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Your recent articles in re Wendell Willkie have been completely "unfunny" to the reader and others to whom I have talked. I know that what I say makes small difference to you, but your "sophisticated-smart" reports on Willkie have been "hitting below the belt." You seem to believe that amateurs in politics whose voices "croak" and "scratch" are objects to be ridiculed. Your smears, very subtly put, on Willkie's every action fall flat; and your reports concerning lack of enthusiasm and cynicism at his Chicago appearance are not true.
Mr. Willkie, regardless of what you think, is not selling patent medicine; and as a news magazine, your attempts to editorialize your news commentaries come as a hard slap to many who have always regarded you as source No. 1 for accurate information.
I wouldn't be so silly as to cancel my subscription, probably because I'm Scotch; but if you must be funny, let's have a joke page and let the rest be facts. There's too much poison-pen stuff from Dorothy Parker and Pegler, without your taking a hand. . . .
B. L. SIMPSON
Evanston, Ill.
> TIME has not tried to be funny. At bottom this is not a funny campaign (see National Affairs). TIME readers and other intelligent voters should know the bad news as well as the good news about both major candidates.—ED.
No Temptation
Sirs:
I have discontinued reading the newspapers because of their inaccuracies regarding the Presidential candidates. TIME is the only publication that I have found that gives me the news unbiased and unvarnished. Please do not ever deviate from your policy of "telling the truth always"—"letting the chips fall where they may." No matter how much vilification is heaped upon you—or how much you are tempted to listen to big Willkie advertisers.
MRS. LUCILE SCHMITT
San Antonio, Tex.
> To give credit where slurs are not due: no advertiser, Republican or Democratic, has tried to tell TIME how to set its editorial course in this campaign.—ED.
Mr. Gedye's Job
Sirs:
Your statement [TIME, Sept. 23] that Mr. G. E. R. Gedye "lost his job with the London Telegraph for criticizing Neville Chamberlain in his book, Fallen Bastions," would, I think, be less open to misconstruction if you could add as a footnote the following quotation from a letter from Mr. Arthur E. Watson, managing editor of the Daily Telegraph, which was published in the New Statesman on April 22, 1939:
"Mr. Gedye published a violently worded political commentary on events in Central Europe. Those events were a chapter in a story not then, if yet, finished, and the progress of which it was Mr. Gedye's duty as our Central European correspondent to report impartially day by day. Mr. Gedye honestly took the view that he could publicly show a partisan attitude to those events without impairing his reputation as an impartial recorder of news. We believed that our readers would not think so, and that in fact Mr. Gedye had himself destroyed his value to us as a reporter. As a result Mr. Gedye resigned by mutual arrangement. . . ."
ALEX H. FAULKNER
New York Correspondent
The Daily Telegraph
New York City
Seasonable Comment
Sirs: