HOOVER AGGRESSIVELY COURTED NEWSPAPER EDITORS

By: Staff Reports APBnews.com Says Some ASNE Members Eagerly Cooperated





APBnews.com reported late Wednesday that a newly released FBI file shows former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover aggressively - and often successfully - courted America's daily newspaper editors. The crime news site recently received a 672-page FBI file chronicling the American Society of Newspaper Editors from 1935 to 1988 after filing a Freedom of Information Act request.



See the full APB story, including a copy of the file in Adobe PDF format at http://www.apbnews.com/media/gfiles/asne/index.html.



APBnews correspondent David J. Krajicek wrote that the vast file contains numerous clippings and dossiers which Hoover used to rank newspapers as friends or enemies. Beginning in the 1930s, Hoover invited some ASNE members to "very special tours" of FBI headquarters in Washington. "The file shows some editors were delighted to become FBI toadies," Krajicek wrote.



Preferred editors were put on a "special correspondents' list" and other newspapers were removed from the bureau's mailing list for running unfavorable stories. For example, the editor of the Citizen-Patriot in Jackson, Mich., during the 1930s and '40s was considered a preferred editor.



In 1948, a Hoover assistant explained in a memo why editors should be easy for Hoover to woo: "The average editor is stuck to his desk. ... He is profoundly impressed by a personal contact. I don't believe the editors have the intimate contact with our field offices and even if they did there can be no satisfactory substitute, for the Director symbolizes the spirit of the bureau."



Editor & Publisher was among the many publications in the file, according to APB. In 1936, E&P Managing Editor Arthur T. Rabb wrote an ingratiating note to Hoover in an attempt to get an interview.



"It is probably no surprise to you that my 10-year-old son is somewhat of a hero among his peers because his father has shaken the hand of Mr. Hoover, nor that most of the kids hope to grow up to be G-men," Rabb wrote in a letter that ended up in the FBI's ASNE file. "Probably some allusion to that phenomenon belongs in our story."



Current ASNE President Richard Oppel, editor of the Austin American-Statesman, told APBnews, "I'm not sure whether to be amused or offended by J. Edgar Hoover's accounting of his contacts with ASNE. ... We all know there was a heavy layer of paranoia in the FBI and inexplicable surveillance of people and institutions at the heart of American life."



One of the stranger entries in the file is information about undercover FBI agents acting as moles to infiltrate ASNE meetings during the 1960s. The FBI withheld 59 pages of the report.







Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher.