"Responsibility for Truth"

"As an editor I wouldn't hire the Government as a reporter because it does a bad job of reporting the biggest story in history to the people. I wouldn't hire the Government as a news service because its stories are too often unreliable and incomplete."

With these straight-from-the-shoulder words one of the leading publishers of the Northwest last week took the Administration to task for failing to come clean with the U.S. people on the progress of the war.

He had a big audience: some 5,000,000 listeners to the Town Meeting of the Air. Big Palmer Hoyt, onetime city editor, now publisher, of the Portland Oregonian, was listened to with respect, for his paper has a reputation for fair dealing. Said "Ep" Hoyt:

"Just as we have experienced many defeats in armed warfare, so have we suffered many losses in the sector of news and information. From Pearl Harbor to the Java Sea, from the Java Sea to Murmansk and the Aleutians we have failed to utilize the great tonic that the stark realism of bad news can give a determined and united people.

"I think Americans are willing to go without sugar, gas, rubber or oil if it will win this war. But to clothe themselves with such a psychology Americans must be sure that privation is necessary. . . .

"The people do not feel the Government has been realistic about the facts of the war. There is no basis for the idea that America cannot take bad news. In this international debacle America has a responsibility for truth which neither Government nor press should lightly put aside."

If there was much truth in what Publisher Hoyt said, there is also much truth in the assertion that the press itself has often been far from realistic about the facts of war--regularly overplaying small victories in too big headlines and burying unpleasant news where it gets little attention.

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