The Evening Star (April 22, 1946)
U.S. will invite Soviet editors to study nation and report to people
By the Associated Press
The State Department will extend to three Russian editors a potentially significant invitation to take a look at how America works and thinks and lives in peacetime.
The three – Ilya G. Ehrenburg of Izvestia, Gen. Mikhail R. Galaktionov of Pravda and Konstantin M. Simonov of Red Star – came here to meet with the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Their visit was planned by the newspaper organization to promote an exchange of ideas between the day-by-day historians of two of the world’s greatest powers.
The Russian writers gave the country’s top-ranking news executives a bluntly frank idea of what they think about this country’s press.
Want report taken home
Some of it was favorable; some of it, too, was sharply critical.
That’s the kind of a report the State Department hopes they will take home to Russia – one based upon a trained newspaperman’s first-hand observations.
So the department – primarily on the initiative of Secretary of State Byrnes – conceived the idea of letting the three newspapermen learn for themselves how the United States ticks. They will be given a free hand to see how ready-to-go machines roll off the production lines, how people live in big cities and in small towns, how newspapers function without government control, how things are here generally.
No hint of acceptance
Although it was confirmed officially that the invitation will be extended, there was no indication yet as to whether it will be accepted. Here as unofficial ambassadors to their American colleagues, the three Soviet newsmen presumably will have to await an okay from Moscow.
If they accept it will constitute another step forward in the endeavor jointly pushed by the State Department, the society and by Kent Cooper, executive director of the Associated Press, and Hugh Baillie, president of the United Press; to break down the barriers against free movement of newsmen and the free flow of their findings in all parts of the world.
Although this reason has not been acknowledged officially, it was learned State Department officials consider that the plan might lead, in time, to reciprocity on the part of Russia and eventually to relaxation of Soviet restrictions over movement of foreign newsmen.