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Show WHO'S NEWS THIS WEEK i i By LEMUEL F. PARTON (Consolidated Features WNU Service.) NEW YORK. The recent emancipation emanci-pation proclamation of Kene-saw Kene-saw Mountain Landis, freeing an oppressed op-pressed minority of major and minor league Newshound Got baU piayers, Landis Aid and reminded this courier of the Praise of Chief Djg blizzard in Chicago, along about 1906. I was a new and bewildered reporter from the sticks, tossed into the maelstrom of a federal court railroad case because be-cause there was nobody else to send except the office boy. It was as intelligible in-telligible as a squirrel cage. The defending attorney loosed a gas attack at-tack of statistics and my pencil dropped from my limp fingers. The judge, a little, brown wheat-straw wheat-straw of a man with a chrysanthemum chrysanthe-mum thatch, got me in the sharp focus of his bright agate eye. I hadn't been wrecking any trains or robbing banks, but I began to fear the worst. I wondered whether my elaborate ignorance of what was happening could possibly be construed con-strued as a federal offense. Then the blow fell. The judge gavelled down the spouting lawyer and said the court would take a brief recess. Then he beckoned me into his chambers. He asked me to sit down. Then he said: "I hadn't seen you at the press table before. This case is confusing. I thought I might help you In getting it straight. It's like this . . ."In a few concise sentences he brought the courtroom hub-bub into something understandable. I managed to write a story about it without breaking my arm and got my first pat on the back from a city editor who was no spendthrift with such gestures. The voltairean little Judge Landis was like that, and any newspaper man who ever knew him will insist that his $65,000-a-year honorarium as baseball commissioner isn't half enough. He was a corporation lawyer law-yer before he began calling strikes on big business, and was appointed to the federal bench by Theodore Roosevelt at the peak of T. R.'s trust-busting rampage. In his dual capacity he has punished two of the major institutions of America, the Standard Oil company and Babe Ruth, the former with a $29,000,000 fine. He was a newsboy in Logansport, Ind. ; a semi-pro baseball player; a stenographer and court elerk at 18, and soon thereafter a law school graduate and practicing lawyer. His appointment as national commissioner commis-sioner of baseball grew out of the "Black Sox" scandal in 1919. ' TpHE easy-going free-for-all of American journalism, in which public officials sometimes owe their high status to an understanding U. S. Has Edge ' "ewsHpahper men and how On Europe in to get on with D d i them.hasgiv-Press them.hasgiv-Press Relations en this coun. try an advantage over Europe in wartime press relations. In the World war and now in the present war Europe has demonstrated the limitations of even the most intelligent intelli-gent of its bureaucrats in co-operating with the press. While England and France have, traditionally, a free press, the human contacts between be-tween the correspondents and high officialdom are still lacking, and both countries are snarled in censorship cen-sorship troubles. At the start of the war, libera opinion noted with satisfaction that France and England had appointed, respectively, to their ministries oi information, a distinguished literary man and playwright, and a leading scholar. It seemed to be an exemplification exem-plification of their war aims. But, like the brass hats of the past, they didn't seem to understand newspapers newspa-pers or newspaper men. The scholarly Lord MacNillan of England has faded into the background, and his press censor, cen-sor, Vice Admiral C. V. Usbornc, is replaced by the clubby and gregarious Sir Walter T. Monck-lon. Monck-lon. In France, Jean Giradoux, the playwright, is still minister of information, but his office Inspires In-spires bitter stories in the American Amer-ican press about tantastio restrictions. re-strictions. The censorship tanglt is an issu; of daily mounting importance im-portance in France. Newspaper men liked M. Giradoux Gira-doux tremendously when he was spokesman for the French ministry of foreign affairs a few years ago He was perhaps, in Goethe's phrase "all too human" for any carcfui grooving of public opinion his own is ironic and whimsical and has been surrounded with a bulwark o( bureaucracy against which newspaper newspa-per men are thrown for a loss. Flo is a charming, monoclcd KontkMnan of 53, who was severely gassed in the World war and so speaks in n husky voice. lie did a short turii at Harvnrd before the World war |