Tass marks 60 years

Press, 12 July 1985, Page 6

Tass marks 60 years

NZP-Reuter Moscow Tass news agency, a household name in the Soviet Union as the official voice of the Kremlin, celebrated its sixtieth anniversary yesterday. Quoted daily on television news bulletins and in all main papers, the agency has traditionally been used to break news of all main stories, from deaths and appointments of leaders to launchings of Soviet spacecraft.

The occasional opening formula, “Tass is authorised to state ...” has come to indicate a direct message from the Soviet leadership and was recently used as the title of a popular television series on Western espionage agencies. In a country where access to information is tightly controlled, where the concept of the press conference is relatively new, arid interviews with officials are rarely granted, Tass also gives Moscow’s interpretation of foreign news and affairs. The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, as it is officially known, was set up eight years after the 1917 Russian revolution to serve

as a central information body under State control. It now provides an eight-lan-guage service to some 5000 subscribers in more than 100 countries.

Employing some 400 correspondents at home and abroad, it co-ordinates its activities from its headquarters in central Moscow. Tass plans to introduce a single automated system to process information from its world-wide network, says its executive secretary, Mr Pyotr Konovalov.

In an interview with the Communist Party daily “Pravda” yesterday, Mr Konovalov reaffirmed the agency’s principles that “information should serve the people, be accurate, truthful, efficiently circulated, topical and socially significant.”