"What I have to say today," said the guest speaker, Robert H. Estabrook, 42, editorial page director of the Washington Post and Times Herald, "won't be quite so harmonious as the tunes from the massed Michigan bands." Thus forewarned, the assembled journalism students at the University of Michigan sat back to listen to some exceptionally frank criticism of the U.S. daily press.
The newspapers that smolder indignantly over the transgressions of others, said Estabrook, might well take a good look at their own: "Recently, the press became very exercised about morality when Charles Van Doren put on his show of contrition. But...