French Object Lesson

"If most of the leading New York newspapers and magazines had to pack up on a day's notice and flee with their office boys, private papers, and a few of the staff somewhere west of the Mississippi, where the Times and the Herald Tribune had to dicker with the Emporia Gazette to use its presses and become two-page Kansas locals; if the Mirror and LIFE, without photographs, came out in Utah; if the Post were seized and George Backer, its publisher, and Dorothy Thompson were put in a concentration camp in the Catskills; if the Christian Science Monitor's editor were arrested as a believer in magic --then New York would have some idea of what has happened to the rich newspaper business of Paris."

Thus last week wrote the New Yorker's Janet Planner--now in the U.S. but long the New Yorker's Paris correspondent in one of the best recent reports on the humiliating fate of the French press. A sobering document, it deserved double reading since the French press--by its own venalities, and its failure to see and warn the French people of the weaknesses of France--must be held in good part accountable for the disaster in which it is a chief victim.

Other Planner points:

> Of the 19 leading Paris dailies the skeleton remains are miserable little sheets consisting of one-and two-page editions in the Unoccupied Zone (where most are exiles), a maximum four pages in Paris.

> Advertising consists mainly of petites annonces at ten to 20 francs a line (50 fr. for annonces for missing children).

> To former No. 1 French Publisher Jean Prouvost, all that remains is a one-page shadow of the once-great Paris-soir. His picture weekly, Match, once ranking as the French LIFE with a circulation of 2,500,000, has been taken over by the Germans, published as an "ersatz" called La Semaine. Seized also was his Marie-Claire (French Ladies' Home Journal, with circulation of 1,250,000), and supplanted by a Nazi rag called Pour Elle.

> Two former leading Paris reporters are now selling newspapers on the streets of Marseille.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.