Dirty Work at the Crossroads

Not all the correspondents realized it, but the U.S. press as well as the Bomb had been on trial at Bikini. The Bomb did its part. How had the press acquitted itself? Last week precise, Annapolis-trained Hanson W. Baldwin, military analyst of the New York Times, put into the record a stern account of slipshod work, "irresponsible sensationalism" and some more than raffish behavior.

His indictments:

P: "Accreditation [with the help of a pressmen's committee] of too many persons who went along simply 'for the ride.' . . . These included an attorney, an unaffiliated lecturer who did not file a single story . . . one correspondent who had to be sent home [for misconduct and making a nuisance of himself], and a representative of a beauty magazine.*

P: "The crazily exaggerated build-up [which] led. . . to the inevitable 'letdown' after the tests. . . . The Navy's safety precautions for the first test were almost ridiculously overdone Pseudo-scientists and in a few cases reputable scientists . . . made some astounding and wholly unscientific predictions" and the press lapped them up.

P: The shoddy conduct of some newsmen. "Many . . . apparently had never been aboard a naval vessel before. Some acted as if the trip was the Lost Weekend. A few tipped the crew and messboys with large bills as if they were in a nightclub. Drinking and drunkenness . . . [were] for a time prevalent, and some . . . gave liquor to the crew. . . ."

Most of the "phonies" and "junketeers" went home after the first test. Generally they were not the newsmen who had put it on the line during the war, and had won a respect in the armed services that they had never had before. Veteran correspondents were not the ones who brazenly toted cases of liquor aboard, made the lives of Negro stewards miserable; got off the dirty-joke ship "news" paper which must have startled Russia's silent correspondent A. M. Khoklov, a captain in the Soviet navy. Baldwin's recommendation: a permanent accreditation committee of newsmen, to weed out the unfit.

*Charm.

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