The Press: Masochism

While the free world's press is quick to trumpet Soviet triumphs and even quicker to imagine them, it can also be faulted by its critics for failure to grasp the real achievements of the West. One such critic is the New York Times's Paris-based correspondent, Cyrus L. Sulzberger, who wrote last week that NATO conference delegates "came away encouraged" by the decisions reached in Paris, but that the "impression spread about the world was one of gloom."

To back up his argument, Newsman Sulzberger excerpted a letter to onetime NATO Commander in Chief Alfred Gruenther in which Belgium's NATO Ambassador Andre de Staercke chided the Western press for its "masochistic" tendency to see "just the weak points of our position." This attitude, said Veteran Diplomat de Staercke, is compounded by "lack of analysis, by sheer ignorance, by that kind of facility which makes bad news easier to believe than good news, or pessimism more secure than optimism."