The Baffling Times

The New York Times, almost alone among the world's newspapers, likes to print the full texts of the more important speeches and documents it reports. So when Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Y. Vishinsky violently attacked U.S. "warmongers" (TIME, Sept. 29), the Times took 13 columns to run his speech verbatim.

Communist Vishinsky, apparently not an old Times reader, confessed to a U.N. committee that he was baffled. How had the Times "dared" to print the text of his speech? And why had the Times printed only abstracts of his subsequent speeches?

In his weekly column in the Times, Managing Editor Edwin L. James answered Vishinsky's question, improving the occasion by reading him a short lesson on the difference between the Russian and the U.S. press. Wrote James: "There was no one who would order the Times not to print [the first Vishinsky attack] and since it was a formal speech by the representative of a great power, this newspaper printed it. . . . [Vishinsky] has repeated it over and over. There was no one to order his speech printed when there was no news in it and so it was not printed again. . . . Mr. Vishinsky is down on the agenda for another speech. If it is a new speech on a new subject, this newspaper will print it."

When the New York Herald Tribune raised the price of its Sunday paper to 15-c- ten months ago, the New York Times doggedly stuck to a dime. This week, the Times lost the fight to rising paper and production costs. It reluctantly raised its newsstand price to 15-c- too.

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