Good Behavior

Often condemned for their faults, seldom praised for their virtues, U. S. newspapers last week exhibited as shining an example of virtue as any for which they will ever go unrewarded. Almost to a paper they refused to make capital of the most sensational of criminal cases.

The trial was that of a Negro butler-chauffeur accused of raping his young socialite employer, Eleanor Strubing, pretty wife of an advertising executive in Greenwich, Conn., suburb of New York City. According to her testimony she found him in her bedroom one evening when she emerged from a shower bath wearing only a towel, was raped thrice in various parts of the house, bound, gagged, threatened with a knife, taken for two automobile rides, finally thrown into an icy reservoir near which she was found hysterical. The Negro's defense was that she had invited his advances. A jury of six men and six women (one a native of Virginia) after over twelve hours debate acquitted him.

By its facts alone it was a criminal case designed to echo throughout the U. S. press, to excite passions, race prejudice, prurient interest. But the paper that printed most about the trial--but without getting lurid--was the Greenwich (Conn.) Time (circulation: 3,265), the Strubings' local paper. Of New York papers only the Daily News and PM gave it conventional tabloid prominence. All other New York papers including the tabloid Mirror and Hearst's Journal & American played it down with brief reports slurring the details. One, the World-Telegram, in most of its reports even avoided mentioning Mrs. Strubing's name.

Less sensational cases have been taken up by papers from coast to coast. Although press services carried brief accounts (except to the South), many newspapers printed nothing. And only one Southern paper asked for the story.

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