Censorship in Action

To all newspapers and radio stations--all those who reach the eyes and ears of the American people--I say this: You have a most grave responsibility to the nation now and for the duration of this war.

If you feel that your Government is not disclosing enough of the truth, you have every right to say so. But--in the absence of all the facts, as revealed by official sources--you have no right in the ethics of patriotism to deal out unconfirmed reports in such a way as to make people believe they are gospel truth.

Thus, in the absence of all but the bare fact of disaster, the President in his radio speech last week officially introduced wartime censorship. Promising "We will not hide facts," the President laid down two censorship musts: First, that the information has been definitely and officially confirmed; and, second, that the release of the information at the time it is received will not prove valuable to the enemy directly or indirectly.

These announcements brought home to the plainest of U.S. citizens that censorship was acutely involved with what he could learn about how the war was going.

Washington newsmen hit the first snags. At the White House press conference a few hours before the President's speech, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Raymond ("Pete") Brandt, a Presidential favorite, righteously complained that Army and Navy had all day given correspondents the runaround. The President cheerfully said that Army and Navy, not newspapermen, were the proper judges of what should be given out.

Interpreted literally, the President's ban on information "valuable to the enemy directly or indirectly" "might well mean a ban not only on all definite news of the Japanese war, but on news of strikes in the U.S. and even on political criticism of the Administration--because such news can easily be construed as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Washington correspondents hoped it would not be thus narrowly interpreted.

It remained to be seen whether the President would insist on a censorship which stuck to its proper function in a democracy--namely: 1) to lock up military secrets at their source, taking care that they are real military secrets, not pretexts for concealing military or political ineptitude; 2) to censor carefully news exported by cable, telephone, radio and mail, so that information is concealed not from the people but from the enemy; 3) to avoid censorship on the basis of "public morale" and "propaganda," which can be made excuses for concealing anything.

Interim confusions:

> When an air alarm was sounded in New York City the information was traced to First Army headquarters at Governors Island, which queried A.P. and U.P. in Manhattan, which queried the War Department in Washington, which denied all knowledge of approaching planes. Then Governors Island queried First Air Force headquarters at Mitchel Field, where the question was mistaken for an air-raid warning from the War Department in Washington. A few hours later the Navy reported planes approaching Boston.

> Of rumors that a Japanese aircraft carrier had been sunk off the Panama Canal, the White House refused confirmation or denial for fear of comforting the enemy.

> Banned were: 1) all casualty lists; 2) ocean weather forecasts; 3) defense production figures even on noncombatant vehicles. Banned likewise is all news of ship launchings (the minesweeper YMS-22--see p. 61--barely got under the wire).

> When an A.P. dispatch from Egypt, undoubtedly passed by the British censors, reported the establishment of a U.S. "arsenal" in Eritrea, the War Department belatedly described this as "essential military information" and asked newspapers to refrain from publishing it. This attempt to conceal information that was already public knowledge abroad--a good example of confusing the U.S. people with the enemy--was frustrated by the fact that U.S. papers had already published it.

Appointed temporary censor of news and communications was FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover.

Just before the U.S. press began to sing a diapason of approval for the U.S. declaration of war--in the week that closed the night before Pearl Harbor--interventionist sentiment in the press had slumped to its lowest point since last spring. According to the survey of James S. Twohey Associates it stood at 54%--as against 84% eleven weeks earlier.

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