Canada & the Press

Six years ago, in Manhattan, an ex-United Press correspondent, Herbert Samuel Moore, saw big things ahead for news broadcast by radio. Moore raised $150,000, signed up some 125 radio clients for news by teletype and short wave, started Transradio Press Service.

Nowadays Transradio Press serves some 175 U. S. radio stations and 50-odd U. S. newspapers. It also has 35 Canadian broadcasting outlets. Fortnight ago, in Ottawa's House of Commons, Transport Minister Clarence Howe announced that Canadian Broadcasting Corp. had canceled the licenses of two foreign-owned news agencies : Transradio Press and British United Press (a U. P. subsidiary). Speaking of Transradio only he said :

"There has been some trouble over news being put out in an unduly alarming form. . . . This organization puts out bulletins with a London date line, but we have not been able to find its London offices or London sources of news." The Transport Minister hinted that there had been complaints about Transradio : listeners thought it was pro-Nazi.

Both licenses were canceled as of July 1, might be restored, said Minister Howe, if the agencies could "show their news source is accurate." By week's end B. U. P. announced that its license had been renewed. Transradio's situation was more obscure.

In spite of its mushroom growth since 1934, Transradio operates on a shoestring compared with worldwide press associations like A. P. or U. P. In Europe, where most of its news originates at present, Transradio has only three or four full-time reporters. In London last September, Transradio had two men, and both departed after war broke out. For several months Transradio's London office had no tenant, no name on its door. Then Alexander Paton, correspondent for some Scottish newspapers, took over. Scotsman Paton's cable stories are brief, innocuous, readily passed by British censors.

For news of France, Transradio relies on the semi-official Agence Havas. Their agreement stipulates that Havas dispatches can be given only to newspapers, not to broadcasters. From Berlin, Transradio picks up short-wave bulletins broadcast by Germany's Transocean News Service. All news originating in London, no matter where Transradio happens to find it, bears a London date line.

Last week President Moore was in Ottawa, trying to convince CBC officials that these sources are "authentic." Said he, darkly: "Selfish publishing and monopolistic interests in Canada . . . have leagued themselves together to destroy independent news services throughout the Dominion. . . ."

Free Press. In Windsor, Ont., across the river from Detroit, one night last week, screaming newsboys ran through the streets, waving copies of the Detroit Free Press with an eight-column banner head:

FRANCE READY TO SURRENDER,

U. S. ENVOY REPORTS TO HULL

The Free Press story (from the Chicago Tribune's Paris bureau) said that only Premier Paul Reynaud still held out against a separate peace for France.

Canadian police sent word to the Free Press to recall the papers, but virtually the entire edition had been gobbled up by wild-eyed Windsor citizens. In outlying communities, police and vigilantes chased newsboys off the streets. A copy went to Ottawa, where Dominion censors stared at it aghast, took up their pens to add the Free Press to the list of banned U. S. periodicals.

Two days after the Free Press incident, editors of Detroit papers got together in the office of the Detroit News with a close-clipped, tight-lipped censorship official from Toronto. They agreed: 1) that a censor should be stationed in Windsor to advise them, 2) that they would kill any story in their Canadian editions that the censor did not like.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.