FOR CYNICAL EFFRONTERY, the leading article in the Daily Sketch
following the Anzio air crash takes some beating. A member of the Sketch staff, a free-lance photographer, and a free-lance reporter (formerly a stringer for Confidential) were on the Viscount. They had been sent to procure a contrived scoop: to confront the Shiv of Palitana, when he arrived out to see his father about getting married to Miss Eva Bartok, with a model whom he had earlier assiduously escorted. When the model and the journalists were killed in the crash, it might have been expected that the Sketch would preserve a decent silence. Instead, it actually attempted to take credit for what had happened, drooling over the dead like a war profiteer after a memorial service. The editor of the Sketch asserts that it was at the model's own wish (rather than that of the paper) that she went to Italy; but it was the Sketch who arranged the trip; and the members of its staff were not there, presumably, simply in order to take pictures of the model boarding and leavihg the aeroplane. A newspaper can always find some justification for taking, and even for printing, gossip pictures and stories; but I can see no justi- fication for a paper assisting in the manufacture of a gossip story.
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