Competitor for Tass

The Russian press is about as competitive as a Russian election. The state not only controls all newspapers but gets along with a single news service, Tass. Last week, in one of those mysterious gyrations of the Russian bear, a group of Soviet journalists met in Moscow for the express purpose of organizing a competitor to Tass.

The new rival was Novosti (News), a second news agency that as yet possesses little more than a name and an aim: "To expand the exchange of information between the Soviet Union and foreign countries." One of its charter members with a name of his own: Aleksei Adzhubei, Khrushchev's son-in-law. There is plenty of room for expansion of journalistic enterprise. Though impressively big (900 men), Tass is a party-lining sloth whose correspondents are used abroad for propaganda purposes as often as for reporting. Khrushchev may have been prompted to put a fire under Tass by his brushes with the aggressive reporters of the West. But the chance that Novosti will ever peddle undoctored news is about as remote as the emergence of a two-party political system in Russia.

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