Ward Just

If the commentators would occasionally get out of the way, we might be able to see the action and listen to the words as the candidate chooses to speak them.

The world presumably is “at peace,”but in these days to be a serious foreign correspondent is to be a war correspondent.

Some cities still support two newspapers—but barely. Being No. 2 is increasingly frustrating and expensive, and made much more precarious by the illusion that all the news is carried by television. Yet, some big city “second papers" are spunkily holding on—for how long, only their accountants know.

“All the news that’s fit to print” means one thing for the New York Times and something else for the typical small city daily. There are 271 newspapers in America with circulations of 25‚000 to 50,000. Our print, tube, and sound critic here tells how the news “cuts” in one large town.

A Time writer once described the newsmagazine’s technique as applying the tricks of fiction to the presentation of fact. That technique has bred many emulators among newspapers as well as magazines. Does it make for more informative journalism than the old-fashioned “just the facts, ma’am” method? Here, in the first of periodical observations on the workings of the news business, a reporter turned novelist examines dijfering approaches to a preoccupation that has become perennial—the effort to divine the future of the last of the Kennedy brothers.

The Carter Administration follows no precedents, and Washington still doesn’t know what to make of him, or it.