"Know-lt-Alls"

Friends of the U.S. press, and of its future freedom, have long noted with misgivings two unmistakable trends:

P: The increasing sterility of editorial expression in all but a few of the nation's newspapers.

P: The taking over of the editorial function by syndicated columnists.

This week a columnist who does not want to be syndicated published a professional newsman's appraisal of many of those who are. Columnist Charles Eugene Fisher writes a seriocomic, largely localized column for the New Dealish Philadelphia Record. His new book is a 317-page work of love and research, The Columnists (Howell, Soskin Publishers, Inc.; $2.50). Says he by way of introduction:

"The columnist is the autocrat of the most prodigious breakfast table ever known. He is the voice beside the cracker barrel amplified to transcontinental dimensions. He is the only nonpolitical figure of record who can clear his throat each day and say, 'Now, here's what I think. . .' with the assurance that millions will listen . . . [but] in a sense he is irresponsible. No newspaper stands or falls by his words. In him . . . the newspapers have found a method of restoring their lost personal fire without possibly awkward aftermaths."

Short, slender, tongue-cheeked Columnist Fisher quickly skirts the dangers to a free press inherent in mass misinformation and in mass-distributed opinion slanted to particular ends. He passes on to a detailed study of his voluble subjects--"faulty and imperfect souls, no matter what their clients believe." Some of the Fisher findings:

Westbrook Pegler (174 papers, circ. 10,000,000) has a literary skill "beyond question, but very few of his methods are consistent with any attempt at honesty, either emotional or intellectual. . . . They make one curious to know whether [he] is not aware that venom is a more marketable commodity than reason. . . . His readers cherish his cholers. . . . His circulation has risen with his blood pressure." Praised: the Peglerizing of Racketeers Willie Bioff, George Scalise.

Columnist Fisher is amused by the fact that in 1937 Pegler himself took one of the most eloquent swings at columnizing: "Of all the fantastic fog shapes that have risen off the swamp of confusion since the big war, the most futile . . . the most pretentious is the deep-thinking, hair-trigger columnist or commentator who knows all the answers offhand and can settle great affairs with absolute finality. . . ." Since writing this, says Fisher, there are "very few answers [Pegler] has not attempted to supply offhand. He is currently concerned with postwar planning (he's agin it) and with interpreting the nation's attitude toward the future (he sees it as blind nationalism). He believes labor and Communism to be virtually interchangeable terms . . .is anti-Roosevelt by profession . . . thinks little of either Dewey or Willkie."

Walter Lippmann (150 papers, circ. 10,000,000) is the Olympian . . . "no man writes with more skill and a better heart when dealing with democracy ten years and 10,000 miles away." But the onetime "brilliant spokesman of liberalism" has been "running neck and neck with general Republican opposition, calling upon the courts to liquidate the New Deal and upon the stars to view the general iniquity in Washington." Columnist Fisher finds Lippmann's "comment on world affairs comes from a background of study and close observance which scarcely any contemporary journalist can touch" . . . but three months before Pearl Harbor he was regarding a large U.S. Army as "a definite inconvenience."

Columnist Fisher groups 54-year-old Pundit Lippmann with old (69) G.O.P. Spokesman Mark Sullivan (55 papers, circ. est. 5,000,000) and old (66) Roosevelt-baiting Frank Kent (87 papers, circ. 5,000,000) as having undergone "violent reversal of attitude at periods approximating their middle years and success." Of Sullivan, Fisher says: "The fact that none of the tragedies [he has predicted] ever came to pass . . . has in no way affected [his] status as prophet, analyst," keeper of the Old Guard faith. Of Kent: "A prosperous citizen [vice president of Baltimore's Sunpapers] . . . when [he] assails the New Deal, the protest comes from the heart."

Walter Winchell (some 800 papers, circ. some 25,000,000) runs a Broadway-Miami-Washington-Reno-Hollywood gossiporium which "suggests a continuous vaudeville entertainment in progress on a rubberneck bus en route to a peepshow and yet it may be the most effective pro-American propaganda medium in the country. . . ." In suggesting that Walter Winchell is the No. 1 propagandist-ideologue for World War II, Columnist Fisher may well be right. But last week Congressman Martin Dies, investigator of un-American activities, was planning to put Mr. Winchell under the magnifying glass.

Drew Pearson (621 papers, circ. 18,000,000) is the most widely distributed Washington commentator, has been labeled generally as a New Dealer, occasionally as a trial balloon floater, and specifically by Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull as a liar.* Columnist Fisher is impressed by slim, suave Andrew Russell Pearson's "many overwhelming news beats," but finds on the debit side: Japan would attack Siberia early in 1943; Willkie would take an Administration post; Stalin would visit the U.S.; Russia could not hold out a month (in 1941) against Germany. Frequently sued for libel, involved in many a classic row with officials, Pearson is not held in awesome respect by his colleagues. But few will deny that when he is hot on a hidden story he is very hot indeed. Lately noted: a leaning to coherent punditry on the international side.

Dorothy Thompson (120 papers, circ. 7,000,000) directs "her monitorial attention to the whole world, which she evidently regards as an obtuse and disorderly place which suffers largely because it won't listen to Dorothy Thompson." Author Fisher is overwhelmed by her epic sweep--"she has never been known to be in doubt about anything." But "in most domestic affairs she never struggled much past a state of mental disorder. In her attitude toward Roosevelt . . . she began with a mild approval of plans to relieve the depression but found herself unable to agree with any which were put into effect. . . . She came to regard the New Deal as totalitarian in design and stifling to enterprise. But her attention drifted presently to foreign affairs, where free and progressive feelings did not entail the embarrassment of dealing with facts close at hand. . . . Her estimates of the temper of America have been grandiosely inaccurate. . . ."

Samuel Grafton (42 papers, circ. 2,000,000) "occupies a world of deep, depressing blacks and dazzling whites. Untroubled by any of the shadings in between, he finds no difficulty in assigning a place to the most baffling tangle of cross-purposes./- The faculty enables him to read a three-paragraph dispatch about some remote and complicated affairs and come to an instant decision on what must be done. . . . Politically, Grafton [onetime office mate of Columnist Fisher] has been a supporter of the New Deal, although he grows restless because it hasn't accomplished as much as he can do any afternoon in half an hour at the typewriter." Columnist Fisher also notes that 36-year-old Grafton "has been critical of all the larger Allied nations except the Soviet."

Paul Mallon (16 Hearst papers and others) consistently reflects the Hearst view. He is "currently engaged by postwar planning at home and abroad. He thinks it stinks. He envisions nothing better than a world of roaring red Communism overseas. . . . He has a remarkable native instinct for fearing that he and his fellows are being jobbed. . . . His protests [are] bolstered by anecdote, rumor and unqualified statements based on what some people think might be going on."

David Lawrence (183 papers, circ. 7,000,000) "feels light was extinguished with Woodrow Wilson's death. . . . After a short and unsatisfactory flirtation with the New Deal," he settled into dry, persistent criticism, but "has approved the Administration's foreign policy more often than not." Columnist Fisher might well have added: friend of Congress, foe of labor.

Columnist Fisher is warm in praise of warm-hearted Ernie Pyle (TIME, May 31) and the late Raymond Clapper (TIME, Feb. 14).

Author-Columnist Fisher sums up: "I'm against columnists. I can sit with a friend and talk things over and he might say I'm full of hop and maybe I am. But when I write something in the paper hundreds of readers take it seriously. They give it disproportionate weight."

* Last week Columnist Pearson printed a list of his stories which had been denied, "but turned out true." Among them: his beats on the General Patton soldier-slapping (TIME, Dec. 6), the Navy's Elk Hills oil deal (TIME, July 5). /- He also has felt Presidential censure, on his "moronic little king" broadcast.

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