Invitation to Critics

As the principal watchdog in the house of freedom, the U.S. press feels free to bark at anybody. And critics who call it to heel can expect to get bitten. As a result, thought Managing Editor James S. Pope of the Louisville Courier-Journal, the press is spoiled: in its daily performance there is much to criticize, but there is little sound criticism of the press. Last week Editor Pope went recruiting for knowing critics.

A newspaper's claim to the protection of the First Amendment, Pope told a University of Michigan audience, rests on its role as a common carrier of vital information: "Nevertheless, hundreds of newspapers habitually carry this information ... in the most horribly butchered and distorted form.

"I know of publishers, honorable men, who cast out of their shop patently dishonest advertising, yet their front pages are a mass of dishonest eight-column streamers nearly every day. Some papers feel the compulsion to propagate their owner's social, political and economic ideas in their news columns, unaware that freedom should include freedom of news from color and distortion."

Readers are not much help as critics, said Editor Pope, who felt that most casual comment on the press is ignorant and irrelevant. But, he said, "someone is going to pioneer in the new art-science of measuring and revealing the box score of the press, and I suspect it will be a uni versity. . . ." He hoped it would be a number of universities.

"I'd like to see appointed [as a start] a University of Michigan committee to make the first academic study of individual newspapers, and to grade them closely on performance of their perpetual obligation to present a balanced and unbiased and intelligible picture of human affairs day by day. . . . Editorial pages should be analyzed for clarity and breadth of mind; financial pages for the general accuracy of the gobbledegook they use for English; columnists for evidence of hardened minds or ulterior influences."

Editor Pope did not think the press would like what he proposed: "Thin-skinned people suffer a lot but they are prone to improve. . . . Your victims will respect you, and accord you whatever praise and gratitude you may earn."

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