Yes--But

French Academician Andre Siegfried, author, economist and world traveler, after 50 years of reading U.S. newspapers, paid them a Gallic compliment. The U.S. press, said he, "has reached maturity but without having lost its youth. Especially it has preserved its real genius, which is that of a reporter. It is interested in everything."

Perhaps too interested in color and not enough in facts, a New York Daily News copyreader last week embroidered an A.P. story about Harry Robert Bell of West Palm Beach, Fla., just home from the wars. If he had stopped to think, he would probably not have dressed up Bell as "the nation's first draftee"--since there were 6,175 duplicates of "First Draftee" Bell, all holders of local draft boards' No. 158.

The Boss Takes a Fling

From the Pacific, where famed Correspondent Ernie Pyle died and Editor Lee Miller flopped as his successor, came another Scripps-Howard by-line--that of the diminutive, dandified boss himself, Roy W. Howard. He had left his red, Chinese-style office in Manhattan and gone forth to battle. Last week, on a carrier off Japan, he was taking another of his periodic flings at reporting.

Although he has never quite lived down his four-day jumping the gun on World War I's armistice, and has sometimes looked funny trying to scoop his local reporters on fires and auto accidents, Roy Howard has scored high with such stories as his interviews with Russia's Stalin and Japan's Hirohito. An incurable romantic about newspapering, he now seemed to be seeing the war from a pretty special angle. He watched battle reports come in, wrote that it was "strongly suggestive of covering returns at police headquarters on election night or collecting the details of a suburban disaster from the desk of a metropolitan newspaper."

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