Turnabout

With an assurance born of the conviction that Texas is part of Colorado (for circulation purposes, at least), the Denver Post sent its crime editor, Gene Lowall, into Dallas last January. On assignment as roving "house dick" for the Post (TIME, Oct. 31), husky, balding Newsman Lowall spent four busy days talking crime with members of Dallas' upper & underworld.

The Post played up his findings in a six-part series last month on "the Southwest's culture and crime center." It contained little that was new. But by the old newspaper trick of totaling up past gangster shootings and policy wars, Lowall gave the impression that Dallas was a racket-ridden city. His scary conclusion: "A hellbroth of mobster violence and derision for the law is seething" in Dallas and may "boil oyer any time."

What boiled over in Dallas was its newspapers, whose journalistic pride was outraged. The Morning News salved itself with a quote from Mayor Wallace Savage: "If such conditions existed here . . . the Dallas News is fearless and independent enough to have printed [the facts]." The Times-Herald quoted Savage too: "I know that if ... such conditions [were known] ... an independent and fearless newspaper such as the Times-Herald would have published [them]."

Last week the News did more. It sent veterarn Police Reporter Harry McCormick to Denver to blow the whistle on crime there. Once, kidnaped by a member of the notorious Barrow-Parker gang (1935), McCormick got an exclusive interview and persuaded the kidnaper to vouch for its authenticity by pressing his fingerprints on the windshield of McCormick's car before he was let go. McCormick had hoped to keep his visit to Denver under cover. But the Post ran him down within 24 hours, politely offered him a car, a photographer and a look at the files. This week, the Dallas News began running McCormick's "expose" of crime in Denver.

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