"A Pretty Poor Job?"

Is the press doing a good job in telling the news to readers? A poll of newspaper copy desk chiefs by George Gallup showed that it is doing "a pretty poor job."

His polls have shown, wrote Gallup in this week's New York Times Magazine, that a third of American adults do not know that Dean Acheson is Secretary of State. In one series of questions (Where is Manchuria? Formosa? What is the 38th parallel? The Atlantic pact? Who is Chiang Kaishek? Tito?), almost a fifth of the people asked couldn't answer a single one. Most of them, said he, had exaggerated ideas of the power of A-bombs, thought a few could erase a whole nation, and thus had no idea of the cost of war. In any case, they believed that "war with Russia is inevitable. So let's get it over with."

The blame for such ignorance, said Gallup, can be leveled chiefly at the people themselves. They "have become so bent on entertainment that anything which doesn't fit easily and unconsciously into this groove tends to be ignored. The old-fashioned idea that everyone should keep 'abreast of the times' apparently has lost much of its earlier appeal." But Gallup raised a pertinent question for the press. Have editors "lost a sense of mission" and begun to worry too much, he asked, "about having the most popular comic strips and the most complete sports pages, and too little about keeping their readers interested in, and informed about, the important problems of the day?"

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