Seven-Day Wonder

When Frank Waldrop, editor of the Washington Times-Herald, came home for dinner one evening last fortnight, his ten-year-old son Andrew had exciting news: "Harry Hopkins was a spy!" The boy had been listening to Fulton Lewis Jr.'s radio interview with ex-Major G. Racey Jordan and, as Waldrop said afterward, "That was his young way of summing it up." Waldrop's own way of summing it up for his readers was to reprint verbatim the broadcast of Lewis, who is not celebrated for his accuracy. Waldrop made no effort to determine whether or not the Jordan charges that Hopkins had shipped uranium to Russia (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) were true.

Actually, by the time Waldrop splashed his eight-column banner (HOPKINS ACCUSED OF GIVING REDS A-SECRETS) across

the Times-Herald, many another U.S. newspaper was also in print with even scarier stories, but with no more attention to a reporter's basic tenet of checking on the reliability of sources. Many papers, notably the Hopkins-hating Hearst press, bayed off in such excitement last week that they hardly bothered even to qualify their headlines. Cried the San Francisco Examiner: ATOM GIFT TO RUSS TOLD. The Columbus, Ohio Evening Dispatch blared:

SHIPMENT OF A-BOMB SECRETS TO REDS REVEALED.

For making such a gullible spectacle of itself, the U.S. press had only its own bad reporting to blame. A cursory check in Washington would have disclosed that Racey Jordan had been trying to peddle his story for nearly a month, and reputable news organizations had turned it down because it was contradictory and full of holes. As an excuse for being taken in, some news editors fell back on the old alibi that they were merely being "objective" and printing the day's news without taking any sides. Actually, such "objectivity" meant that the shrieking headlines and deadpan stories gave the readers few or no clues for getting at the heart of the matter, i.e., that they were based on entirely unsubstantiated charges.

Not all papers took refuge in such "objectivity." Many of them took pains to put their readers on guard. From the first, the New York Times played the story conservatively and headlined it gingerly, as did the Christian Science Monitor. The New York Herald Tribune early warned its readers of good cause for "skepticism," and the Louisville Courier-Journal scouted the story from the start, bitterly lamenting: "Not the least of the tragedies of our era of mass communications is the power possessed by little men with loud voices and a vestigial sense of decency. Wherever the target is big enough, there the scavengers gather to demonstrate with what sickening ease the dead may be slandered."

By midweek, when Lieut. General Leslie Groves's own congressional testimony sawed off the limb on which Jordan had climbed, many an editor seemed to feel a sudden need to get back on solid ground himself. Both the Atlanta Constitution and Journal, which had run as black headlines as anybody, finally ran stories from their own Washington staffers debunking the whole affair. Said the Constitution primly: "Mr. Fulton Lewis Jr. . . . has laid another egg." Only a few could boast the journalistic responsibility and integrity shown by the conservative Washington Star. No admirer of Harry Hopkins when he was alive, the Star early pointed out "good reason to be highly skeptical" of the Jordan "blockbuster." After the bomb had been defused, the Star interred it as the "Prize Dud of the Decade."

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