"The Whole Truth . . ."

If every misrepresentation or half-truth on the front page of the typical metropolitan daily were blacked out, how much reading material would be left? Last year members of the Psychology Department, on the track of meat for class-room consumption, constituted themselves into a committee, presumably impartial, to study distortion of news in eight Boston newspapers. Equipped with rulers and calculating machines, the psychologists chose the fight over repeal of the Arms Embargo last fall as an issue suitable for study and began to add inches. To no one's great surprise, most of the dailies were found all too innocent of objectivity, the cardinal virtue in journalism. John Q. Public, who rarely reads editorials, could nevertheless grasp editorial policy through the news columns. Word coloring of stories was discovered; news favorable to policy found prominent display on the front page, while "in acceptable" news was found buried on the inside pages; and letters to the editor approved the paper's position with suspicious frequency. Both Hearst papers, the American and the Record, extensively publicized the anti-repeal activities of the National League of American Mothers, whose home offices were discovered to coincide with those of the newspaper houses! The Globe came nearest to being an old-fashioned sounding board of many opinions, whereas the Christian Science Monitor was found surprisingly skillful at spooning its readers only what the readers relish.

The logical extreme of this tendency is PM, which could teach a few lessons to the Volkischer Beobachter on how to agitate the public, though it redeems itself by the sincerity with which it grants and strives for its purpose. In view of the trend of American journalism away from the ancient canon of "the whole truth and nothing but the truth," small wonder that many readers--those who can afford it--subscribe to more than one paper for a balanced news diet, and that America's most popular cliche, has become "Aw, it's a lot of propaganda."