The Press: Newsmen or Spies?

The representatives of Russia's Tass news agency make a great show of acting like reporters. But last week such members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors as Columnist David Lawrence and Scripps-Howard Editor Walker Stone thought it was time for a showdown on the question: Are Tassmen in the U.S. bona fide reporters or simply Russian agents gathering intelligence material for Russia's vast espionage system?

The editors demanded that the Washington correspondents' Standing Committee bar all Tassmen from the Capitol press galleries. In the Senate, Maryland's Herbert O'Conor went much further....