Abstract

Think Pieces

This is thumb-sucking season in Washington journalism. It is the time when the men who report to the nation the doings and misdoings of its federal government find the springs of factual news all but dried up and are reduced to turning out, in the guise of news, dispatches that in major part are the product of the reporters' communion with their own imaginative souls. Although there is always likely to be some of this sort of reporting going on in Washington and elsewhere, the present thumb-sucking season is without parallel in intensity, for it comes at the close of an election campaign which produced no concrete issues or pledges, obliterated the opposition party, and returned U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to power in a fashion that left him without a precise debt to any specific section of the electorate.