The Press: Let Freedom Ring

Between New York and Moscow, words like "slave" and "phony" flew back & forth. The New York Times's pugnacious managing editor and Sunday columnist, Edwin L. (for Leland) James, and the Communist Pravda's choleric co-editor, David losifovich Zaslavsky, were locked in battle.

James had started it. When a Soviet delegate to the U.N. Economic and Social Council solemnly asserted that only in the Soviet system was there a free press, James exploded: "Propaganda gone crazy." Zaslavsky retorted with half a page of invective in Pravda. James came back this week with a challenge: "There are some millions of your own countrymen in ... concentration camps. . . . Why not exercise your freedom by giving the world a picture of these camps. . . . [If you do] I would be willing to apologize for calling you a phony."

Of course, neither Zaslavsky nor any other Soviet journalist could accept the challenge. And, anyhow, Zaslavsky had already told the world almost everything it needed to know about the Soviet press. Some of it was in his latest anti-James outbursts ; the rest was in his own life and works.

The Party Line. Sitting at his cluttered desk, scratching a dim pencil against a pad of sleazy paper, old (68), squid-faced Zaslavsky knows his own position perfectly. Like most other responsible editors on Soviet Russia's 7,000 newspapers and 360 magazines, his is a party assignment. On pain of party inquisition he is bound to it. Even before the printers get his copy, censors see it. The party line has to be remembered, and the implacable, pervasive MVD (Secret Police). Deviation is dangerous.

Zaslavsky knows little about U.S. newsmen except what he has read in Upton Sinclair, Morris Ernst or heard from occasional contacts with ex-PM Publisher Ralph McAllister Ingersoll. But he knows all about Zaslavsky. He wrote:

James is on the chain of his boss, Sulzberger.* At the present time we cannot consider James's words as his own — they are really the voice of his master-owner — we hope he gets full freedom. But it will come to him only if he replaces Sulzberger as owner, or in case what he calls the Russian conception of press freedom triumphs everywhere.

Staring across Zaslavsky's desk is a plaster bust of Lenin, molded in sternest mien. Zaslavsky remembers — and well —that even before Lenin had a political party he founded a newspaper to promote revolution, assigned its correspondents:

1) to report only what would spread social discontent; 2) to be ready always to serve as a nucleus of active revolutionaries.

Wrote Zaslavsky:

We understand very well why the biggest agencies, the Associated Press, the United Press, and International News Service so fiercely seek complete, unrestricted freedom for their irresponsible information —a full unlimited right to penetrate all nations, have their agents everywhere buy everywhere what they need, sell everywhere things that are profitable for them.