You're Another

As a onetime newsman for Pravda and Tass, the U.S.S.R.'s Jacob M. Lomakin is an expert on the Russian press. Last week at Lake Success, U.N. Delegate Lomakin enlightened U.N.'s Subcommission on Freedom of Information and of the Press. What was it, he asked, that kept Russia and the West from getting on with the peace? Why, it was those warmongering, imperialist, monopolist newspapers of the U.S. and Britain. They have too much freedom and "they trade in news as one trades in tobacco products . . . [for] profit." He wanted a resolution to punish them.

The U.S. delegate, Harvard's sharp-witted Prof. Zechariah H. Chafee Jr., a member of the Commission on Freedom of the Press and author of a two-volume study of the press, waited 40 minutes for Lomakin to talk himself out. Then Chafee slyly quoted from a State Department document detailing the Russian-Nazi plan to gobble Poland in 1939. "To agree to kill a nation," asked Chafee calmly, "does not that constitute real imperialism?"

As for warmongering, said Chafee, he preferred to call it the "promotion of hatred," and he read a few samples from the Russian press. It had called the New York Times's Brooks Atkinson "a mercenary bandit, not fit to whip," and the Herald Tribune's Walter Lippmann a "faithful servant of monopolistic circles."

Britain's Archibald Mackenzie let Lomakin have the other barrel. "[He] complains of a slanderous campaign . . . against the Soviet Union. Does he read his own newspapers? Do the Soviet papers dispense soothing syrups? If Hearst is wrong, the New York Times or the Washington Post or someone else will correct it. But who corrects Pravda?" Jacob Lomakin said nothing. For Pravda and Lomakin take orders from the same boss.

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