REMEMBERING THE 'FATHER OF PRESS CRITICISM'

By: Nat Hentoff Sometimes the 'Facts' Lie, Columnist Suggests


When I was 15, I picked up a copy of a four-page weekly (cover price: 2 cents)
called In Fact: An Antidote for Falsehoods in the Daily Press. Its
publisher, editor, and reporter was George Seldes, an alumnus of the United
Press and the Chicago Tribune. He had covered American forces during
World War I and later reported on Lenin and Mussolini, who had Seldes thrown out
of Italy. Seldes had resigned from the Chicago Tribune because its
proprietor, Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick, censored those dispatches that did
not conform with the colonel's fierce views.

I was reading most of Boston's daily newspapers when I first saw In Fact,
but the news in those four pages startled me. Seldes, for example, printed a
letter from the commander of the American Legion ordering Legionnaires not to
wear their uniforms whenever engaged in strikebreaking. He also attacked the
establishment press for not printing a 1938 report by Dr. Raymond Pearl, head of
the biology department at Johns Hopkins University, that linked cigarettes to
cancer.

After becoming a reporter, I read several of Seldes' books: "You Can't Print
That," "Lords of the Press," and "Even the Gods Can't Change History." In 1982,
I wrote about the mentoring Seldes had inadvertently given me in
Lithopinion, a journal published by Local 1 of the Amalgamated
Lithographers of America. A few months later, I got a letter from Seldes at his
home in Hartland Four Corners, Vt. He told me he appreciated my article because
by the early 1970s he had been listed as dead in "Webster's Biographical
Dictionary" and "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations."

We corresponded, and I talked to him on the phone. He told me how In Fact
in 1940 - 10 years after it was founded - had died. It had become so
controversial that even labor unions, among its earliest subscribers, canceled.
It also had been boycotted by the Communist Party. The mainstream press largely
ignored his revelations, even though a number of reporters from leading
newspapers had sent him stories for In Fact that they could not get into
print.

Seldes was blacklisted by The New York Times for some 40 years, because
- at the request of Heywood Broun, president of The Newspaper Guild -
Seldes had testified in a hearing about the wretched salaries that journalists,
including those at the Times, were getting. Listed falsely as a member of
the Communist Party by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Seldes was
summoned by U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy and so furiously proved that he had never
belonged to any party, group, society, or faction that McCarthy came out of a
closed hearing to tell the waiting press that Seldes had been cleared.

"That was a first," Seldes told me. "How many people have been cleared by
McCarthy himself?"

Among the accomplishments of which he was most proud, he said, was that "In
Fact was the first regular publication in the whole world that was devoted
to press criticism and to publishing news that had been suppressed by the
press." I'm not sure about "the whole world," but In Fact was the first
press criticism I'd seen and the most unsparing I've ever seen.

I last saw Seldes in 1985. After many years of research, he had put together
"The Great Thoughts," published by Ballantine. The book's enthusiastic reviews
led to impressive sales - and canceled the rest of his obituaries. During
his book tour, I interviewed Seldes in his New York hotel room.

At 94, he was busily clipping from several newspapers spread on a table before
him. Underlining some of the clips, he looked up, didn't even say hello, and
handed me several of the clips. "You ought to look into these stories," he
commanded. In "A Press Challenged," Jack Cox quoted from the 1947 Commission on
Freedom of the Press: "It is no longer enough to report the fact truthfully. It
is now necessary to report the truth about the fact."

I knew George Seldes enough to believe he would have reported the truth about
the fact concerning the deal between special prosecutor Robert Ray and William
Jefferson Clinton. By focusing on Clinton's testimony during his deposition in
the Paula Jones case - and giving him a pass on the more serious perjury
before a federal grand jury - Ray freed Clinton from criminal charges on
the subsequent obstruction of justice, including tampering with witnesses.

Explaining his rationale on ABC-TV's "Nightline" (Jan. 19), Ray said, "Some-
times we may rely too much on law and Constitution and statutes." And on NBC-
TV's "Meet the Press" (Jan. 21), Ray added that he had acted "in the best
interest of the country, so that the new president would be afforded an
opportunity with some space ... for a fresh start."

I can hear George Seldes exploding: "Many Americans, including the new
president, may want to move on, but it should not be done at the expense of the
truth!"

I did not see much comparable indignation in the reporting and commentary by
today's press on the deal that kept Clinton from being indicted.



Nat Hentoff is a writer for The Village Voice. His "Getting It Right" column appears monthly in E&P.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.