Is Sex Necessary?

When 34-year-old Washington Correspondent James Arthur Wechsler became editor of the New York Post a year ago (TIME, June 6, 1949), Publisher Dorothy Schiff was just about ready to sell her tabloid or shut it down. She had sunk "millions of dollars" into the preachily liberal Post, and had neither the cash nor the desire to go on losing so liberally. Editor Wechsler decided on a drastic change.

He painted the Post's face as gaudily as he knew how, lowered the newspaper's neckline and its tone. Day after day, Page One gave prurient readers the eye: SIN STREET (prostitutes), ONE WOMAN'S ORDEAL (abortions), LOVE ALONG THE PARTY LINE (a girl Communist's "intimate" confessions), GREENWICH VILLAGE AT NIGHT (Bohemianism and homosexuality), TEN NIGHTS IN A DANCE' HALL ("By Henriette de Sieyes, Vassar '45") and THE SEX CRIMINAL. These tactics paid off. By last March the Post was selling 389,454 copies a day and was solidly in the black. Last week, helped along by the New York World-Telegram and Sun strike (TIME, June 26), the Post's circulation was topping 500,000.

High Traditions. Despite the sensational Post's sensational success, some of its oldest friends were shocked by its behavior. Though they admired Wechsler's crisp, hard-hitting editorial page, they accused him of betraying the Post's high traditions by pandering to the public's lowest tastes on its news pages. Last week the Saturday Review of Literature, a high-minded magazine with a lower circulation (97,866), published a debate between Wechsler and Editorial Writer August Heckscher of the New York Herald Tribune. Subject: Is sex necessary to sell a liberal newspaper?

No, argued Heckscher. The Post's old friends "are not actually averse to sex. [But they dislike] having their sex dished up as bait. The only thing worse than an obviously bad paper is a paper . . . which is obviously good and makes ugly sounds as a matter of deliberate policy. . ." He thought that the Post had almost run the gamut of sex and sensation, predicted that it would soon inspire "a feeling not only of boredom but of distaste and revulsion." Concluded Heckscher: "A newspaper is neither read nor edited in watertight compartments. A liberal newspaper must be liberal all through; it must pay its readers the compliment. . . of assuming them to be intelligent and mature. [Otherwise] it will cease being a liberal newspaper and become a sensational paper with an editorial page that is irrelevant and without influence."

Low Tastes. Not so, said Wechsler: "The People have persistently crowded the newsstands to buy the journals which are against [their political interests] and left the liberal publications to a select, self-righteous audience. . . A newspaper which professes to be a spokesman of The People must display some real capacity for interesting them. . . It cannot depend for survival on. . . those who [already] agree with its editorial policy."

Wechsler admitted that the Kerr natural-gas bill (TIME, April 10) was more "grave" than a coed's murder or Ingrid Bergman's baby, and that "a leopard loose in Oklahoma could hardly compete with an atomic physicist loose in Minsk." But the coed, the baby and the leopard sell more papers. Concluded Wechsler: "Occasionally I hear someone murmuring, 'After all, circulation isn't everything.' I philosophically concede the point, but I would hate to argue it with a corpse."

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