For a Price

The emigre editor of one of Europe's great newspapers last week told what happens when a democracy's press is corrupted by its politicians. The country was France. The editor was Pierre Lazareff of Paris-Soir. His Deadline (Random House; $3) was a telling documentation of the thesis that "France was undermined and betrayed from within" because "the French people were systematically misled by a venal and treasonous press."

The low morale and the confusion with which France entered World War II, Lazareff traced to false reporting, kept publishers, and the press service stranglehold of Agence Havas. Subsidized by every government in power, Havas crushed competition between newspapers, killed legitimate news stories, forced editors to print tainted propaganda as news. "Of all the poisons which have exerted their influence on French public opinion, the Agence Havas was surely the most virulent," Lazareff claimed. As one of Europe's best-informed editors, Lazareff spoke with authority.

Editor of Paris-Soir at 33, tiny (5 ft. 2 in.) Firebrand Lazareff increased his paper's circulation from 60,000 to 2,000,000, branched out into magazines (Match, Marie Claire).

Warned by his father that journalism in France was for "misfits and blackmailers," Lazareff as a young reporter found that a series of biting articles on Rumanian politicians had been bought up and suppressed for more money than printed articles ever brought. Soon Lazareff learned that there was no newspaper in Paris at that time that could not be bought. Either the French Government subsidized the paper to slant political news or the papers openly solicited subsidies from political parties, industrial groups and foreign countries. Even stuffy Le Temps, for years the most widely quoted French newspaper, took money from Russian Tsarists, later from Communists.

Similar means of extracting a living from journalism were those employed by Le Matin's Publisher Maurice Bunau-Varilla (whose brother started the Panama Canal). A classic case was Bunau-Varilla's campaign against Leopold II of Belgium, which stopped suddenly after special concessions were granted a Belgian Congo railway of which Bunau-Varilla was a director. In his later years the publisher became interested in a pharmaceutical formula known as Synthol. It was adopted first by the French Army. Later the Germans professed to need it in great quantities. When France fell, Le Matin was the first pro-Nazi paper published in Paris.

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