Critique

> Film Genius Orson Welles has been on the enemies list of the Hearst press since 1941. Reason: his movie classic, Citizen Kane, a powerful profile closely based on the life and times of Founder-Despot William Randolph Hearst. For 33 years, even after the boss's death in 1951, the Hearst newspapers scrupulously observed his edict and barred Welles from their pages--except for an occasional slip, usually followed by an editorial inquiry. Then six months ago Entertainment Editor Ray Loynds of the Hearst Los Angeles Herald-Examiner began the vindication of Welles on his own initiative by finally reviewing Citizen Kane on the movie page. Now his Hearstian rehabilitation moved onward and upward into the front news section. By decision of its top management, the Herald-Examiner recently ran on page two an unannounced two-column Loynds report headlined HOLLYWOOD TRIBUTE TO ORSON WELLES. Wrote Loynds: "Welles' greatest film contribution is Citizen Kane (1941), which stunned the film world with its remarkable cinematic control and invention and did for post-World War II cinema what D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation had done for cinema before the '40s." However, the old man's ghost soon walked again. By the later editions, Loynds' paean to Citizen Kane had vanished from the story on orders of the managing editor for "extreme editorializing."

> The National Observer scooped the press Nov. 2 with a story about a colorful entrepreneur named Elizabeth Carmichael, who was about to produce a revolutionary three-wheeled car called the Dale. National Observer Reporter John Peterson breezily noted in a frontpage piece, complete with a photo of the dynamic carmaker next to her sporty space-age vehicles, that Carmichael and her "talented mavericks" had designed the Dale with a new kind of plastic body that would be safe in crashes at speeds of up to-50 m.p.h. The car would also get 70 miles per gal. of gas and cost less than $2,000. Such claims went well beyond the visions and capacities of Detroit's giants, yet Peterson printed Carmichael's tall talk with virtually no skepticism. He soon learned the dangers of reporting unconfirmed technical claims without any disclaimers. Last month the Dale bubble burst when the Dallas police issued a warrant for the arrest of Carmichael and her creative crew on charges of conspiracy to commit theft. They also filed charges accusing her of engaging in illegal deceptive trade practices. The National Observer reported these events in a sort of retraction in its Feb. 15 issue. The story conceded that Carmichael's car might "turn out to be only a dream," and one Washington-based editor, Lionel Linder, also mustered a lame defense of Peterson's original article as primarily a "personality piece." Meanwhile, the personality of the piece and her mavericks are on the lam from the law.

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