Job for the Readers?

When Senator Joe McCarthy began his investigation of possible security leaks in the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth last October, the New York Times reported it in great detail. The stories, whose chief source was McCarthy's own daily briefing of reporters on what went on in the closed session, resulted in such Times headlines as: ROSENBERG CALLED

RADAR SPY LEADER; RADAR WITNESS BREAKS DOWN: WILL TELL ALL ABOUT SPY RING AND MONMOUTH FIGURE LINKED TO HISS RING.

Deep Damage. Last week, more than three months after the investigation began, the Times got around to telling its readers how much truth there was behind the headlines. In a series of three articles, Reporter Peter Kihss concluded that the investigation had not only turned up nothing new in the way of security leaks or espionage but had actually deeply damaged the morale of scientists and other Monmouth employees. Reported Kihss: "Neither the subcommittee nor the Army has yet charged any present Monmouth employee with being a Communist now or an espionage agent now. The subcommittee's intimations on possible past or present espionage remain far from courtroom evidence. The record is that the Army and the Eisenhower Administration had already tightened security regulations and opened investigations under the President's April 27 executive order before the McCarthy inquiry turned toward Monmouth."

In an editorial, the Times owned up to the fact that its readers had been misled, said: "Army investigators found no spies, and neither has Senator McCarthy, yet the Senator was given sensational headlines last October on supposed espionage and Communism at Monmouth . . . For the newspapers, Fort Monmouth has been a lesson that will not quickly be forgotten, but the reading public should understand that it is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore charges by Senator McCarthy just because they are usually proved exaggerated or false. The remedy lies with the reader."

Truth v. Objectivity. Actually, the Times was grappling with a problem that has stymied many another newspaper: getting the truth across to its readers while still conforming to long-established standards of journalistic "objectivity." Under those standards, an observation by Senator McCarthy is reported in the same "objective" manner as a quote from President Eisenhower. The fact is that U.S. daily journalism has not yet achieved the standard recently described in a speech by Turner Catledge, the Times's own managing editor: "A new responsibility has been added to that of collecting and presenting the facts. I refer to the responsibility of explanation. Explanation and interpretation are, indeed, new dimensions of the news."

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