Has Unique Job In Journalism

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31005, 10 March 1966, Page 1

Has Unique Job In Journalism

Mr John Scott, a special correspondent of “Time”, the weekly American news magazine, believes he has a unique job in journalism. He has what amounts to a roving commission to make “depth studies” of the world’s trouble spots—not for publication as such in the magazine, but as background information for its editors. Now in New Zealand on a lecture tour for “Time,” Mr Scott has most recently studied the Vietnam situation and the Soviet Union reform movement. Next he plans to study the question of the world’s food

resources in relation to its population. “This is tied around the Indian famine.” he said yesterday. “I will spend one or two years on the subject, depending on whether the famine occurs next Sep-tember-October. “The two crisis periods in India are just before the April and October harvests. We are sending millions of tons of grain to India, and this may stop millions from starving to death, but millions of others will still die.

“The problem can be solved only by the use of birth control and the modern development of food resources—

algae, plankton, hybridised seed and fertiliser to increase the yield of the fields.” After this Mr Scott would like to study the convergence of the Communist and non-

Communist worlds. “I have no views on the subject yet,” he said, “but great interest.” He said the areas of study were recommended by him. and so far his editors had ah ways agreed with him. Work In Russia

Mr. Scott makes book-length reports on his findings at the end of each assignment, and these are published by "Time.” He has been with the magazine since 1941, and before that spent nearly 10 years in Russia. He went there first in the depression years and worked as a welder in industrial plants. The great purge of 1937 forced him and thousands of other foreigners from Soviet industry, but he stayed in Moscow for a further three years as correspondent for a

French news agency and later for the London “News Chronicle.”

Mr Scott made two long trips through the Balkans, the Middle East and Asiatic Russia in 1940 and 1941, and was expelled from Russia just before the war for "slandering” Soviet foreign policy and “inventing” reports of RussoGerman friction. After travelling the world for the last 11 years, Mr Scott said he looked forward to retiring three years from now and doing some “reflective" writing about world affairs. "I don’t intend to die in an airport,” he added. In the meantime. Tufts University has asked him to lecture for a term this year at its Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.