The Big Red Scare: I

The shiny new United Nations machine came off the San Francisco assembly line four years ago this month. In the time since, United States-Soviet relations have deteriorated consistently; the signing of the Atlantic Pact a fortnight ago formalized the split between the two countries. But much more serious than this diplomatic hardening of the arteries has been the growth of anti-Russian feeling in this country. A significant part of the American press has parlayed domestic news into direct propaganda with viciousness and determination.

Techniques vary, Some papers, like the Boston Herald, have done it bluntly, and on a propaganda level, stupidly. Last week, that paper splashed a story all over page one about the grip that communists supposedly had on Lawrence, Massachusetts, without a single fact to back it up. It pictured the mill town threatened by near-revolution in such a hysterical way as to amuse even the least skeptical reader; the thinness of the mixture made the Herald's story an obvious piece of propaganda.

Some Operations have been more subtle. Life Magazine put the maraschino on its latest Americanism sundae with a two-page picture spread of "fellow-travelers and dupes" who backed the Cultural and Scientific Conference in New York. The rogues' gallery left little space for a small-print admission that not all of these people were really dangerous, that some were merely being "duped," and that much of the "evidence" against others was hearsay. A magazine with Life's circulation can bring a lot more pressure merely by visual impression and numbers than a paper like the Herald.

These two instances are only the most recent examples of biased "reporting." Almost the whole press coverage of the un-American Activities Committee was slanted from the first whack of Parnell Thomas' gavel. The burst of front-page copy which followed Lawrence Duggan's death and the one-sided stories of the slander thrown at Dr. Edward U. Condon by the Thomas Committee have been mere items in the "crusade."

People who stop to looks for facts will find, in 99 cases of 100, mere allegations, totally unbacked by fact. But as long as papers send out their staffs to make anti-Red news, there will be a stream of allegations. This will convince the majority of readers--the ones who don't stop to look twice--by sheer sustained invective if nothing else. It will give the Legion and the Klan, which don't worry about facts, new material for their screaming accusations. It can color the thinking of the intelligent to a point where the quarter-truths get by as half-truths, where the attitude of every newspaper reader is affected by something he doesn't believe.

There are areas of political and economic operation where public opinion may not hamper formal relations with Russia. But there could come a point where national psychology would be the determining factor between war and peace. Continuation of the present style of reporting can boost our national attitude way off balance at the end of a springboard. It's a high board, and below is war.

(The second of two editorials on this subject will appear in Wednesday's CRIMSON.)