A Word About Propaganda

"Officials said tonight that Russia's newest diplomatic note shows the Kremlin wants to turn a summit conference into a propaganda circus' instead of seeking meaningful agreements."

Thus ran an Associated Press story last week, and it brought one member editor to a boil. Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer lashed out in an editorial charging the A.P. with trafficking in propaganda itself. Scolded he-'When [A.P.] accepts, for worldwide dissemination, cracks at Russians from unnamed 'officials' it is making itself a mouthpiece, not an objective news service ... What officials? The story did not name them. Undoubtedly the reporter was not allowed to do so. If not, the story should have said directly that 'the State Department said,' if that is the fact. If that is not the fact, the A.P. should not give its great facilities to some 'officials' merely expressing their own views and not the formalized, quoted opinion of the government itself."

Editor Daniels, 55, was talking through his hat about the A.P. story, which was at worst, dully written, but he could speak with some authority about propaganda in the news. As Franklin Roosevelt's press secretary in 1945, he admitted last year he released only those pictures of F.D.R. at Yalta (two months before his death) that showed him "least marked by deadly haggard weariness."

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