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was on one phase of newspaper history. I originally had the idea that it would be interesting to draw a comparison with the way American and European papers, certain selected papers, handled a certain historical incident, just to see the difference in American and European journalism at a given period. This was a rather large-scale topic which turned out to be more than could be handled by a senior at Princeton, at least more than I could handle, and so it came down to the handling by several American newspapers of one phase of history: the Boer War. So I went into the New York Public Library and spent many a day there going through files of old New York newspapers, such as the World and the Times and the Sun and a couple of others during the Boer War period to try to evaluate the way in which they handled the news and especially the way in which they let their editorial opinions influence their handling of the news. And I was going to balance this against three or four selected European papers but this just really became, because I did so much work on the American side, an impossible project. So I only did the American half. But the thesis turned out very satisfactorily, at least as far as Princeton was concerned. They thought it was fine.

Can you talk about some of the conclusions, anything in particular that might point out deficiencies in American handling of international news?

Well, the burden of it was to show how American papers influenced their treatment of the news in accordance with their editorial judgment of the news. There was a great deal of excitement here at the time of the Boer War. My original idea, by the way, was to compare that treatment with the treatment of some European newspapers on the handling of the Spanish-American war. It was to be that kind of comparison. At any rate, the