The press had been put on warning. The danger to its freedom came not from external pressures but from internal excesses, said the $215,000 report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press (TIME, March 31).
Had the report hit home? If so, it was a glancing blow. Some of the best papers regarded the commission's warnings as a challenge; others spoke up with more vehemence than penitence, and some of the worst chose to ignore the whole thing. Sample reactions:
"Totalitarian arguments," huffed Robert R. McCormick's Chicago Tribune. A work of amateurs and professors, said...