Responsibility of the Press
Indeed, if Mr. Atkinson will look about him in the Soviet Union, he will see an extension of the idea suggested by Dr. Kuska. As described by Alexander Kendrick at an American-Soviet Cultural Conference in New York recently, the Soviet press is unique. Before the Revolution, there were 859 newspapers in the Czar’s realm, with a total circulation of 2,700,000 and a policy dictated by the Russo-Asiatic Bank. Today there are 9,000 papers in 80 languages with a circulation of 40,000,000 and several readers to every copy of each paper.
Compared to our papers, there are obvious differences: no sensation, no spice, no scandal, no desperate competitive drive for entertainment. The newspapers are all informative, they tend to be typographically excellent, their news is presented in careful, balanced form so that the constant reader is prepared to grasp new developments as they take place. The cultural leaders of the country, scholars, critics, writers and musicians, contribute to the papers.
The principal difference, however, is in their publishers. No paper is published for profit. No multimillionaire can control public opinion. No people’s organization is without a newspaper: trade unions, hundreds of them; national groups; local, district and national government councils; sport groups; youth groups; women’s organizations. They are crusaders, too; not reactionary anti-vivisection crusaders like the Hearstlings here, but stinging critics of public and governmental bodies for sloppy execution of their tasks. And there is a contact between the readers and the papers that would be inconceivable here. Newspaper staffs hold regular meetings with readers to discuss problems raised by the readers and most papers have an annual readers’ conference at which editors make public accounting of their stewardship. The Soviet Constitution guarantees printing presses and stocks of paper to the organizations of the people, such as trade unions, cultural and scientific organizations, etc. It has not remained a paper promise: the press is entirely in popular hands. It operates in a responsible way to further Soviet objectives by stimulating more active support, by exposing failures.
There is, however, definitely no freedom of the press for rent-collecting landlords, bankers, industrial monopolists. The Soviet press is frankly not a formally democratic press but a press of the working people. That no longer bars any important body of Soviet citizens, since exploiting classes no longer exist there. The rule operates primarily to assure an ever-expanding popular participation in the nation’s political and economic life, while it hampers the work of hostile foreign intelligence services. This would hardly seem the fit subject of a diplomatic protest by the British Foreign Office or the U. S. State Department.
A press of that kind would solve most of the problems of “freedom of the press” in our country. It can be attained somewhat short of Socialism, as is occurring in some parts of Eastern Europe. But such a goal must be recognized as a distant one. Its attainment will require the utmost effort of the whole American people. A first step is to spread understanding of the class character and function of the press as a whole.