Harper's Magazine landed a heavy counter-punch on the Harvard-baiting Chicago Tribune this month, when its current issue challenged the Trib on 79 major statements that the Trib made in one 2,040-word news story.
The Harper's article is written by Milton Mayer of Chicago University. After pointing out that the Tribune story ran as the news lead on the front page, Mayer proceeds to reprint it in full, adding footnotes of his own based on exhaustive research.
Zoo Keeper
The Tribune, for example, claimed that a Canadian communist "was given a job with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, which was headed by Archibald MacLeish, before Julian Huxley, former London zoo keeper, took it over."
Mayer retorts: "MacLeish was never head of UNESCO."
Furthermore, said Mayer, "If Julian Huxley, Secretary of the London Zoological Society (1935-42), is a former London zoo-keeper, then Colonel R.R. McCormick, President of the Chicago Sanitary District (1905-10), is a former Chicago sewage disposer."
Main targets of the Tribune article, written by ace reporter Frank Hughes, were the members of the Commission on Freedom of the Press, a private group established in 1946 to study American Journalism.
Hits Chafee
Zechariah Chafee, Jr., Langdell Professor of Law; William E. Hocking, Alford Professor of Philosophy, emeritus; Archibald MacLeish, Law School graduate; Reinhold Niebuhr, University preacher; and Arthur M. Schlesinger, professor of History are five members of the twelve-man commission. They all figure prominently in the Tribune article, as did other faculty members and alumni of the University.
Hughes charges that Commission members have been instrumental in enlisting multi-million dollar, tax-exempt foundations behind attempts to tamper with freedom of the press in the United States."
These foundations, Hughes continued, have for years been giving cash grants to "communists or to the publication of communist propaganda."
No Foundations
Attacking Hughes' article at its heart, Mayer claims that no foundations at all were involved in the survey made by the Commission. He quoted from the group's reports to prove that it did not propose curtailment of free press.
After casting doubt on the political loyalty of one William Benton, Hughes says that Professor Chafee, American delegate to the United Nations subcommittee on freedom of information and of the press, had been suggested for the post by Benton. He also attempts to link Chafee's name to Alger Hiss.
With this groundwork prepared, Hughes blasted the U.N. subcommission, and claimed it had "drafted a code to establish what newspapers in this country and throughout the world may and may not publish." This code, wrote Hughes, "could supercede the first amendment of the Constitution if adopted as a treaty by the senate."
Mayer says that the subcommission never advocated interference in the dissemination of information; that, on the contrary, the group had gone on record as opposed to any restriction of free press aside from already existing laws about treason, incitement to violence, obscenity, and libel.
Won't Violate Constitution
The code could not violate the Constitution, wrote Mayer, because it does not compel any signatory nation to limit freedom of expression in any way whatever.
The Tribune described Chafee as "one of the most vigorous definers of the Soviet view on freedom of the press." Mayer merely points to the similarity in sound of the verbs "define" and "defend."
"Niebuhr has preached socialism and denounced capitalism for many years," Hughes charged. "Niebuhr attacks what he calls the Marxist illusion in many of his works," Mayer replied.
The Tribune article concluded its case against the Commission by saying that "these 12 professors repeated the accusation in their report that newspaper owners and workers possess the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth."
This statement, said Mayer, is "a misrepresentation of a misquotation from William Allan White." Furthermore, he added that not all the commission members were professors.
At the end of his article, Mayer quoted a statement made in a Tribune editorial in 1947, commemorating the Chicago paper's hundredth anniversary. It said:
"The Chicago Tribune lives and grows because it is first of all a newspaper. It spares no expense, no effort, to gather the news of every significant development and trend at home and abroad. And it prints it, completely and without compromise, in the public interest.
