Announcer A:
Today and every day, the American people must make decisions on which their whole survival may depend. To make sound decisions the people must be informed. For this they depend on the nation's free press. How well is the nation's press doing its essential job? The people have a right to know the truth. They have a responsibility to ask. The right to question. The Press and the People.
As moderator, from Harvard University, the winner of the Peabody Award for television and radio journalism and the Lauterbach Award for outstanding contributions in the field of civil liberties, Mr. Louis Lyons.
Louis:
The question we shall explore is how informed is American public opinion on the Soviet challenge. We have two guests who are eminently qualified to discuss this.
Announcer A:
One of our guests was an editor of the
London Economist and is one of the world's most influential writers on politics and economics. She is the author of five books and many articles dealing with the world power conflict between East and West, Miss Barbara Ward.
Announcer B:
Miss Ward says, and I quote: "We need a much greater understanding of the Soviet challenge to the West and of what other nations think of us. This understanding depends to an overwhelming degree on the quality of reporting from our correspondents abroad and on how much of these reports their editors will print."
Announcer A:
Our other guest is a distinguished American statesman, a former Governor of
Illinois who last year returned from a 7000-mile trip to the
Soviet Union, Mr. Adlai Stevenson.
Announcer B:
Mr. Stevenson has written, and I quote: "We have been badly informed and are badly mistaken. The Soviet Union is a stable power system and is not on the brink of internal collapse...Our emotional reaction to the rise of communism has been to reject reality, aided and abetted by our political leaders."
Louis:
For years, the advances of the Soviet Union have caught us by surprise. We were jolted to learn they had the bomb years before our leaders expected it. Their
Sputnik shocked us into realizing that they were way ahead in space development, in scientific research, and in the education of scientists.
Their leadership in the field of missiles has forced reappraisal of our whole defense program. Most recently communism has faced us with a challenge that our economists say may be the most serious threat of all – an economic competition for the uncommitted and undeveloped areas of the world. Our earlier surprises demonstrated a deficiency in our information about the Soviets.
How well are we now informed about the economic challenge of the Soviets and what it will take to meet it? Well, we will ask our guests, Governor Stevenson and Miss Barbara Ward, who in private life is Lady Jackson. Miss Ward, you're quoted as saying we need a much greater understanding of the Soviet challenge. Won't you spell out this challenge?
Ward:
Well, I'd like to leave it to Governor Stevenson to talk about the challenge inside Russia because he's recently been there. And I'd like to talk a little perhaps about something I've seen at first hand, living in
Africa, and visiting
Asia. That is the mounting Soviet offensive of trade and aid in all of these underdeveloped areas.
I question whether we've yet really measured the force they can put into it, or the scale of effort that they are prepared to devote to it. I wonder whether, just as we have been surprised in almost every other field of Soviet activity, whether we haven't got something of a surprise coming up here and whether we can't for once be well informed and ready in advance.
Louis:
Thank you. We'll want to go into that, Miss Ward, and Governor, you've just been quoted as saying that we have been badly informed about the Soviets and so are unrealistic in our attitude toward them. Won't you explain that?
Stevenson:
Well, Mr. Lyons, first let me say how honored I am to appear on this program with Barbara Ward, with Lady Jackson, and let me say that it wasn't long ago, if we will recall, that it was commonplace in this country to refer to the Soviet Union as a land of peasants, of muzhiks, and so on who couldn't repair a tractor. And this sort of derision has now melted into a sudden realization that this country in some forty years has become literally a threat to the United States in terms of industrial development.
This development, which I have had an opportunity to witness, is spectacular, as we are now beginning to appreciate. It's come along very rapidly. It has provided not only for the enormous military machine, for the great scientific development, which we have seen examples so frequently in recent years; it is also improving the well-being of the people, and has had a surplus for development of the underdeveloped countries.
Louis:
And you contributed, Governor, to our understanding of the Soviets by coming home and doing a dozen articles on your tour which many of our leading papers printed. But just last
November, the New York Herald Tribune, one of our leading papers, printed an analysis by a
New York investment firm which concluded that the Soviet economic threat was much exaggerated. They couldn't catch up with the United States because they were already crowding their capacity. Now we see a certain amount of that sort of conclusion. What do you say to this?
Stevenson:
Unhappily, we've seen entirely too much of that conclusion for a good many years. We've been assured repeatedly and often from high places that the Soviet Union was an unstable power system, that it was on the verge of collapse, and that ultimately the people would not tolerate the loss of consumer goods and would rise in their righteous wrath and that the system could not survive.
The fact of the matter is that it has survived. It was said here a moment ago – and, to all external appearances at least, this is true – it's a strong and a stable system. My impression is that we have had enough of this, of this, what Barbara Ward has most aptly referred to as this ideological prejudice about the facts with respect to the Soviet Union. And that the sooner we face the facts, the better it will be for us.
Ward:
I wonder if I could take that point up with the Governor because I think it's a very important one. We have had in the West, and perhaps quite especially in the United States, this underlying belief that a system under Soviet control and pursuing Communist methods cannot beat us, a priori, because free enterprise, as such, is better. And one sees that in a number of statements that have been made both in the press, with its editorials, and by politicians. From this flows another consequence which I think is a dangerous one. And that is the belief that to describe Soviet formidability is in some way selling America short. Governor, you've met that.
Stevenson:
I have a classic example of it, if you will permit me to count it here, Mr. Lyons, in the campaign of 1956 I remarked in a speech one time that in my estimation the time was near at hand when Soviet economic development would be of greater importance, a greater menace, if you please, to the United States than Soviet military development.
And I was promptly chastised by none other than the Vice-President of the United States, Mr. Nixon, who said that I was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. I don't think knowing the facts or revealing them or asking the people to consider them is aid and comfort to the enemy. I think it is the essential condition of a successful democracy, of our rearmament, our preparation, if you please, to meet the challenge of the Soviet Union.
Louis:
Well, Miss Ward, on a closely related point, Philip Reed, head of General Electric, in an article just November 16 in the Herald Tribune, said the Russians can't successfully challenge us in economics because they lack the dynamic of our competitive enterprise. Well, one wonders in view of what you've written on economics, Miss Ward, whether American competition is going to be the big factor, if it's limited to new-model cars and household conveniences as against the Soviet effort in basic production?
Ward:
Well, to take us a lot of, a long way here, but I would like to say one thing, and that is that the Soviets do challenge us in those areas in which we all admit that government activity is necessary and essential. They challenge us in the field of education. They challenge us in the field of military activity. They challenge us in the field of space research and in all kinds of research which can't in any way be related to the market.
Now, I'm perfectly certain that the free competitive system does a wonderful job for the whole range of the things we need, and it is certainly not in any way saying that free competition is failing if one says that, Look, look at the Soviet model; see where government activity is succeeding; and don't use ideological prejudice to blind your eyes to the facts of success in the government field simply by saying it's government and therefore it can't succeed. And that I think we do see in some of our editorials.
Stevenson:
I'd like to, if I could, underline that, Mr. Lyons. One of the problems the United States confronts, and I think it's a very serious one – it's a social, philosophical, psychological problem – how we can describe Soviet success in the economic or scientific or educational field, or wherever you please, without appearing to advocate the system.
Now this is a very difficult thing. Curiously enough, I've known many people who have come back here and attempted to report the simple facts, as I have myself, and have been roundly abused on the assumption that they're advocating the system. Now until we can get mature enough, until our reporting and our editorial writers can report the facts and distinguish them from advocacy, I think we're in a very sad way.
Ward:
Yes, I think this is a very serious point, because it does affect the kind of comment that is made upon the facts that are presented. I don't think that, at least in many of the great newspapers of America, the facts are not represented. There is an immense amount of reporting – steady reporting – of Russia. But, very often, the conclusions drawn are, have this ideological bias – it's Communist, therefore we cannot admit its success.
Louis:
We find a great deal of reporting on Russia and a great deal of comprehensive reporting on the economic side in such papers as The New York Times, with its great foreign service, and the
Christian Science Monitor, which has had some articles in depth, and in papers like the Milwaukee Journal, where
Harry Pease has done a series on the satellites recently.
We find papers like the Kansas City Star which will attack every returned traveler from Russia, be he doctor, dentist, teacher, or farmer, and get his story. A sort of a home-town view of the Russians. Well, you, Governor, you have written a series of articles, and Walter Lippmann went and saw the Russians and wrote a series of articles; also Mr. James Reston of The New York Times, and Senator Hubert Humphrey. There's been quite a lot all together. And yet we find so able a specialist on information as Mr. Reston himself telling us that he feels with all the hard information that's put out the public doesn't have much stomach for it. Do you find this? How much of a limiting factor is what we can take?
Stevenson:
I wish I was an authority on this field, what the absorptive capacity of sense in the American people. I must say I've tried to find out a couple of times, and not very successfully. But I think there is a lot of basically good reporting about the
Soviet Union – the facts – and especially recently. I think
Sputnik was a sort of break-through.
We broke through our psychological resistance to the facts about the realities of the
Soviet Union after having reassured ourselves that they couldn't do this, and they couldn't do that, and they couldn't catch up – words that unhappily are still repeated all the time by big, by leaders in this country, including some very distinguished big businessmen who have recently assured me that the Russians can't possibly overtake us in economic development.
The fact of the matter is that many little papers don't pick these things up. Too much of our press is preoccupied largely with entertainment, rather than with information. If we had had adequate reporting throughout the country, would we have been surprised at each one of these discoveries about the
Soviet Union? Would we have been surprised that their education had made such a great advance? Would we have been surprised that their science had enabled them to launch the first
Sputnik and the Lunik?
Would we have been surprised that they are now economically overtaking us in the underdeveloped countries, as Miss Ward has just mentioned? Would we be surprised – in a few months, I'm afraid, if not years hence – when we suddenly discover that their influence in foreign trade is a major factor that confronts all of the Western trading nations?
Louis:
Let me ask Miss Ward who has seen journalism in
Britain as well as in this country and in other places. James Warburg said on this program recently that the lack of an opposition press, and so of a critical press about foreign policy, is a major reason for what he called lack of an informed public opinion on it. How do we stand as you see us, in our editorials and comments, in relation to the British press, or in any other country where there is an opposition press?
Ward:
Well, I think it's awfully hard to compare the two because we don't have your institution of columnists. Now you have columnists who are printed right through the nation and they represent very different points of view. And I know as I go around America in many cities, the columns seem almost like a Socratic dialogue because you have, say, Mr. Marquis Childs on one side, Mr. David Lawrence on the other, and in any one day they may in fact be saying almost diametrically opposite things. So no one can say that in some areas at least America isn't having an opposition point of view.
And if one refers to the editorial slant, which does seem to be on the right, to be extremely Republican in its balance, then also one has equally to say that they don't always win the elections. Therefore, presumably, the public opinion itself is keeping some check there. So I don't honestly think it is a one-party press that is the problem. Frankly, I think it's something rather different which afflicts all popular newspapers, and that is the point the Governor was making: that they are designed to a great degree for amusement.
You know you really can't say that studying Russian economic growth is terribly amusing. And you can't say that the Russian trade offensive around the world is as good as a strip cartoon – it just isn't. Therefore, when Mr. Reston talks about a certain imperviousness to the facts, I think he is dealing with a very serious problem in the whole of Western democracy because we too have our tabloids; we too have our mass-circulation dailies where everything has to be spot, everything has to be a crisis. There is no space really for the sustained story. And this is a sustained story.
Louis:
Let me ask you this, and the Governor too, who's been a world traveler, but you live in
Africa, when you can get home, Miss Ward. You see the challenge to democracy as wanting to prove to them that that's a better model than communism for these newly developing societies. Well then, are we enough informed about these countries in
Africa and
Asia to understand this?
Ward:
Well, as I have said, I would agree with the Governor that the degree, the amount, of information is improving, but I don't know what he, I'd like to know what he thinks about this problem of spot news and entertainment, of the story that is told only when it breaks, whereas some of the biggest things that are happening in the world aren't breaking in that sense, they're building up slowly, I mean it's like an iceberg – you see the top above water with the
Sputnik, but what you've missed is the whole enormous scientific build-up that went before.
Louis:
I'm sure the Governor would be as interested as I would to have you say what you think as to the adequacy of the economic training of our newspapermen, as of your own. When you were very young, you started in a small publication, the
London Economist, writing about these great issues, and you soon had world attention. What did it take?
Ward:
Well, I think that is, I'd like to come back to that in a way, Mr. Lyons, but I still would like to know what the Governor thinks about this other problem of spot news, crisis reporting, and the difficulty of getting the big story over.
Stevenson:
It's very hard – and I shouldn't be saying this to you, Mr. Lyons, but because you know more about it than most anyone in our country – it's very hard to generalize about the American press, isn't it?
Stevenson:
We have a great variety of newspapers. Aside from the few who deal in what you might call hard content, most of our newspapers, I think, are preoccupied with entertainment and reflect generally what the people want, but I think, and that's characteristic of our politics. Generally, will dredge up just a cross-section of what we are, and I think our newspapers reflect pretty much a cross-section of what we are and what we want.
But I think the responsibility of the newspaper is sometimes to give us what we don't want but what we should know. And this is something that perhaps isn't consistent with the box office, with the circulation department's ideas of how you sell the package; and I'm afraid that probably is part of the problem. Maybe more basic even than that is the difficulty in this country of facing up to the hard realities in a time of peace.
We can do anything that we are called upon to do in time of war, as we've demonstrated time and again, especially in the last two wars, in time of war. But that's easy, because then you have one objective, that is to defeat the enemy. But in peacetime, however, when you have to prepare for all of these things, when you have to face these hard and difficult and stubborn facts about our adversaries in the world, this and also the system of government that we have constructed here – the checks and balances of the legislative and executive and judicial and so on – have not contributed somehow to this easy, incisive, perfect leadership that we need governmentally. And I think this is another reason why our press has an even larger responsibility to help the people understand.
Louis:
Well, Governor, you've said...
Stevenson:
That sounds more like a speech than a recitation.
Louis:
You said in your article in The New York Times Magazine, just March 1st, that Americans should travel more and see bow the poor are getting poorer in some countries and the rich richer in others. Would you apply that advice to editors who don't have their own foreign services?
Stevenson:
I certainly would. I certainly would. I think it's not only the editors, I think it's basically the publishers. One of our real problems is the publishers who, I would hope, would try to see the world in round, try to see more of it, to see it as a whole and find out if they can't escape from some of the psychological inhibitions from which they suffer, these ideological restraints, if you please, or prejudices. This is, this is too trying a time for us to give our people anything less than the best – and I mean by that, the truth – if we're going to make the democratic system succeed.
Ward:
You know, Mr. Lyons, I would say on your earlier point about the training of journalists and so forth that this is really much less important than the kind of leadership that the people who really control the press can give. Because, although it's true that in the last ten years a quite new field of journalism has arisen. I mean, before the war, as far as I can remember, we didn't have to know a gross national product when we saw it, and we didn't really have to know what proportion of net income had to be invested to get a break-through into economic modernization.
By golly, in those days even the economist didn't talk like that either. So I'm admitting that there's a perfectly new field of economic journalism which is now perhaps essential to survival, because this is the kind of force the Soviets are mobilizing. It is essential now that we understand the meaning of a six percent rate of growth as opposed to a two percent rate of growth and so forth – the Soviet as opposed to the American figure.
That is all essential. But even so I don't think the best informed reporters will really get their way unless the leadership in the press, the people who really control it, want to give a long picture, want to give a sustained story. There's one thing that I know a great friend of mine, Mr. Lester Markel of The New York Times, is very anxious to see happen. And that is that the news agencies, the wire services which make up so much of the foreign news for the small newspapers, might consider every week putting out a kind of digest or summary of the week's news which gave people a little depth or a little perspective.
And he said that a great many newspapers which don't have full and adequate foreign reporting would use that kind of survey, and it would give people a little less hectic view of the world and a little more sense of proportion, which you get, for instance, by reading The New York Times Sunday news service. I think this is an admirable idea, but it isn't going to be put through unless leaders of the wire services and leaders in the press really go for this kind of thing. What do you think, Governor?
Louis:
Well Governor, to take for a minute our side of this competition with the Soviets, Miss Ward has been telling us about the economic strengthening we need in our defenses, our education, our science, our whole economy. Do you feel that we are enough informed about what this means in terms of budget, of taxes, of government programs, that come up immediately and so on?
Stevenson:
Well, we have an annual debate in this country on foreign aid and how much it's going to cost, and when we have to cut the budget we usually cut it at the expense of the foreign-aid bill. So there's a certain amount of reporting and education that's going on in this field, and I hope there will be more and more because it's extremely expensive and it's very hard to explain.
And I know a little bit about this from personal experience. It's a little hard to explain to somebody why they should spend money abroad to improve the lot of the Indonesians, for example, when the garbage hasn't been collected in the alley behind their house for want of money. These are some of the problems that we confront in the problem of communication and understanding and truth about our situation in the world, and the press is unhappily, and the politicians are the means of communication to which we have to look.
Louis:
Well, Miss Ward, you have said that we needed also to understand the image that people in other countries have of us. As you've seen the people in
Africa and
Asia, what about this image that we don't get?
Ward:
Well I would say, it's awfully hard again, just as you can't generalize about newspapers, it's awfully hard to generalize about Africans.
Louis:
Well, does the world in their perspective look very different from the way it does to our Washington-Moscow axis of the cold war?
Ward:
Well, of course, their one passionate desire to keep out of that. There is an African proverb that when the bull elephants fight the grass is trampled down, and I think an awful lot of people in
Asia and
Africa feel that they're the grass and would like to keep out of the way. But on this question of the image, I think that some of the more thoughtful ones cannot fail to he impressed by the sense they have that Russia wants to go somewhere, and that the Western world wants to stop them.
Louis:
Nor can they help but be impressed with the fact that a poor country has pulled itself up by its bootstraps.
Louis:
It has an enormous magnetic attraction to other poor countries, doesn't it?
Stevenson:
And I think this is what we have to understand more and more in this country: that when one-third of the world is free, one-third of the world Communist, and one-third of the world is, is uncommitted, the Communist struggle for that other third is going to decisively weight the power and force and influence in the world for generations to come. And this is the heart of the struggle.
Ward:
And I think they have the impression through propaganda but also, as the Governor points out, from this Operation Bootstrap in the
Soviet Union of pulling up to within reach of America in forty years they have the impression of dynamism. The thing that America used to stand for was the shot that was heard around the world, the sense of being in the vanguard of human liberation and the excitement of human progress. I don't think America stands there today. I think she should. And I feel that in some aspects of dynamism that the Russians have created an image which tends to efface ours. And we spend our time trying to stop them, so...
Stevenson:
May I add one further word in defense of the American press – that it's not easy to report from the
Soviet Union. They still impose a censorship, and the same is true, as you know, in many areas.
Louis:
Let me ask you and this will have to be the last question, just for a word on it. There is much discussion about the desirability of more participation by the public in shaping foreign policy, and yet some insist it's a job for the experts. To what extent do you think it's useful that all of us who can should get into this debate, Governor?
Stevenson:
Well, ultimately in a democracy – and this is introduced as another major problem – a democracy, our policy is going to be only as effective as the people insist. And the people, therefore, have to understand, have to know if they're going to support it ultimately, have to understand what we're doing and why. So therefore they are bound to be involved in the formulation of policy. Obviously, they can't know the intricacies and detail of negotiations and historical antecedents of every question that arises, but they must understand the basic elements of our policy.
Louis:
Just a word from you, Miss Ward, if you'll comment on that.
Ward:
Well, Louis, I agree, I think, that in a free society we can't, particularly in time of peace, go very much faster than people will go, will in fact be ready to go. And this is where one comes back again to the press. If the press is one of the great media of information and if the press does its job, the people are much more likely to be able to do theirs.
Louis:
Thank you very much, we come back to the press. Thank you Miss Ward and thank you Governor Stevenson. What we've been discussing is certainly the most strategic problem before our nation – how prepared we are to meet the competition of communism in the world. The first step to meet it is surely to understand it, and the question is whether we are getting the information that's essential to our understanding.
The problem is so central that, as we have seen, it reaches not only behind the Iron Curtain to the development and capabilities and programs of the Soviets, but to the most remote areas of the world, where communism's challenge is already competitive with our economic efforts to encourage free democratic societies. This is a challenge, of course, to our political leadership, to our economic system, to our whole society, and, most immediately, to our press, which must be our eyes and ears. Here, if anywhere, the adequacy of our information is a basic element in our chances of survival. Well until next week at this time on The Press and the People, this is Louis Lyons.