How to Cover Russia

To editors of the free world, no problem is greater than covering Russia and its satellites, where a free press is unknown. Last week the International Press Institute, founded by the New York Times's Sunday Editor Lester Markel to explore just such matters, took up the problem in a report, The News from Russia. After sounding out more than 100 U.S. and foreign editors by questionnaire, I.P.I, concluded: "The occasional dispatch [an editor] receives from Moscow is completely misleading when he presents it in the traditional manner."

The reason, as I.P.I, points out, is that Soviet censorship has been steadily tightened until it is now absolute. Until the Iron Curtain closed in 1946, reporters could still talk with Soviet citizens, still telephone the outside world, still argue with censors, occasionally even evade them by sly phrasing (e.g., "In Moscow the sexes are equal. This morning, women were out chipping the ice off the streets just like the men"). Now, says I.P.I., no one will talk to correspondents who is not "officially authorized" to do so. Furthermore, free-world correspondents may not argue with the censors because the Russians blandly insist that there are no censors. Correspondents in Russia never see what changes are made in their cables before they are sent; the cables are either killed or sent as censored without the newsmen knowing how the meaning has been changed by cuts. Even mailed stories are censored, and then retyped to give the home offices the impression that the copy was uncensored.

Triple Pressure. It is bad enough, says I.P.I., that the Moscow correspondents are forced to get their "news" from controlled Soviet newspapers. Still worse, correspondents tend in time to censor their own copy, in the interest of fast movement for stories they deem urgent. There is also a third pressure to keep correspondents in line. Of the six Western correspondents still in Russia--two from A.P., one each from U.P., Reuters and Agence France-Presse, plus the Times's own Harrison Salisbury--the majority are married to Russians. Since the correspondents' wives may not leave with them if they are evicted, and the correspondents must get their resident permits renewed every few months, "it is understandable that the men with Russian wives should constantly have personal considerations [in] regulating their behavior." Moreover, says I.P.I., the Russian trick of withholding news frequently makes Western editors play their own game--e.g., they automatically front-page a Stalin statement, even if propaganda, simply because Stalin rarely makes one.

Booby-Trapped. One answer to all this, says I.P.I., is to maintain a "Russian desk," staffed with experts who know Russia intimately and whose job is to winnow all Russian publications (including correspondents' censored dispatches) for the significance that lies behind the distorted facts. For, concludes I.P.I., "there is no 'news' of the Soviet Union as such, but only information indeterminate in quantity and undigested in character." Only experts, trained as journalists, can digest it and tell newspaper readers what the loaded story really means.

What the I.P.I, report actually proves, without quite saying so, is that the free press is being booby-trapped by its fetish for "objectivity." This leads it to treat stories from Russia just like news from New York or Chicago. The reader who has come to expect the A.P., for example, to play news "straight" is not warned that an A.P. dispatch from Moscow is triply loaded. The outstanding example is the Times itself, which only last week, as it has many times in the past, was giving top play to Correspondent Salisbury's dispatches without reminding the reader that their contents might be directly out of Pravda. Ironically, no one has defended the "objectivity" fetish more vehemently than I.P.I.'s founder and president, Times Editor Markel. If it achieves nothing else, the I.P.I.'s study may cause U.S. editors to realize that their "objective" treatment of stories from Russia makes them unwitting tools of Moscow.

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