The Press: The Times that Tries

The New York Times, which has no trouble printing "All the News That's Fit to Print," had considerable trouble last week deciding what nudes are fit to print. When the producers of the Broadway comedy, Reclining Figure, tried to place an ad in the Times illustrated with a line drawing of a reclining nude, a staffer in the ad department said no. Other New York dailies ran the ad as submitted, but in the Times the nude was decorously fitted with a brassiere. At week's end, after taking the matter "under review," the Times allowed the ad to run as originally submitted, apparently under a new rule of fitness, which could be paraphrased roughly as "All the Nudes that Fit the News."