Most Patagonians and a good many Americans consider TIME the No. 1 U. S. Magazine. Just as many, and perhaps more, Americans think of it as an overripe opinion sheet, filled with Yalemen, an inflated sense of its infallibility, and an intense desire to diddle at President-making. For every reader who admires the reporting and commentary of a staff that has included men like John Horsey, Theodore White, John Scott and Robert Sherrod, there is at least another who shudders at the forced cliches and elephantine ponderosities of "TIME-style" and gags at the thought of swallowing the Luce line, prepared with infinite cunning in the TIMEdifice in Rockefeller Center.

And yet this year, the second in the atomic era as TIME would put it, there is a crying need for intelligent and responsible reporting of happenings on this harassed planet--reporting that TIME's staff, if uncompelled to tread the grand old party line, is admirably equipped to supply. We are at a crossroads in foreign policy, atomic policy, domestic policy--and a well informed citizenry is our best insurance against disastrous delusions, irretrievable mistakes and, again to borrow a TIMEphrase, World War III.

Most Americans understandably view Russia with considerable fear and suspicion, and an already critical situation is worsened by TIME's habit of damning the land of the Soviets on all occasions. TIME annoys by its devotion to a nationalistic American Century and by its attempts to smear, with seeming objectivity, all liberal groups as Red, Commie or Pinko, a set of terms that was once the exclusive property of the Hearst press. Good Democrats wince when, as a "newsmagazine," it refers to Republican election victories in terms of solemn rejoicing for the country, and scoffs at or discounts Democratic triumphs. Luce thinking, like all party lines, is ofttimes indigestible.

Henry Luce, would-be President or President-maker, possesses a plethora of power in his direction of those three excellent magazines--TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE. Their staffs are among the finest of any paper or magazine in the nation. It is Mr. Luce's responsibility to see that they present the news objectively as well as readably. But we suppose that Mr. Luce, were any such proposition presented him, would lean back and jest: "What's the matter? Running out of hot air?"