State Department, A.P., U.P., I.N.S., alike provide “opinion-forming” material designed to further the current dangerous drive for American imperialist rule of the world. They are at one, moreover, in pressing foreign news services to abandon their present spheres of influence in favor of the American news monopoly. The Soviet news system, which checks the functioning of outside opinion-formers in the Soviet Union and helps limit their activities in Eastern Europe, is their favorite target. But they have made little headway there. When Randal Heymanson of the North American Newspaper Alliance visited Czechoslovakia last year, government spokesman Dr. Theodore Kuska talked with him. Dr. Kuska said the Czech film industry would be nationalized and _newspapers would be published only by political parties, trade unions and similar responsible groups_. “Only in this way,” said Dr. Kuska, “can the press be regarded as truly free.” It is not recorded whether the N.A.N.A. representative swooned on the spot. But for the benefit of Brooks Atkinson, it should be pointed out that some of the responsible groups Dr. Kuska speaks of cannot even be heard in the American press. The conditions earlier described prevent their publishing papers or obtaining circulation of their views. Thus, control of the press and control of opinion is rigidly frozen into monopoly shapes here; the Czech proposal seems to promise a much broader freedom of the press. Responsibility of the Press Indeed, if Mr. Atkinson will look about him in the Soviet Union, he will see an extension of the idea suggested by Dr. Kuska. As described by Alexander Kendrick at an American-Soviet Cultural Conference in New York recently, the Soviet press is unique. Before the Revolution, there were 859 newspapers in the Czar’s realm, with a total circulation of 2,700,000 and a policy dictated by the Russo-Asiatic Bank. Today there are 9,000 papers in 80 languages with a circulation of 40,000,000 and several readers to every copy of each paper. Compared to our papers, there are obvious differences: no sensation, no spice, no scandal, no desperate competitive drive for entertainment. The newspapers are all informative, they tend to be typographically excellent, their news is presented in careful, balanced form so that the constant reader is prepared to grasp new developments as they take place. The cultural leaders of the country, scholars, critics, writers and musicians, contribute to the papers.