Boring from Within

Communist newspapers in the West are too dull even for Communists. At a meeting of France's Communist Central Committee, Party Secretary Etienne Fajon, 48, explained why the circulation of France's Communist L'Humanite has slipped from 500,000 to 120,000 in the past nine years. Said he: "L'Humanite is boring. The paper suffers from a series of consecrated formulas and stereotyped vocabulary . . . Our journalistic language is frightfully poor. This comes from a paralyzing fear of not using the same terms as the party's official documents."

In seeming response to Fajon's orders, L'Humanite promptly filled its columns with sports news, nonpolitical features, and sensational six-column spreads on murders. Last week the paper even used what it would have regarded in the past as a "bourgeois" circulation slogan, suggested by a suburban Paris party cell. The slogan: "Every morning, your bread, a good cup of coffee and L'Humanite."

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