Fakes!

Crouching with a telescopic lens attached to his camera in the thick of the recent fighting around Cordoba, able German Photographer Capa snapped Red soldiers charging over a trench, then quickly snapped again to catch one of those very soldiers as a White bullet clipped him, bowled him to the ground. In this particular case a wealth of evidence indicated there had been no faking, but last week editors outside Spain had awakened to the unpleasant fact that many of the pictures and much of the text which they could not avoid printing contained large elements of fake. Great and solemn organs of the press could not very well open their columns to this particular story, but World Trend Features, after sifting the facts in Paris, conclusively reported: "The apparently innate tendency of the press to fake has been brought out sharply by the present Spanish war. The English press, with the possible exception of the Manchester Guardian, has had no difficulty in sinking to that level which it unanimously concedes to be the native habitat of the American press. . . . The French press has, on the whole, lived up to its reputation of being the most outrageously mendacious of the remaining free presses of the world--with notable exceptions in the case of the Paris Figaro and Le Temps."

On the other hand French correspondents, fabricators though many of them are, have notably excelled in their readiness to actually go into Spain and take the chance of dying there. Up to last week two French correspondents had been killed. Publisher Lucien Vogel of the Paris picture weekly Vu was alone in having set off by air to take his own photographs in a Lockheed plane which crashed and broke his arm. As many as eleven French planes at a time have ferried uncensored dispatches out of Spain.

"The day of the capture of Badajoz [by the Whites]" declared World Trend Features, "the figure of 2,000 Reds shot was given by the French Havas correspondent who was not there but in Portugal. All over the world this figure was taken up and printed. Next day John Elliott of the New York Herald Tribune was the first American correspondent and probably the first non-Spanish correspondent to enter Badajoz. He saw no signs of the shootings, so didn't report them. By some of his own Herald Tribune colleagues he was promptly condemned for 'having sold out to the Fascists.' Each of the great inter national press services is faking in its Paris bureau and each says it has to do so to keep up with the 'colorful competition' of the others."

"The best pictures of bloody charges and struggles to the death in Spain are taken by an English movie man at Burgos who from time to time hires the rifle range and a squad of Spanish supers. He says he was driven to this by complaints from his London superiors about the poor pictures they were getting. They even sent him a letter written in grossly in correct Spanish, which he was instructed to show to General Mola, demanding facilities to make pictures under fire. Instead he framed London, and now he is framing London's congratulations on his work."

At latest reports no news agency or newspaper had met the competition of Free-lance Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. who wrote for the current Liberty:

"At Marquina, held by the Governmentalists, I saw nuns shackled to one another's ankles being dragged by lively mules through the cobblestone streets, the whole tops of their heads ablaze! I was told they'd been dipped in kerosene 'and touched off with long white church tapers. . ."

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