Government v. A.P.

The best pleased U.S. publisher last week might well have been the Chicago Sun's Marshall Field III. At his prodding, the Administration filed its much-threatened suit against Associated Press for alleged violation of the Sherman and Clayton anti-trust acts (TIME, May 4; July 27).

Marshall Field had failed either to buy an A.P. franchise from Hearst or to get himself voted to membership (the Sun was turned down, 684-to-287, at A.P.'s meeting in April). Last week, he declared that if the Department of Justice forced A.P. to welcome all comers, that crackdown would prove to be "one of the most important strokes for freedom of the press in the history of American journalism."

Ticklish problems were ahead for Trust-Buster Thurman Arnold. A chief one is his necessity to prove that A.P. is a monopoly--it gets lively competition from U.P.*, I.N.S., the news-gathering services of such newspapers as the Chicago Daily News, the New York Times and Herald Tribune. Equally difficult to prove is that newspapers perish for lack of A.P. membership alone, since some of them grew big without it.

Meantime A.P. was calm. "What is charged against it," declared A.P. President Robert McLean, "is no more, at bottom, than this: That it seeks to protect its members who have invested their skill, their work and their money in its growth." A.P. promotion men declared that the Government's bill of particulars contained some of the best advertising they had ever seen. ("A.P. ranks in the forefront in public reputation and esteem . . . has long been regarded as synonymous with the highest standard of accurate, non-partisan and comprehensive newsreporting.")

For the rest of the U.S. press the A.P. suit promised one of the liveliest legal tangles in modern journalism. Doubly enlivening was the fact that the Chicago Sun's morning rival, the Chicago Tribune, was one of the most interested spectators. Spat Colonel McCormick: "Marshall Field is not a legitimate newspaper man and the Sun is not a legitimate newspaper. It is part of an alien and radical conspiracy against our republican form of government. It is subsidized by our Government to the extent that its losses, running into millions of dollars a year, are deducted from the owner's income tax."

*The same editions that carried the story of the A.P. anti-trust suit also carried the superb scoop on the Solomon Islands by U.P.'s Robert Miller.

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