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Times domestic and foreign coverage has also sometimes fallen short of what Times readers have a right to expect because of the Times ideal of "objectivity" (which many Timesmen realize to be unattainable if it is an ideal in the first place). The Times has long liked to feel that if it gives both sides of a question, or at least two versions, it has done its journalistic job. Sometimes this brings nothing but confusion to the reader, sometimes gives a completely wrong impression. In its tradition of "factual" journalism, the Times policy has been to print newsworthy statements of eminent citizens, Senators and other supposedly responsible people without qualification as long as the words were not libelous. But even Timesmen are wondering latterly whether its policy has not been proved false by the complexity of modern news, and the difficulty of presenting the truth in such cases as Senator McCarthy v. Owen Lattimore. As one troubled Times editor remarked last week: "When a responsible person makes irresponsible statements, what is a responsible paper supposed to do? Merely balancing accusation with denial no longer seems enough." In groping toward a solution of the problem, the Times has been running more bylined interpretive pieces by correspondents and such staff experts as Military Analyst Hanson Baldwin, whose articles carry as much weight in the Pentagon as Reston's do in the State Department.
No Turned Stomachs. The job of processing most of the day's news and writing headlines is done by the three main copy desks, foreign, city and national, which form a semicircle at the southeast end of the city room. There is also an "obit" and utility desk (the Times keeps 1,000 obits in type) presided over by white-goateed "Judge" William D. Evans, ninetyish, who boasts that he has buried all the other members of the Yale Class of 1885. With so much copy coming in, there is not much time (or inclination) for cutting it or making it more readable. "The Times," cracked one old hand, "is probably the best unedited paper in the world." Washington Correspondent John Day of the Louisville Courier-Journal aptly summed up this feeling of reluctant admiration recently. "There are mornings," he told Publisher Sulzberger, "when I grab hold of a copy of the Times and say to it: 'Damn you, I'm going to read you if it kills me!'J:
Times copy is edited so that it "won't turn your stomach at the breakfast table." (An early slogan for the Times was: "Will Not Soil the Breakfast Table.") In the Times, bodies are never found "lying in a pool of blood," nor "badly decomposed" in the woods. The Times was net always so squeamish. Ochs once told an editor who complained that a certain story was too smutty for the Times to print: "When a tabloid prints it, that's smut. When the Times prints it, that's sociology."