as the London Times, the Paris Le Monde, or the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, this near-unanimity constitutes a puzzle for which in the end one can find no explanation save local or national pride. One thinks one knows what authority in a daily journal is, and one does not find this particular quality in the New York Times: not, at any rate, in relation to most of the topics that matter to the rest of the world. The visitor is ready to concede that a steady diet of the paper will yield much valuable information about New York municipal politics and some interesting sidelights on the complex machinery which administers New York State. He will pay tribute to the industry with which the Times staff attends to the assembly of local news items, including the weekly selection of debutantes' photographs; and he will be duly impressed by the sheer size and weight of the Sunday edition. Beyond that, his admiration will tend to flag. Indeed, if he is interested in international affairs, and if he has himself at some stage been a member of the journalistic profession, he will wonder how the Times ever managed to get itself included in the list of the world's leading newspapers.

“Without the Times,” wrote Mr. Richard Rovere some years ago (in the London weekly Spectator of January 2, 1959), “no one with any professional concern with events as they unfold can function in his accustomed way. Government officials cannot know what is going on in the government when they are unable to consult this newspaper; the Times does a more thorough job in Washington than all the Washington newspapers put together. Without the Times, all other publications that pretend to any seriousness are gravely handicapped, for the Times sets the standard, and a great deal of American journalism is really the Times in paraphrase, a day or two late. The syndicated columnists, the news magazines, the journals of opinion, radio and television analysis—all of these are dependent upon the Times. There are few writers on public affairs who do not work on the comfortable assumption that the Times will call to their attention anything they would want called to their attention.” Now if this is true—and I see no reason to doubt it—there is, it seems to me, cause for serious concern. For the plain fact of the matter is that as a reliable source of information about the world outside America's borders, the New York Times is inadequate and misleading.

The odd thing about the passage just quoted is that it comes from a writer who plainly does not depend exclusively on the Times for his picture of the world, and whose own work reflects a degree of sophistication unheard of in Times Square. Anyone familiar with Mr. Rovere's Washington Letter in the New Yorker will, I believe, agree that its author inhabits a mental universe quite different from that of the average Times editorialist. Pointing this out, by the way, takes care of the suggestion that I am here applying snobbish European standards. The fact is that the best American journalism is very good indeed—as good as anything in Europe. It just so happens that, with few exceptions, the best American journalists do not work for the New York Times.

If statistical measurements alone are applied, there can, of course, be no question about the paper's pre-eminence. With a daily circulation of some 700,000 and a weekend run of close to a million-and-a-half, the Times (one is told) dwarfs its nearest competitors. It prints a daily average of sixty pages bearing nearly a half million words. Its Sunday edition regularly weighs over five pounds, and on at least one occasion ran to 612 pages. Charged with the task of filling those pages is a staff of over 5,000 men and women scattered in different bureaus across the USA and fifteen foreign countries. (I take some of these figures from an article by Mr. Joseph Kraft in the April 1961 Esquire.) More important, the paper's readership has been estimated (still according to Mr. Kraft) to include 44 per cent of all government officials in Washington, 30 per cent of the nation's college presidents, 60 per cent of its newspaper editors, and 28 per cent of its banking executives. Its special European edition is read by virtually all foreigners, from officials to students, who want to keep in touch with the United States. Finally, its syndicated news service reaches 66 other papers all over the world, with an estimated 25 million readers. These are solid claims to eminence. They do not, however, compensate for the persistent absence of the one element that would really make the Times an authoritative newspaper: professional competence in the reporting and interpreting of events, especially outside the United States.

In a sense this is an open secret. Within the journalistic profession it has long been accepted that the Times is not to be relied upon for the kind of reporting that readers of the more prestigious European papers take for granted. This opinion is naturally held most firmly by those who have spent some time abroad, and who have compared what happens there with what is reported in the Times. Mr. Murray Kempton wrote some years ago in Encounter (June 1961):

The foreign coverage of the New York Times seems to me to be in general miserable. . . . There is no event occurring abroad upon which the Times—here I have to except its Middle European correspondents—has ever given me any information critical to my judgment of history. It was a year and a half behind on the Pasternak case. If I had depended on the Times, I don't believe I should ever have heard of Aldermaston; I should certainly not have understood even as much as I do now about the French moral crisis over Algeria. The entire British general election of 1955 was covered without giving us one significant quotation from Aneurin Bevan. . . . When I was in Italy two years ago I made a rather serious, if unsuccessful, effort to engage its culture. Since then I have retained a certain passion for that subject. I read every Times story on Italy with some concentration. I have no notion of what has happened since I left, beyond a certain chronological recollection of unexplained events.

Matters have not improved since then in this regard. In some respects, indeed, the situation has worsened, from the standpoint of a reader interested in overseas news, with the departure from Moscow of Mr. Max Frankel—perhaps the outstanding “professional” the Times has ever employed in a key foreign post. Mr. Frankel's otherwise welcome presence in Washington does not make up for the vacuum he left behind in Eastern Europe, an area now serviced by a group of writers of whom it is charitable to suppose that they are still learning their trade. Nor are one's doubts silenced by the reflection that in Western Europe there is at any rate Mr. C. L. Sulzberger; for Mr. Sulzberger has stopped being a reporter and become a commentator. As such he deserves much praise, for even when one disagrees with him, one is always able to take him seriously: more or less in the way in which one takes Mr. Walter Lippmann seriously, and in which one fails to take Mr. Joseph Alsop seriously. But news coverage is something else again. Neither Mr. Sulzberger's thoughtful dispatches from Paris nor the fading memory of Mr. Robert Kleinman's reporting can make up for the depressing conclusion that in its coverage of the international scene the New York Times consistently fails to reach the minimum standard of competence its readers have a right to expect.

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II

Of this lamentable state of affairs many examples could be given, though only a handful can be recorded in this space. For convenience, they are all culled from a brief recent period—late May to late June 1965—and discussed in the light of what this writer believes to have been the true situation in certain areas which he feels professionally equipped to judge. No attempt will be made to assess the paper's editorial policies (save as reflected in the editing of news dispatches), or its cultural contributions. The unsatisfactory level of the latter is anyhow not seriously in dispute among educated readers. It is generally accepted that the Times (notwithstanding a recent improvement in the Sunday book supplement, which apparently reflects the rise of energetic competition in the form of Book Week and the fortnightly New York Review) cannot be expected to evolve beyond a certain decent mediocrity where intellectual matters are concerned. I pass no judgment on this state of affairs. I merely note that the paper's strength is reputed to lie in its news coverage. Yet this is just where it seems to me that the shoe pinches most urgently.

It would be unfair to deny that there have been examples of competent news gathering, and in at least one recent case something like a display of editorial obstinacy in the face of official displeasure. The reporting from Santo Domingo was not merely exhaustive—in fact rather too exhaustive: in the end one was drowned in a sea of gray matter—but patently true to the facts, even if not as incisive as Mr. Barnard Collier's dispatches in the Herald Tribune. To be sure, one got as much about the Dominican political situation from a single article in Le Monde as from all the endless reports in the Times. But at least a reader who had the patience to wade through those columns could eventually find the few nuggets of gold among the dross. It is also, I suppose, a tribute to editorial consistency that the mess in Vietnam has not been covered up, and that Mr. David Halberstam's successors in Saigon have continued to retail facts rather than official fantasies. This said, I have come to the end of the laudatory part. All the rest is plain disaster.

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The main reason this is not more widely perceived probably has to do with the peculiar principle of selectivity followed by those responsible for the paper's foreign news coverage. The editors in New York plainly are not interested in anything save “spot news,” and the correspondents in the field for the most part are unable to produce anything else. Analytical coverage is no part of their training. They are expected to discover what is going on, in the most literal sense. If there is no “crisis” (a term by now almost wholly denuded of meaning), they feel there is nothing to report. The exceptions are provided by a few privileged correspondents who are allowed to roam further afield and to file “background” material. I shall come to them later. For the moment, let us see what happens during an average week or fortnight when there is no upheaval and only the daily routine of political weather-reporting.

One such period was the week beginning May 16. On May 15 the Times man in Delhi, Mr. J. Anthony Lukas (who is generally one of the paper's abler correspondents), cabled a report on the Indian food situation, which appeared the following day under the reassuring two-column headline: “WINDFALL FOR THE MAN IN A DHOTI: INDIA'S FOOD PRICES CUT SHARPLY.” A diligent reader of the dispatch might have discovered that there was in fact very little to celebrate. As Mr. Lukas himself observed: “Food prices always decline in the spring . . . following the year's main harvest, which ends in April.” However, “this year's decline was sharper than usual, partly because prices had further to drop from last year's inflated highs.” So the cheerful headline was really not quite appropriate, though it might have been said to be in tune with the overriding principle in force among Times editors: always look for the bright side of things. Mr. Lukas, of course, was not responsible for the misleading headline, but his report might perhaps be said to have encouraged optimism at headquarters. The price cut had been announced by the Minister of Food, Mr. Subramaniam, “a witty, urbane man whose eyes twinkle behind horned-rimmed [sic] glasses.” He “was delighted to report that rice and wheat prices had declined 18 per cent since January.” Mr. Lukas was delighted too. “To the average Indian,” he cabled, “who last year had to pull his dhoti, or cotton shirt, even tighter around his meager belly, it was the most welcome news imaginable. . . . To him, the drops already recorded, and those expected to follow later in the summer, mean that he will be able to afford more to eat than he could during the sharp inflation and near famine that began here last July.” In this roundabout way one learned that things had been pretty bad last year. Now, however, there was an improvement. In January, “a bushel of wheat cost about 19 rupees ($4) in New Delhi. . . almost five days pay for a skilled worker. Today that same bushel costs about 16 rupees or four days pay.” No indication of how much the price had risen previously, during the famine period, and whether its current drop had brought it back to “normal.” In the absence of this information, unfortunately, the rest of the story conveyed very little. Moreover, how much of the worker's princely income of 80 cents per diem now goes for food, neither Mr. Lukas nor the twinkly-eyed Subramaniam thought it worth telling. All in all, the news value of this story was slight, though the correspondent had to be given credit for trying to go after the important facts. The cheerful headline comes under a different rubric: that of unconscious fraud, perpetrated no doubt with the best of intentions.

That was the news from India for the day. To most readers it must have sounded reassuring: things getting better. In fact—as everyone familiar with this area knows—the food situation is not getting better, if population growth is taken into account. But Times correspondents are not expected to poke into the disagreeable realities behind the official façade. Theirs not to reason why. The man in Delhi had done his duty. So had the headline writer. After all, people who really want to know about India's food prospects can always read the Wall Street Journal or the Economist.

By way of contrast, the same issue (May 16) carried a “human interest story” from Moscow. Nothing so dull as food prices. This one was about the behavior of young people: a topical worry, it seems, in the Soviet Union as elsewhere. “Movie-struck youngsters are causing increasing concern for [sic] Soviet youth leaders,” cabled Mr. Theodore Shabad from the Soviet capital that day. How are they doing that? “The youngsters flood film magazines with letters, besiege casting departments, and mob the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography. The authorities are trying to deter them by painting an actor's life in blackest terms.” Clearly not a crisis dispatch—Mr. Shabad was having a day off from his usual beat. “How to become a movie actress? That question seems to be uppermost in the minds of Soviet girls 14 to 17 years old.” And of girls in other countries, too. The purport of this particular story (and many others like it) was that the Russians are just like you and me. This is doubtless true, except that it has absolutely no bearing upon the nature of the regime or the behavior to be apprehended from it. But then Mr. Halberstam, since his promotion from Saigon to Warsaw, has developed the same trick. His story that day (it is still May 16) dealt with the effects of drink and was prominently featured under the headline: “PRIDE OF POLAND: A TOAST IN VODKA.” The reader was not spared a single cliché. “Vodka is a part of life here. It is served at the most formal tables, for the most important visiting dignitaries; it appears at impromptu gatherings of friends, and at casual afternoon chats at coffeehouses.” After some initial bewilderment one discovers that this genial stuff leads up to a commercial. “Polish vodka may be the best in the world. So good in fact that the United States Embassy, which works at trying to increase economic ties with Poland, has often encouraged the Poles to attempt a major export campaign. Most Americans here are convinced that Polish vodka, properly advertised, would be a success in the United States. But last year only about $100,000 worth was exported to the United States. . .” and so on, for another half-column.

Well, that was the news from Eastern Europe that day. After all, Sovietologists and other nud-niks can always read Le Monde (they should).

But the Times also has its political experts planted right in the Soviet capital, within earshot of the Kremlin. “SOVIET'S ATTACKS ON JOHNSON GROW,” it headlined prominently on May 22, over a cable from its diplomatic sharpshooter, Peter Grose. Not a man to miss the obvious, Mr. Grose quoted extensively from official speeches and articles expressing displeasure with recent American actions. These included a Tass statement of May 20 commenting unfavorably on Mr. Johnson. An unnamed diplomat consulted by Mr. Grose thought the Tass communiqué (lengthy extracts of which Mr. Grose had already cabled the day before) “reminiscent of the worst things” Khrushchev had said about Eisenhower in 1960, at the time of the U-2 incident. Mr. Grose duly noted this searching comment, and then went on to quote from “an article in the current issue of the New Times, a weekly journal of foreign affairs.” (It is not, by the way, necessary to be stationed in Moscow to get the New Times, which is freely available in most Western capitals and is generally regarded as a reliable weathervane.) “Diplomats doubt that this recent Soviet attitude reflects any sudden shift in policy,” Mr. Grose reported. “Rather they believe it is a result of Soviet frustration and anger at the dilemma forced upon the Kremlin” by Mr. Johnson's actions. Well, without being a diplomatic correspondent I had gathered something of the sort myself.

On the following day (May 23) there was nothing from Mr. Grose. Instead, readers were left to mull over a brief and inconspicuous UPI dispatch which began: “The Soviet Union said today President Johnson's policies were pushing the world ‘to the brink of world war’ and compared the President to Hitler.” This sounded ominous, but on inspection it turned out that the alarming comparison had not been made by “the Soviet Union,” but merely by the official daily, Izvestia. To the editors and correspondents of the Times, anything that comes out of Moscow invariably represents “the Soviet Union,” whether it is an editorial, a new movie, or Professor Liberman's “discovery” that pants cannot be sold to customers if the size does not fit. Mr. Grose's dispatch of May 20 summarizing the Tass statement opened with the words: “The Soviet Union warned today that armed United States intervention in local crises was threatening to ignite a broader conflict between East and West.” Readers not familiar with the habitual style of Tass communiqués (which come out of the Soviet Foreign Ministry at a fast pace whenever the situation demands it) must have thought things were really beginning to get serious. In actual fact the Russians were simply voicing their displeasure with Mr. Johnson. The comparison with Hitler had been made dozens of times during the Korean war, only then it was Mr. Truman (“the mad haberdasher”) who was accused of setting the globe on fire. If the revival of these polemics signified anything, it suggested that the responsible Soviet officials had reluctantly concluded that Mr. Johnson bore a stronger resemblance to Truman than to Roosevelt. Presumably they had been so advised by their ambassador in Washington, who in turn might have formed this quite accurate impression by consulting his regular sources in the capital. All this is part of the diplomatic drill, as are Tass communiqués and Izvestia editorials. Most serious newspapers employ one or two “diplomatic correspondents” to enlighten their readers on the significance of these goings-on, since after all the public cannot be expected to remember everything that was said and done fifteen years ago. The Times, of course, has its weekend section, of which more later. What it does not have is a staff member who—when reports of this kind come in—is able to set them in perspective.

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This consistent failure to make sense of the raw material pouring from the newsroom tickers lends a certain charm to the paper's handling of the more recondite aspects of inter-Communist polemics. “Moscow Warns Reds Must Unite” (May 28) promised the reader fresh illumination upon this confusing topic. What he actually found beneath the headline was another dispatch from the tireless Grose, this time briefly summarizing a 3,000-word Pravda article. So far as one could gather from the few extracts, and from Mr. Grose's interspersed comments (plus those of “Western analysts” in the Soviet capital whom he had thoughtfully consulted before filing his story), Pravda was trying to tell the Chinese that there ought to be a moratorium on polemics, at least in public. No other “Reds” were mentioned in the story, which was followed up by a brief report from Paris that the leaders of the French and Italian Communist parties had just met secretly in Geneva; an editorial footnote drawing attention to this fact was actually spatch-cocked into Mr. Grose's cable. From this the reader could only infer that the two big West European Communist parties were contemplating some joint move in the Sino-Soviet dispute. In fact, however—as appeared from a very full report in Le Monde on May 28, which also carried the official French CP communiqué on the talks in Geneva—MM. Waldeck Rochet and Luigi Longo had met in Switzerland on May 24-25 to discuss the Common Market and the steps to be taken by their respective parties to coordinate their tactics in Europe. To this Le Monde added the significant information that the French CP had come around to the Italian viewpoint on the subject of European integration, and that the next step was likely to be a conference of the Communist parties of “the Six,” with a view to preparing the entry of Communist deputies (hitherto excluded) into the European parliamentary assembly at Strasbourg. If this dramatic development—perhaps the biggest shift in West European Communist affairs for a decade—had come to the notice of the Times, it was kept secret. Instead, readers were served a brief and inconsequential report from Rome (dated May 27) to the effect that the Italian Communist leader Giorgio Amendola had been denounced for the hundredth time as a “revisionist” by the Albanian party organ Zeri i Popullit. “The article was reported from Tirana by the Italian news agency Ansa,” the Rome dispatch gravely stated, thereby anticipating any possible complaint that the readers of the Times are left in doubt about the provenance of its reports. There is indeed nothing wrong with the news-gathering machine of the paper, except that the people who run it have no sense of relevance and in a good many cases appear not to understand what they are getting on the tape.

This weakness, it might be supposed, is corrected in the Sunday edition, when editors, columnists, and foreign correspondents are encouraged to adopt a more reflective mood. But here a great deal depends on the competence of those concerned.

While Mr. Frankel was stationed in Moscow, there was something to be got out of perusing his background articles. His successors, when not literally quoting “Western observers here” (who always sound remarkably alike), are given to circumlocution. On May 30 the News of the Week in Review section filled almost half a page with Mr. Grose's reflections on the political atmosphere in the Soviet capital. Little emerged save trivialities, leading up to the predictable conclusion: “In the mind of the Soviets, according to diplomatic analysts, were the continued blasts from Chinese propagandists that the Soviet Union is somehow failing to pull its weight in Vietnam.” What else could have been in their minds? Then came this gem: “Messrs. Brezhnev and Kosygin have been visibly stunned [my italics] by statements such as these from Peking propaganda organs” (some press extracts followed). How visibly were they stunned? Did they blanch in public? Did they confide their dismay to Mr. Grose? There are some clichés that foreign correspondents are well advised to stay away from.

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Not that the home office does much better. On June 14 a full-page editorial round-up of domestic and foreign reaction to U.S. policy was remarkable chiefly for persistent waffling and a resolute attachment to triviality. Nine-tenths of the space was devoted to home opinion—a normal allotment. After the Senators and Congressmen, it was the turn of private citizens. “John M. Muse, a druggist in Decatur,” gave it as his opinion that “Johnson is doing some of the things Goldwater wanted to do.” Mrs. Dorothy Hager, a secretary in Atlanta, approved of sending the Marines to Santo Domingo. On the other hand, Lyman T. Johnson, a teacher in a downtown Louisville high school, voiced some doubts about the other Johnson. “We can't convince people that our way is right by using a pistol,” he was quoted as saying. In between, the Times managed to insert the opinions of a few foreigners, including one Charles de Gaulle, reputedly President of France, who appeared to be a stiff-necked character. Elsewhere, too, there were signs of unrest. “Bonn, London, Ottawa and Rome reflect official support for the President, but an undercurrent of private concern.” In this context, “private” apparently means “off the record,” since strictly speaking governmental attitudes are never “private,” even when voiced informally. “Even in Moscow,” a correspondent reported, “some officials are in ‘near despair’ as they look at the future of Soviet-United States relations.” The phrase, “Even in Moscow,” leaves one puzzled. Where else but in Moscow would a correspondent have noticed an atmosphere of “near despair”? But I suppose it does no good to quibble over tiny details.

On the rare occasions when the Times informs its readers of what is being said abroad, its summaries tend to be brief to the point of obscurity. On June 11, the London Times was quoted to the effect that U.S. policy in Vietnam might cause a rift in Mr. Wilson's Cabinet; its own editorial line was summed up in two brief sentences. The Conservative Daily Telegraph fared somewhat worse. The only French papers quoted were the Gaullist La Nation and Combat (a weekly which hardly anyone reads). The only German paper cited on the subject of US troop reinforcements was the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich which “said the decision meant that United States bombing of matériel and personnel centers in North Vietnam had failed, a point also made by The Times of London.” This might be called stenographic reporting. “Information of Copenhagen” (presumably a newspaper) said President Johnson “had apparently developed cold feet.” Lastly, there was Hong Kong. “Communist newspapers in Hong Kong said the United States was turning the Vietnamese conflict into another Korean war. Chinese Nationalist organs, however, praised United States policy.” Wonder of wonders.

Lest I give the impression that this collection of inanities is somewhat unfair to the hard-working editors of what purports to be the world's greatest newspaper, let me add that my own technique on this occasion has been as haphazard as theirs. I have simply grabbed the first fistful of samples out of the bag. There is plenty more. Indeed one could go on for pages.

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III

What has been said so far comes under the general heading of slovenliness and editorial absent-mindedness. While these are not unimportant, it is fair to say that a daily newspaper's general standing hinges upon its processing of the actual news flow, rather than upon the intellectual eminence of its editorial staff. There are some very good newspapers whose writing is far from brilliant (though seldom as dull and sloppy as that of the New York Times). They are good because their readers can at a glance obtain a reasonably full and accurate picture of what is happening in the world. For many years, the most competent performer in this field was the London Daily Telegraph, but it is my impression—speaking as a visitor—that the Washington Post is not far behind and may now even be a little ahead. A journal of this kind does not aim at the political authority of the London Times or the intellectual rigor of Le Monde. Its purpose is rather to provide a reliable service for a large and widely spread political, business, and professional readership. As such it can play an important role. Most of my British acquaintances prefer the Telegraph to the London Times as a news vehicle. The Telegraph's writing is plain, and its editorials reflect a kind of Toryism worlds removed from the complex cerebrations of Printing House Square. (To become a leader-writer on the London Times one needs more than political acumen and a decent social background. Even a classical education and an Oxford “first” are not enough. There is a special flavor to its writing ultimately traceable to the distilled essence of 300 years of High Church Anglicanism). But Conservative and middlebrow (by British standards) though it is, the Telegraph has its virtues: having perused its news columns one has a fair grasp of the day's events and can then turn to one's favorite journal of opinion—say the Liberal Guardian, whose style is better but whose news coverage tends to be a trifle spotty.

Where does the New York Times stand in this competition? My impulse is to say “near the bottom,” but one must be fair. There are occasions when the paper's technique comes in handy, as for example in reproducing the full text of an official speech or document. In nine cases out of ten the contents are boring, but there is always the odd exception, and in any event it is useful to have a record of what has actually been said by public officials even on routine occasions. This service, then, the paper performs—at least domestically (foreign statesmen, however eminent, seldom rate a textual reproduction of their remarks). The Times is also unique among American newspapers in covering United Nations debates, and since the UN happens to be in New York, this gives its delegates and personnel an obvious incentive for reading the paper. Having acknowledged this, one is bound to add that in most other respects the paper's foreign coverage is shockingly bad. Indeed, much of it is so bad that one cannot think of any European daily of comparable standing whose readers would put up with the kind of service New Yorkers are getting (and appear to be quite happy with).

To grasp just how bad the Times's foreign reporting is, one has to compare it daily with the performance of its rivals, and few people have the time. Moreover, it is not just a matter of matching it against a single specimen from abroad (perhaps its London namesake). One has to sit down to the job of analyzing its news columns over a fairly extended period—say a month—in the light of: (a) the parallel reporting in half a dozen foreign dailies in at least three languages; and (b) the actual course of events, so far as it can be reconstructed and understood by an independent observer, not only through what he reads, but also through what he happens to know from his own expertise, plus that of colleagues in the political and journalistic fields. When one has done this for a period, one notices flaws not obvious to the general reader. If (like the present writer) one has been a foreign correspondent oneself, one recalls that even in those dim days one came across plenty of instances where the New York Times had not, to put it mildly, won professional acclaim for its handling of the news. The fact is that the paper's own image of itself—as reflected in the public and private utterances of its executives—is at odds with its standing within the profession. Most practicing correspondents with international experience think it not only dull but incompetent. As for the army of academic experts on international affairs, now scattered in universities and research institutes all over the globe, one must have listened to their frantic abuse of the Times's seemingly incurable sloppiness and mediocrity to get a fair notion of its true “image” in the political world. On ceremonial occasions this is never mentioned, which is why the paper's executives seem quite unaware of its real standing.

As an example of how this reputation has been earned, let us take a look at how the paper, as compared with others abroad, handled Franco-German affairs last June—a critical time for both countries and for the Common Market. In that month France additionally went through a domestic upheaval which offered the Times a wonderful opportunity to display its acumen, for the first half of June witnessed M. Gaston Defferre's takeover bid for the leadership of the French Socialist party.

For a start, the June 4 issue of the Times carried a Paris dispatch from Mr. Henry Giniger reporting the opening of the Socialist party congress at Clichy and giving an extremely brief and garbled account of M. Defferre's speech and the reactions. From this one gathered that the Mayor of Marseilles had “pleaded with his party . . . to join other left and center forces in a federation as the only way back to power.” What Defferre and his friends had actually proposed was an eventual fusion with the left wing of the Catholic movement, and this was what the whole debate (which had been going on for months) was about. No one could have gathered this from Mr. Giniger's story, which dealt with everything except the central issue (The headline ran: “DEFFERRE URGES UNION OF PARTIE”—a wholly misleading formula). Two days later a second dispatch from Mr. Giniger (dated June 5, by which time the Socialist congress had been in session for three days and the entire French press had carried lengthy reports of the proceedings) still said almost nothing about the real issue, and in the bargain provided a gratuitous piece of misinformation: M. Defferre was losing his battle against M. Guy Mollet. According to Mr. Giniger: “Gaston Defferre, Socialist candidate for the French Presidency, fought today to stave off apparent defeat for his effort to unite France's left and center parties in a federation against the Gaullist regime.” What Defferre had really urged was a Socialist-Catholic alliance directed impartially against the Gaullists and the Communists, and this proposal was adopted by the congress a few hours after Mr. Giniger had filed his second report (the headline that day, June 6, ran: “SOCIALISTS COOL TO DEFFERRE PLAN”). The opposition in fact collapsed on the first ballot, after Defferre had made it plain that in case of defeat he would withdraw his candidacy for the Presidency. This outcome was accurately predicted a week in advance by most commentators, including the left-wingers on the weekly Nouvel Observateur and the heavyweight pundits on Le Monde. It had also been anticipated by the Communists, who for weeks had been directing their fire against Defferre. Its importance—apart from the prospective burying of the church-school issue, which has long been central to French politics—had to do with NATO, since the Communists' principal grievance against Defferre was his unduly pro-American orientation.

None of this appeared in Mr. Giniger's reports or in the subsequent editorial on the matter. In fact the Times more or less dropped the subject. On June 12 it carried two messages from the sapient Giniger. One (which was featured on the front page) dealt with the theft of some examination papers (“New Exam Scandal Disclosed In France”). The other, a background report on the French political setup (“PROBLEMS BESET CHALLENGERS OF DE GAULLE”), for the first time mentioned what the whole upheaval of the past week had been about: the future relationship between Socialists and Roman Catholics. But this vital piece of information was tucked away inside a five-column spread dealing, in elementary language, with French political history since the war. Thereafter silence until June 19, when the Times featured a report from yet another Paris correspondent, Mr. Henry Kamm, reporting the collapse of “unity” talks between Defferre and his prospective allies. From this one learned that “seventeen political leaders” had gathered in Paris to consider the formation of an anti-Gaullist alliance, but not who they were or whom they represented. In consequence it remained unclear why the talks had failed, or who had been involved in them, though an expert might have guessed that the crunch had come over the clerical issue, and that some of Defferre's prospective allies among the smaller anti-clerical parties had put a spoke in the wheel. But guessing games of this kind are not, strictly speaking, what reporting in a daily paper is meant to provide a basis for.

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From Defferre to de Gaulle. Ever since he blocked British membership in the Common Market, the General has been in bad odor around the Times editorial office, not to mention NATO and the U.S. Embassy in Paris. Of the numerous correspondents whom the Times maintains in and around Paris, only Mr. C. L. Sulzberger occasionally has a kind word for him. The others are reserved or—in the case of Mr. Drew Middleton—actively hostile. Mr. Middleton used to be based in London and has always tended to be an admirer of all things British. De Gaulle's exclusion of his favorite country from the Common Market hit him hard, and he has not been the same man since it happened. During the month of June he produced a steady stream of disparagement, ranging from a private poll of local opinion in the Lille area to gloomy animadversions upon the effect of French policies on NATO. The Lille report, which appeared on June 5 under a prominent headline (“NO PRIZES FOR LOCAL BOY—BUSTLING LILLE FINDS LITTLE GOOD TO SAY ABOUT DE GAULLE”), recorded Mr. Middleton's personal impressions of the area. Lille is de Gaulle's birthplace. It also happens to have a Socialist town council, a fact not mentioned in the report, which dwelt rather upon the views of the local business community. “When an American remarked at a dinner party that President de Gaulle was a ‘Lilleois,’ the hostess sniffed and pointed out that the General had been born here only because his father had been teaching here at the time.” No prizes are offered for guessing the identity of the American. Not content with sampling the opinion of hostesses and other local bigwigs, the conscientious Middleton also made the rounds of the lower-class estaminets. “In one of the cafés near the 17th-century bourse, or stock exchange, a fellow drinking cognac chased with beer said he could not care less where President de Gaulle had been born. ‘I am against him and all his politics, he announced.’” From other informants Mr. Middleton and the New York Times reader gathered that Lille, being an industrial center, is all for European integration. “As inhabitants of a frontier city, the people of Lille are inclined to be unimpressed by their President's talk of national sovereignty and independence. Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany are so near, and economic relations so intimate, that nationalism becomes a bit blurred.” Eastern France must have changed a lot since the days when it was the major stronghold of traditional nationalism, and French industrialists must have changed even more since the time (less than a decade ago) when they were the chief supporters of protectionism and the foremost critics of the Common Market. But if they have taken economic union to their hearts, then surely they must remember that it was de Gaulle's government which in 1958 lowered the tariff barrier? Or are they against him on both counts—because he is a nationalist and because he led France into the Common Market? It is all very bewildering—or would be if one were able to attach the least importance to Mr. Middleton's reporting.

Not that he is a mere reporter. From time to time he poaches on the preserve of his colleague Mr. Sulzberger and comes forward in the role of pundit. On June 11 (the day after de Gaulle had “off the record” told some French parliamentarians what he thought of the Americans and their “dirty affair” in Vietnam), Mr. Middleton sent an extremely lengthy dispatch which appeared the following day under the double-column headline: “NATO'S CRITICAL HOUR.” The bulk was devoted to a pessimistic forecast of the imminent Erhard-de Gaulle encounter in Bonn, and the possible consequences if the two men should fail to agree. To Mr. Middleton it seemed certain that they would clash. “Nowhere in Europe, diplomats say, is the attitude toward the French more chilly than in Bonn.” “Diplomats contend that these results [of Gaullist policy], coupled with France's flirtation with the Soviet Union, have strengthened Moscow's position in the struggle for the control of Germany.” “The French, these diplomats concede, may have reasons for their policies, as they are outlined in the General's utterances on world affairs. But qualified Allied sources strongly doubt that the intelligence reports on which French decisions are based are as complete, penetrating, and independent of the Executive branch's view as those of several other Western governments” [such as the United States?]. “French foreign policy begins—and perhaps ends—in Bonn.” “In theory, French policies toward Germany are based on the Treaty of Cooperation of January 1963. But it is argued that President de Gaulle's execution of this policy aims solely at inducing West Germany to follow French objectives, rather than at genuine cooperation.” And so on, for two whole columns. By the time one had finished Mr. Middleton's essay there could be no doubt as to whom he had been talking to and what he was trying to accomplish. And this kind of stuff passes for responsible “independent” journalism!

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Now turn to the French, German, and British newspaper comments on the Erhard-de Gaulle meeting of June 11-12. The Germans indeed had grounds for worry, since they knew in advance that no agreement was possible on de Gaulle's pet theme: greater independence from the U.S. They therefore decided to make the best of it and to concentrate on practical details. Die Welt of Hamburg (conservative, pro-British, and generally cool to France) on June 12 headlined over three columns: “CLOSER COLLABORATION WITH FRANCE IN THE MILITARY DOMAIN.” The Subject of this piece was an agreement on the opening day of the talks for the military staffs of the two countries to work more closely together, notably in electronics. The paper's editorial opened with the words, “The sky in Bonn is grey, but it does not rain,” and its general tone was cordial, with the stress on the need for the two countries to cooperate wherever possible. The influential Frankfurter Allgemeine (June 12) headlined “DE GAULLE AND ERHARD TRYING FOR A BETTER CLIMATE” and emphasized the friendly atmosphere of the opening talks. The Bonn correspondent of the London Times thought the General's welcome rather tepid, but noted that the two sides had agreed “on extended Franco-German collaboration on conventional arms. . . and on the joint fitting out of small units of the French and German navies with data-processing equipment [which] will not make it any easier for Britain to develop her own research and development projects with the Germans.” Progress was also made in educational matters such as language teaching and student exchanges. A Berlin message of June 11 to the London Times reported a formal statement by the Social Democratic party (of which Mayor Brandt is chairman) urging closer union with France. “The principle of close cooperation with France was strongly emphasized by the Social Democratic leadership, including the ‘shadow cabinet,’ in a statement issued today. Franco-German reconciliation and friendship were indispensable for German politics, it said. . . . All possibilities for collaboration with France should be made use of. . . Germany should not be faced one day by a situation in which she would have to choose between France and the United States.”

That same day (June 12) the New York Times merely carried a brief dispatch from its Bonn correspondent, Mr. Philip Shabecoff, on an inside page, reporting the understanding on technical cooperation and an agreement to postpone the June 30 deadline on the financing of Common Market farm policies. But on the following day (June 13) the Times had what its editors plainly regarded as a real story: “DE GAULLE REBUFFS ERHARD ON EUROPEAN UNITY PARLEY,” it trumpeted over two top front-page columns, “TWO-DAY VISIT TO BONN ENDS IN DISCORD—GERMANS REPORT AN AGREEMENT, BUT FRENCH AGAIN ATTACH CONDITIONS.” When one turned to the British, French, and German papers on this and the following days, one discovered that no one outside the New York Times office had noticed these calamities. What had happened was that the Press Officers of the two delegations were at odds over the precise meaning of an agreement to call a conference of “the Six” (the Common Market partners). According to the Germans, the French promise was unconditional. According to the French, it hinged on a prior understanding about certain aspects of Common Market agricultural policy. That was all—hardly worth a banner headline. In fact, no one in Bonn or Paris took this traditional bit of diplomatic maneuvering seriously. Both the French and the Germans declared themselves satisfied with the talks. The London Sunday Telegraph on June 13 ran a lengthy report from its Diplomatic Correspondent, who had covered the Bonn talks. It appeared under a three-column front-page headline, “DE GAULLE AGREES TO SUMMIT OF THE ‘SIX’—ONCESSIONS TO BONN,” and opened with the words: “President de Gaulle left Bonn today after a major and apparently successful ‘fence-mending operation’ to repair damaged relations with his West German ally.” The correspondent of the London Sunday Times1 thought the two governments were as far apart as ever on NATO and European integration, but noted the agreement to call a “summit” meeting of the Six. Most French and German papers stressed the agreement and played down the bargaining. The New York Times, however, for another day stuck to its line, “ARIS-BONN SPLIT IS EXPECTED TO SHOW AT PARLEY,” it headlined a June 13 dispatch from another man in Bonn, Arthur J. Olsen. “France and West Germany,” Mr. Olsen cabled, “are expected to show again in Brussels tomorrow that they remain at odds on how to advance the unity of Europe.” Then, unaccountably, the subject was dropped. From one day to the next, readers of the Times were told nothing more about it. The French and the Germans had failed to play their allotted roles and were punished by being ignored. The subject only re-emerged into prominence three weeks later when there was a real clash at Brussels over European farm policy: not between the French and the Germans, but between the French and the Dutch, whom the Times had never mentioned.

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I have gone into some detail over this foolish performance: not because it is unusual, but rather because it is typical of the way foreign news is handled by the Times. First, the commitment to an editorial (or ambassadorial) line: the French and the Germans are going to quarrel. Next, for a day or two, a determined effort to write the “news” in the spirit of this assumption. Then, when the facts won't fit the formula, dead silence. Anyone who studies the paper over a period of time must, I think, reach the conclusion that this modus operandi has become second nature. I am sure it is neither conscious nor premeditated. It is rather a consequence of the urge to sound grave and authoritative, plus a determination never to admit a mistake. The London Times in the old days used to employ the same technique, but in its case the Olympian manner had some substance behind it. Besides, the Establishment positively demanded that kind of tone. It was part of the elaborate ceremonial rigmarole of British society: an entire ruling class symbolically enlarged and presented to itself via a rigidly formal, stylized, hieratic manner of discourse. To this day the London Times is as much part of the Establishment as is the House of Lords or the Church of England. It employs a linguistic code which connects it with these institutions, and through them with the governing stratum as a whole: itself an amalgam of the ancient aristocracy, the business plutocracy, and the upper ranks of the civil service. Even its follies (e.g., the “appeasement” of Germany in the 1930's) have to be judged in institutional terms. They disclose the inner life of the governing set—the temporary link between All Souls (or some other Oxford college) and the Foreign Office hierarchy of the period. The New York Times is not in this sense an Establishment paper and cannot be. It serves a middle-class public and its tone is determinedly middlebrow. The note of gravity, the implied claim to authority, is based on a single implied characteristic: professional competence, mastery of the factual material, possession of all the worthwhile material “fit to print.” And it is just this claim which no experienced reader of the paper can grant to it.

Not even where it should be comparatively easy: in the reporting of economic and financial matters. The Times, after all, is primarily a businessman's paper, though it has pretensions to being a lot else besides. One would expect it to be genuinely knowledgeable about economics. It does in fact carry a lot of news about such matters, though mostly of a local kind. When it comes to the international scene, the reporting once more is skimpy, and what there is does not always inspire confidence. The paper does best when official speeches have to be summarized. Beyond that level, its correspondents tend to get lost. In recent months a simple test has been provided by Britain's persistent economic troubles. The Times failed it. In all the weeks since the sterling crisis exploded last October, the Times has not offered its readers anything beyond platitudes. This must have been at least partly the fault of its London correspondents, one of whom, Mr. Anthony Lewis, used to cover the Supreme Court until he was suddenly sent to London and told to report on British affairs. I regret having to state that reading Mr. Lewis is an experience even more painful than watching his various predecessors at work. Mr. Middleton, in the years when he was London correspondent, never departed an inch from the dead center of conventionality, but at least he had the advantage of knowing and liking the country. Mr. Lewis is clearly bewildered by the British, and his reporting gives the impression of an able man trying to do a job for which he has no training and which does not particularly appeal to him. As it happens, Britain just now is grappling with a deep-seated economic malfunction, and economics is not Mr. Lewis's forte. Nor does he get much help from his colleague, Clyde H. Farnsworth, who is supposed to cover this part of the field.

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Mr. Farnsworth's dispatches (which appear in the business section of the paper) are long, dull, and cliché-ridden; they are also uninformative. By this I mean that they contain few facts that are worth knowing, and many trivial details that could be left untouched. Moreover, he has a habit of being wrong both in his forecasts and in his interpretations. On June 13, for example, the business section of the Times featured a lengthy report by him under the prominently displayed headline: “BRITISH ECONOMY TERMED IMPROVED.” This told the reader that “although none of Britain's basic economic problems have been solved by the eight-month-old Labor Government” (that would have been asking a bit much anyway), “the pound sterling will probably continue to be worth $2.80 for some time.” “Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan are confident the nation has turned the economic corner.” And so on for an entire column of background reporting, which also stressed the generous aid already provided to Britain by the international financial community. The chief cloud on the horizon appeared to be the possibility that the Labor Government might feel encouraged “in a fresh bid for popularity” to spend too much on social welfare or on cheap loans to home buyers. In the long run there was a danger (always according to Mr. Farnsworth and his unnamed informants, who sounded remarkably like City bankers) that too much protective tariff coddling might remove the sap from the nation's muscles. “Critics say some of the new austerity measures tend to make industry flabby. The tariff surcharge, formerly 15 per cent and now 10 per cent, is a case in point, critics say. Britain, already a high-tariff nation, needed to lower, not raise, her duties to bring in the fresh wind of competition, they argue. . . .The Government will be bitterly attacked by the international trading community if the surcharge is not wiped out by the end of the year.” That was on June 13. On June 16 Mr. Farnsworth and the Times had a different story (naturally presented without the least apology for having been totally wrong three days earlier). “BRITAIN'S DEFICIT IN TRADE DEEPENS,” ran the headline that day, “EXPORTS DROP WHILE IMPORTS SHOW SHARP INCREASE—STOCKS REGISTER A DIP.” Below this warning, Mr. Farnsworth, in a cable dated June 15, complacently proceeded to eat his words of the week before. “Britain's trading position worsened last month with exports declining and imports rising to the highest level since records were kept,” he told his readers. “Special factors, the Government was quick to point out, accounted for the import rise. May was the first full month to feel the effects of the cut in the import surcharge from 15 to 10 per cent. The surcharge had been imposed last October as an emergency measure to keep imports from rising. Foreign traders delayed exports to Britain until after the first reduction in the charge on April 27.” So the wicked import surcharge did have some sense to it after all, and its premature reduction in April (largely due to the pressure of the City and the “international trading community”) was at least partly responsible for the disastrous worsening of the trade gap.

In the rest of his June 15 cable, Mr. Farnsworth imperturbably backpedaled from his optimism of the previous week. “The failure of exports to maintain the advance of the first quarter was the most dismaying feature of the trade figures, experts said” (did he need an expert to tell him that?), “especially after exhortations and incentives from the Government.” This concluding remark was strictly nonsensical, a mechanical tribute to the tribal taboos of the business community, which invariably blames the Government for its own incapacity. The fact is—and if Mr. Farnsworth doesn't know it, one wonders what he has been doing in England all this time—that British industry is not sufficiently competitive, for reasons that official “exhortations and incentives” cannot cure. “The trade figures” (he went on) “came as something of an embarrassment to high Government officials who recently have been saying that Britain had turned the economic corner” (and who had been duly echoed by Mr. Farnsworth). “But no new emergency measures are expected to be taken, unless the trading position continues to worsen later in the year.” Readers who still remembered his earlier dispatch must by now have been thoroughly confused.

As it happens, there was no need to go out on that particular limb. The British Board of Trade issues its figures in the middle of each month. A statement was due on June 15, and while no one could foresee that it was going to be as bad as it turned out, it would have been wise to wait before rushing into print with an optimistic report three days earlier. It is true that the story the Times printed on June 13 contained mostly “background material.” It is also true that its forecasts were quite wrong, and its interpretation remarkably silly and platitudinous.

So much for the paper's international expertise. A particularly bad week? No, just an average one, which I happen to have picked.

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IV

Lastly there is the matter of ordinary relevance or topicality. By this I mean the choice which the editors make among the mass of material that reaches them: the stories they select as particularly newsworthy, the prominence given to reports on the front page or elsewhere. After all, a good many readers probably content themselves with a glance at the headlines. Even those who take the trouble to read foreign correspondents' dispatches normally pick out the ones that are featured, unless the reader happens to be a specialist in one particular subject (we have seen what he is likely to find if he gets more deeply into it). For practical purposes, a daily newspaper like the Times may be said to be performing its prime task if its readers can at a glance discover what is going on in the world around the United States. Can they?

On the face of it, the answer seems to be in the affirmative. Isn't the Times the only paper which literally prints everything ? But the matter is not as simple as it seems, for it involves some judgment of what is, or is not, important. It may be that Mr. Robert Wagner's decision not to run again for the mayoralty of New York was for some people genuinely the most important event to have taken place in the month of June (the announcement of this decision blocked the entire front-page of the Times on June 11 and a fair number of inside pages as well). The Times, after all, is a local, not a national, paper. The United States indeed has no national daily (unless it be the Wall Street Journal). One knows the explanation: the country is too big and decentralized, etc. A critic who normally makes his home in London, where all the dailies are “national,” must take this into account. He must also remember that he is dealing with facts and values. One can point at a piece of sky and say, “This is blue,” in the expectation that other people will agree, but one cannot be equally certain where the relevance of a newspaper report is concerned. Personal and national blinkers come in. All the same, when a newspaper aims at world status, it enters a particular kind of competition, in which size and weight are not the most important criteria. How does the Times shape up compared with other leading journals so far as the relevance of its international news coverage goes?

Suppose we take three successive days—June 17, 18, and 19—and then see what kind of emphasis was given to the day's events by the Times and by other dailies in the competition—such as the London Times and Telegraph, and the Paris Figaro and Le Monde. On the first day, June 17, more than five out of eight news columns on the front page of the New York Times were given over to domestic affairs, ranging in importance from the proposal to establish a Cabinet-level department of housing and urban affairs to the slaying of a taxi driver in Brownsville. The remaining space was taken up by cables from Saigon and Santo Domingo, plus a Washington report on the sending of additional troop reinforcements to Vietnam. It may thus be fairly said that the nation's affairs were adequately covered, with the corollary that foreign countries appeared only in the role of being occupied by American troops. This last, of course, runs counter to the paper's editorial line, so that the prominence allotted to Vietnamese and Dominican affairs might be read as an implied criticism of the administration's involvement in those parts. Though I am willing to place this construction upon the matter, it seems to me more likely that the responsible news editors quite simply thought the rest of the world less important.

News from various Asian and European countries appeared on the inside pages, some prominence being given to a minor shooting affray in Kashmir, along the unsettled border between India and Pakistan. Further along, on page 8, one learned from the redoubtable Clyde H. Farnsworth, now doubling as legal correspondent, that the law authorities in Britain had made a change in an ancient provision permitting judges to impose discretionary terms of imprisonment for contempt of court. A British decision to allow international inspection of nuclear plants, and a West German parliamentary debate on proposed emergency legislation “for a time of war or national crisis” were recorded on pages 9 and 10, while on page 11 General de Gaulle was reported from Versailles to have told the citizens of a town-ship in the region that France needed political stability to fulfill its destiny. This destiny (one learned by perusing the report) was “to act as a counterweight to the two leading world powers, the United States and the Soviet Union.” Further down in the same report (altogether occupying two-thirds of a column) one discovered that the French Foreign Minister had addressed Parliament on the ticklish subject of Franco-American relations. His speech, which was summed up in two brief paragraphs, appeared to have culminated in a profession of friendship. “It is simply ridiculous,” he was quoted as saying, “to think that her [France's] objective is only to be unexplicably [sic] unfriendly to a great friendly nation.” France had taken a position on Vietnam “only because the conflict may endanger world peace,” while as for Santo Domingo, “France found herself unable to condone military intervention.” End of paragraph and of story.

The rest of the world's news that day was more or less routine: a brief account of the latest UN debate on the situation in Santo Domingo; a cable from Jerusalem on Mr. Ben Gurion's political prospects; a message from Johannesburg on a squabble between the Dutch and South African governments over a fund to aid political prisoners; anti-Semitic vandalism in the South German town of Bamberg; and a somewhat surprising film note from Moscow about a movie which for once did not blame the Jews for all the crime in the Soviet Union (“SOVIET FILM DEPICTS THE SECRET POLICE AS HUMANE—JEWS' INVOLVEMENT BYPASSED IN MOVIE BASED UPON ECONOMIC-CRIME CASES”). And that was the international news for June 17. The remainder of the front section, all 34 pages of it, including the bulk of the editorial page, was devoted to home affairs, ranging from Senator Goldwater's views on Vietnam to the troubles of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the usual flurry of local news, theater news, and a few marriage announcements.

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Turn now for comparison to newspapers abroad. The London Daily Telegraph of June 17 quite properly and understandably led off with Mr. McNamara's announcement about troop shipments to Vietnam. This was the frontpage “lead story”; it was followed up by British political and economic news, including the inevitable official statement that despite the poor trade figures in May, “a basically healthier position in our balance of payments is being established.” When one turned to the other main news page, (which in the Telegraph appears at the back), one discovered that the French President's speech of the day before had not left the British unmoved, “DE GAULLE CONDEMNS U.S. INTERVENTION—EUROPEAN UNITY CALL,” the headline ran in large type along two columns, and underneath one found the story which the Times had buried in its inside pages: notably the passage where the General had compared the means whereby the USA and the USSR were extending their influence. “One and the other seek to spread their hegemony well beyond their frontiers,” in the one case by imposing a totalitarian regime upon satellites, in the other “by other means, assuredly less deplorable and painful, which consist in offering protection to others, offering them aid, and intervening if necessary with military force, as we see presently in Vietnam, Laos, and the Dominican Republic.” Did the Times editors hide this report inconspicuously away because they felt that de Gaulle was going a bit too far?

The French, needless to say, do not suffer from such inhibitions. For Le Monde (otherwise mildly critical of the President's home and foreign policy) the speech was front-page news. Le Monde also featured two other items which the Times did not think newsworthy: a French move in Brussels to fix 1970 (instead of 1967) as the date for the joint administration of the Common Market's customs revenues, and an extensive forecast of what the French Finance Minister's views would be during his forthcoming visit to London, where he was to meet his British colleague, Mr. James Callaghan, and to unveil the French plan for reforming the world monetary system. There was no mention of this topic in the New York Times on that day, nor for that matter on the following day (June 18) when the London Times ran a two-column center-page spread on Britain's financial difficulties and Mr. Callaghan's projected visit to Washington and Ottawa (June 26-9). That visit, it appeared, had political as well as financial implications. As the Washington correspondent of the (London) Times put it, under a prominently displayed headline on the main June 18 news page (“u.s. Concern Over British Role East Of Suez”), Mr. Callaghan was likely to get a sympathetic hearing in Washington, on condition that he did not propose to ease his country's monetary difficulties by reducing British defense commitments in Southeast Asia. “Apart from America's efforts to balance its own external payments, which have not been altogether successful, there are influential officials who would strongly object to any British attempt to achieve national solvency by reducing defense costs. They have especially in mind the British commitment east of Suez. It was forcefully said today that Britain has a moral responsibility to carry this particular white man's burden. The United States would not assume responsibilities east of Suez, should they be abandoned by Britain.”

All this, one supposes, might have been of interest also to readers of the New York Times, had they been told about it—which they were not. By June 19 the paper had caught up at least to the extent of mentioning the Anglo-French financial talks in London. It ran a brief cable in its business section summarizing Mr. Callaghan's own statement on the monetary position and adding some speculation about what the British Chancellor might ask the U.S. Treasury to do in order to ease the shortage of dollars resulting from recent U.S. actions. The French were said to have “emphasized a new flexibility in the . . . approach toward reforming the international monetary structure,” but no hint was given as to what they were being flexible about. And that was all. Not a word about the threatened scaling-down of British defense commitments, and nothing about the reported American refusal to carry more of the white man's burden “east of Suez”—meaning in Southeast Asia (Singapore and the Indian Ocean, to be specific).

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Back to the Continent. Le Monde on June 18 still thought the French President's four-day tour of the Paris region headline news: a pardonable touch of national egoism. It prominently reported him as having told the citizens of Meaux (Seine-et-Marne) the day before that “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals can become the capital element of civilization and progress.” The Paris Figaro also thought this newsworthy, though in an editorial that day (the 25th anniversary of de Gaulle's historic appeal for resistance against the Germans in 1940) it dissociated itself from the President's political line, while praising his past achievements. The New York Times ignored the anniversary (a big day in France) and ran a brief, garbled report of the President's provincial tour at the bottom of page 7, under an inconspicuous heading (“DE GAULLE MOVING NEARER CANDIDACY”). From this one learned that “he ended a review of his estimate of the state of France and the world by recalling the 25 years that, he said, he has [sic] represented the destiny of France.” Aside from constituting an assault on syntax—hardly a proper tribute to the General's faultless style—this piece of balderdash managed to conceal from readers what de Gaulle had really said. Neither were they told that his criticism of the U.S. had been developed at much greater length the day before by his Foreign Minister in the French Assembly. For contrary to the impression left on readers by a two-paragraph resumé printed by the Times on June 17, M. Couve de Murville had expressed himself at great length and with considerable forthrightness. He had, for example, expatiated in detail upon the theme of a new European equilibrium “from the Atlantic to the Urals.” He had also had this to say:

In Vietnam what is at stake is the fate of a people to whom we are deeply attached. What is probably at stake too, for a long time to come, is the future relationship between the white and colored peoples, at any rate in Asia. The peace of the world may also be concerned, for whatever may be said, America and China are at grips there.

The remainder of the speech dealt with European integration, the future of the Common Market, and the need for an “independent Europe.” It was probably the most important declaration made by a French Foreign Minister in years, and the most complete exposition yet given of Gaullist policies in Europe and Asia. The account of the statement and the subsequent debate filled two entire pages in Le Monde. The New York Times report on June 17 (from Mr. Henry Kamm) summarized it in two wholly misleading sentences, which for good measure were buried in an inside page.

An oversight? Then why was it not made good the next day, June 18? On that day the Times carried exactly one item of foreign news on its front page: an account of Mr. Harold Wilson's effort to set up a “peace mission” on Vietnam. For the rest one had the usual diet: Saigon, Santo Domingo, and home affairs. The inside pages carried reports from Moscow (“KHRUSHCHEV AIDE LOSES FARM POST”), Havana (“CASTRO IS CRYPTIC ABOUT GUEVARA'S WHEREABOUTS”), New Delhi (“U.S. URGES INDIA PULL BACK FORCE”) and Bonn (“'53 GERMAN RISING MARKED IN WEST”) but not a whisper from Paris, only the silly cable from de Gaulle's provincial tour already mentioned. Adequate reporting?

On June 19, though, Paris was back in the news: Vice-President Humphrey had arrived there on a goodwill mission, and that rated the front page of the Times. (No other foreign news did, save for a brief item on the apparent collapse of M. Defferre's efforts). Mr. Humphrey, it appeared, was going to call on the General and try to remove his anti-American prejudices. This provided a theme for yet another Times correspondent in Paris, Mr. Henry Tanner. Improving on Mr. Kamm's efforts of two days earlier, he reverted briefly to Couve de Murville's speech of the 16th, of which he gave the following one-sentence résumé: “On Thursday, Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville, surveying French foreign policy before the National Assembly, declared that this policy ‘was not inspired by any desire to oppose the United States of America, our friends and protectors.’” My eyesight may have failed me, but I did not discover this phrase in any of the accounts given in the French press. In any case a platitude of this kind (assuming that it had been uttered) told one nothing about the real import of Couve de Murville's hour-long speech—a veritable declaration of independence, plus an impassioned appeal to the other European nations to follow France's lead. This kind of reporting might be tolerable on the Liverpool Daily Echo (though from my reading of the British provincial press I do not believe it would in fact be tolerated). It seems hardly good enough for the New York Times. Besides, Franco-American relations were just then in the center of the picture: everyone was commenting on how bad they appeared to be. To have ignored or garbled the most important French policy statement in many months, at this particular moment, constitutes something of a negative achievement.

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I can hear the rejoinder: do British and French papers invariably report important American utterances? Probably not as fully as they should, but they rarely ignore or misunderstand the gist of a Presidential statement. Besides, the New York Times does not suffer from their space limitations. It is indeed quite willing to print the full text of even the silliest speech made by some local bigwig at home. What it persistently fails to do is to acquaint its readers with the real drift of affairs abroad, notably when that drift—and this is where a kind of censorship appears to come in—runs counter to the editorial frame of reference. Thus during all the months when the British were plainly failing to secure entry into the Common Market, the paper's readers obtained no adequate picture of the balance of forces in Western Europe. Thus, too, the strength of Gaullism was persistently underrated, and the General himself consigned to perdition (with no visible effect on his standing at home) once he had turned out to be an obstacle to “Atlanticism.” Soviet affairs have for years been reported in such a manner as to leave the reader with the impression that the USA and the USSR are pretty much alike, except that the Russians suffer from a shortage of consumer goods. The coverage of Latin America invariably stresses the bright side—economic growth, where it can be discovered—and leaves the paper's readers bewildered at the spectacle of revolutionary nationalism in its various forms (not all of them Communist or Castroite).

Over-all, there is an almost total neglect of the intellectual sphere, notably as it relates to the collective outlook of the rising generation. Students appear in the role of demonstrators or troublemakers: they are rarely considered as carriers of new ideas and attitudes. Yet any competent observer of the European or Latin American scene knows that the ferment among the young (especially at the universities) is more significant than a good deal of the standard official phrase-making. As Mr. Theodore Draper has remarked (with reference to Latin America), both conservatives and radicals tend to come from the same social milieu, and the current wave of radicalism in certain areas is largely a revolt of the educated younger generation against its own parents. But the kind of reporting-in-depth for which Mr. Draper has won recognition is just the sort of writing that is almost never to be found in what purports to be the country's leading newspaper.

One could go on, but one day is pretty much like the next, so far as the handling of foreign news by the Times is concerned. The over-all impression—a compound of ignorance, provincialism, and plain incompetence—remains the same year after year. Others may have a different picture. I shall be told that the Times has virtues unsuspected by foreigners. That is doubtless true; it must be true, seeing that the paper takes itself so seriously. I merely register a dissent from the seemingly widespread notion that it is an inexhaustible source of relevant information about what passes abroad. Inexhaustible it may be, but the relevance of its coverage leaves something to be desired.

1 No relation to the daily London Times.

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