The Press: Red but Not Read

In a converted loft on Manhattan's West 26th Street a handful of Communists put to bed another Worker (no longer the Daily Worker), a sickly-looking eight-page tabloid. "Forty-two percent of all plants being operated in the Soviet Union," exulted a Page One story, "were constructed in the last four years." The market for such "news" is dwindling these days. The Worker is a failure, a Red newspaper that is printed but not read. Its claim to 15,963 paid circulation is as phony as its news. At week's end loyal party workers hawk unsold copies through Harlem, the Lower East Side slums,...