The Press: The Disenchanted

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Three of Europe's top-echelon Communist newsmen last week were out of their jobs as a result of their protests against Soviet military reprisals in Hungary. The disenchanted:

¶ Jacov Levi, United Nations correspondent since 1953 for Yugoslavia's official Communist paper Borba. Levi, 35, quit the party and his job in Manhattan, explained that Tito's defense of Russian intervention in Hungary and the arrest of former Yugoslav Vice President Milovan Djilas (TIME, Dec. 3) had convinced him that "the promised liberation and democratization in my country have reached a dead-end street." Levi, the only Red correspondent accredited to U.N. forces in Korea in 1951, asked asylum in the U.S.

¶ Emanuele Rocco, an editor of Italy's Communist daily Il Paese since 1952 and longtime protégé of Party Boss Palmiro Togliatti. Rocco, 34, first worked or L'Unita and helped turn it from a wartime underground weekly into the official Communist daily (estimated circ 350.000), which claims to be Italy's second biggest newspaper (after Milan's conservative Corriere della Sera). On Il Paese (estimated circ. 50,000), L'Unita's sister paper, Rocco played up stories of Russian brutality in Hungary, persuaded Editor in Chief Tomaso Smith to run editorials blasting L'Unita's attempts to blame the uprisings on "fascist counter-revolutionaries." When Rocco refused to join the party in defending Russia, he was fired.

¶ Franz Xavier Philipp, Vienna correspondent for East Germany's Communist news agency ADN, and a former longtime editor of the Soviet-sponsored Berlin daily Tägliche Rundschau. Philipp also wa fired for refusal to slant stories of th Hungarian fighting, denied ADN's charge that he was working for the U.S. Secret Service.