news presentation, the telegraph dimmed the privacy of the book-form, and heightened, instead, the new public image in the press. The first harrowing experience for the press man visiting Moscow is the absence of telephone books. A further horrifying revelation is the absence of central switchboards in government departments. You know the number, or else. The student of media is happy to read a hundred volumes to discover two facts such as these. They floodlight a vast murky area of the press world, and illuminate the role of telephone as seen through another culture. The American newspaperman in large degree assembles his stories and processes his data by telephone because of the speed and immediacy of the oral process. Our popular press is a near approximation to the grapevine. The Russian and European newspaperman is, by comparison, a litterateur. It is a paradoxical situation, but the press in literate America has an intensely oral character, while in oral Russia and Europe the press has a strongly literary character and function. The English dislike the telephone so much that they substitute numerous mail deliveries for it. The Russians use the telephone for a status symbol, like the alarm clock worn by tribal chiefs as an article of attire in Africa. The mosaic of the press image in Russia is felt as an immediate form of tribal unity and participation. Those features of the press that we find most discordant with austere individual standards of literary culture are just the ones that recommend it to the Communist Party. "A newspaper," Lenin once declared, "is not only a collective propagandist and collective agitator; it is also a collective organizer." Stalin called it "the most powerful weapon of our Party." Khrushchev cites it as "our chief ideological weapon." These men had more an eye to the collective form of the press mosaic, with its magical power to impose its own assumptions, than to the printed word as expressing a private point of view. In oral Russia, fragmentation of government powers is unknown. Not for them