Shrillness in Fleet Street

In Paris last week, pundits and plain citizens alike chattered with rage at a paper few of them had ever read--London's jingoistic, whopping (circ. 4,052,712 cut) that showed Charles de Gaulle and West Germany's Konrad Adenauer, fused into a two-headed monster, laying a wreath on the grave of onetime French Premier and Nazi Collaborator Pierre Laval.

The Express cartoon was one of the lowest journalistic blows of the year; historic fact is that it was Pierre Laval's government which condemned De Gaulle to death in absentia after the fall of France in 1940, because of his refusal to collaborate with the Nazis. But low as it was, the cartoon was only a little lower than the run-of-the-mill abuse that London's Fleet Street was directing last week at De Gaulle and Adenauer.

Craggy Konrad Adenauer--whom London Daily Mirror Columnist "Cassandra" (William Connor) once accused of demonstrating that Europe's German "problem child is still reaching for his flick knife"--has been a target of Fleet Street snarls for months. What had suddenly turned the snarls into a shrill chorus of rage was President Eisenhower's approaching tour of Western Europe's capitals and a surge of British fear that Adenauer would somehow persuade Ike "to keep the cold war alive." To the Daily Mail (circ. 2,071,054), Adenauer was reminiscent of Adolf Hitler, "who ranted and raved to show what a great man he was." To Lord Beaverbrook's Express, Adenauer was "willing to prolong the quarrel between Russia and the U.S. for the purpose --the sole purpose--of recovering East Germany and the lands still further east which were handed over to Poland when Germany was defeated in the war."

The Terrible Twins. Early this month the Laborite Daily Herald (circ. 1,464,773) bannered a new charge against der Alte: DR A. JOINS A-BOMB CLUB IN SECRET. Burden of this "scoop" by Herald Air Correspondent Gilbert Carter was that West German money and scientists were helping to build France's Abomb. Outraged, West German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss denounced Carter's story as a phony, invited Carter to inspect West German research centers--and the French-German Ballistics Research Institute in Alsace--to see for himself. For telltale days Carter hesitated; when he finally did accept, it was with the face-saving declaration that the only thing that would convince him he was wrong was a look at the French bomb.

Implicit in Carter's phony scoop was the real cause of Fleet Street's wrath at De Gaulle: his insistence on regarding West Germany, rather than Britain, as his closest ally. Adenauer and De Gaulle, screamed the Daily Herald, are "the terrible twins . . . two stubborn, jealous, ambitious and misguided old men, determined to assert power and authority in Western Europe."

Gnat Bites. To suggestions that all this bordered on abuse of press freedom, Britain's editors could point with some justice to the public behavior of Adenauer and De Gaulle. Recalling the radio speech in which Adenauer charged that Fleet Street was being manipulated by anti-German "wire pullers" (TIME, April 20), London's Economist declared: "Dr. Adenauer has chosen to make a political issue of the gnat bites of individual British critics, and to make use of them in opposing British policies." Along with the Economist, most Britons professed to find it hard to understand why the French and Germans should get so worked up over attacks from papers notorious for their lack of influence on British policy.

The answer to this was supplied by the influential Manchester Guardian. "The Express' circulation," said the Guardian, "is something which thoughtful Frenchmen are not prepared to shrug off." Fact is that, although Fleet Street may exaggerate popular emotions, it has a good nose for what they are. No one could doubt that ordinary Englishmen nodded in agreement when the Daily Herald, in a moment of candor, stated: "Between [De Gaulle and Adenauer] there is a common bond: a determination to cut down Britain's influence on the Continent ..."

Worth More Worry. So far, the British government has made no effort to counter the anti-French and anti-German shrillness in Fleet Street. Said one British official : "The only effect of the popular press that we are worried about is the effect it has through requotation abroad." In a week when Moscow's Izvestia could draw on Fleet Street for propaganda material, these effects were perhaps worth more worry than British statesmen and publishers had yet given them.

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