Grist for the Mill

Since the Korean truce talks got under way last summer, U.N. newsmen have been faced with a dilemma. They have found that Communist correspondents, whom they see every day at Panmunjom, are often a better source of truce-talk news than the sparse briefings by U.N.'s own information officers. From such men as Alan Winnington of the London Daily Worker and Wilfred Burchett of Paris' pro-Communist Ce Soir, U.N. correspondents have extracted Red reaction to U.N. proposals even before the U.N. negotiators announced that the proposals had been made. And high-ranking U.N. officers have frequently asked correspondents what the Red reaction seemed to be. Many U.N. newsmen disliked fraternizing with Red correspondents, but feared they would be beaten on stories if they didn't. They thought their job was to get the news, no matter how questionable the sources.

Playing the Game. The first big story to come from the Reds was Burchett's account of his interview with General Dean (TIME, Dec. 31). The next came when the Associated Press found that its Pulitzer Prizewinning Photographer Frank Noel, 52, was in a North Korean prison camp. Eager for an exclusive, A.P.'s Bob Schutz lugged a camera to Panmunjom and asked the Communist correspondents to deliver it to Noel. A few days later, A.P. had a set of P.W. pictures taken by Noel. Though they had been censored by the Communists, they were the first pictures out of North Korea by a Westerner, and got a big play in U.S. papers. The United Press, stung by the beat, struck back with its own photos of General Dean, taken by a Communist correspondent.

Toasting with Lead. Last week Reuters, the British news agency, decided it was time to stop playing footie with the Reds. When the Communists offered pictures of Commonwealth prisoners, Reuters promptly returned them unused. Then the Army stepped in with a warning from Colonel George Patrick Welch, General Ridgway's information officer. Some correspondents, said Welch in Tokyo, had been abusing their rights at Panmunjom by "fraternization and trafficking with the enemy." He said they were guilty of "excessive social consorting, including drinking of alcoholic beverages, with Communist 'journalists.' " The Army's Stars & Stripes, which itself had played up every Communist-fed picture and story it could get, joined the attack. It charged that newsmen from "both sides whoop it up with each other's booze while on other parts of the front . . . the two sides are toasting each other with grenades and lead."

Both blasts were unfair. Though long aware of the U.N. newsmen's competition for Red favors, the Army had never made a real move to stop it. In fact, it had unwittingly encouraged the practice by withholding legitimate news from the U.N. correspondents. As for the drinking charge, some U.N. newsmen had occasionally passed flasks around in the cold of Panmunjom, but "whooping it up" was hardly the right description. The net effect of the Army's ill-considered blast was to discredit the free world's press in the eyes of its own readers, and to provide grist for the Communist propaganda mill. Cried the Peking radio next day: "The Iron Curtain rang down with a clang today, and was marked 'Made in Tokyo.' "

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