"Reporters Know!"

In two Midwest States where major political battles were heading toward a showdown last week, rank & file newsmen tossed away their press cards and got up on the stump. And in both cases they found themselves trying to outshout their own publishers.

In Minnesota, where Farmer-Labor Governor Elmer Austin Benson has been branded a friend of "Reds" in his campaign for reelection, most of the newspapers have frankly slanted news and headlines to favor his youthful, gladhanding, Republican opponent, Harold E. Stassen. (A notable exception: the Cowles-owned Minneapolis Star.) The angry Governor did not help matters by declaring that every daily paper in the State was a liar except the Willmar (Kandiyohi County) Tribune (circulation: 4,562). Ordinary newshawks took this as a slur at their bosses rather than themselves, gratefully remembered that friendly Elmer Benson as a U. S. Senator had given them interviews even while he was taking a bath.

Last week a committee of 51 reporters, copyreaders, rewritemen in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth broke journalistic taboos by publishing a pink-covered campaign booklet called "Deadline," crammed with the pro-Benson opinions their papers did not want. First edition ran to 100,000 copies. Excerpts: "We've written about Gov. Elmer Benson for two years. We know he is going forward. . . . The Red menace was a red herring. And smelled even fishier. . . ."

Most laudatory passages in "Deadline," however, were from Benson obituary notices which reporters swiped from their publishers' newspaper morgues. Typical hold-for-death quotes from anti-Benson newspapers: "Elmer A. Benson will go down in history as one of Minnesota's outstanding Governors. . . . Governor Benson displayed courage, forcefulness, and never yielded in his fight to aid the common man. . . . Even his enemies called him great. . . ."

Only reported reprisal against committee members last week was the temporary dropping of bylines of two sports writers by the Minneapolis Journal. All "Deadline" authors were Guildsmen, though the Guild officially took no hand in the publication.

This week Governor Benson's newshawk friends scored a scoop on their own papers when George W. Kelley, their Duluth cochairman, received the following wire from Franklin Roosevelt: "If the political writers on Minnesota papers are inferring that I have deliberately withheld approval from or disapproved candidacy of your Progressive Governor for reelection, they are of course misinterpreting my attitude. I have repeatedly indicated the high esteem in which I hold Governor Benson. . . ."

In Michigan, the Detroit Newspaper Guild set another precedent when it bought space in the arch-Republican Free Press for a political ad. ''REPORTERS KNOW!" clarioned the Guild. "We have mingled with men and women in the breadlines . . . witnessed big taxpayers' vain attempts to shirk. . . . Frank Murphy MUST Be Re-Elected!" On its front page the Free Press testily explained it had taken the Guild's money only because it believes in freedom of the press, opined that most Detroit newspapermen "are not led by the nose to the ballot box by John Lewis."

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