ABSTRACT
As a result of his treatment by the press during and following the Cuban crisis Russell was determined to combat all those tendencies in the U.S. which he felt served to strengthen government control of the press so as to use it as a weapon in the Cold War. After reading “The Management of News,” an article by Lester Markel, associate editor of The New York Times, published in the February 9 issue of Saturday Review, Russell wrote to the Saturday Review and his letter appeared on 16 March 1963 under the heading “The Press as a Weapon”:
Should the American Government decide to sterilize “subversives,” “liberals” would be concerned to see that there was a proper right of appeal.
Lester Markel’s article “The Management of News” is most astonishing for its lack of self-consciousness. The “news” is now acknowledged as that information which suits governmental convenience. Orwell would have admired Mr. Markel’s subtlety of mind. Most American apologists for nuclear genocide are less frank than Mr. Markel. It would be well to examine what it is he assumes and asserts.
He assumes that the function of the press is to criticize the efficiency of governmental operations in the Cold War, which, he declares, is as crucial as any hot war and in which the press is a vital weapon.
The American government systematically lies about the consequences of nuclear fallout. It pursues policies the consequence of which can only be nuclear annihilation. The Cuban crisis is a primary example. Mr. Markel, however, would have us accept the totalitarian function of the press for simple reasons. He assumes that the Cold War is desirable, that the government should lie and suppress truth in the pursuit of it, and that criticism should never begin with the criminal assumptions of American policy.
I submit that the eager readiness to eliminate several hundred million human beings, the sublime conviction that American rockets are permissable but other rockets are wicked, the refusal to allow that sane men (including journalists) have a duty to tell the truth about the danger to mankind, establishes once again the shameful betrayal of America by “liberals” who embrace the conception of the world prepared for the American public in the Pentagon and the exploitative centers of corporate capitalism.
