What They See in the Papers

COMMUNICATIONS

The unruffled and competent reporter stands on the deck, at the airport, at the Secretary's elbow, with his pencil working on the wad of copy paper, his sharp eye on the crowd, on the building about to fall, on the halfback faking and spinning. The good correspondent goes overside with the troops, crawls up the ridge to the command post, cajoles himself into the bomber, bums a ride in the General's jeep. The photographer is there with his tripod, his fast-action film; he is there with a cloud filter for the dogfight in the stratosphere; there with a flash bulb in the bloody alley where the body lies.

The copy gets beaten out on the portable typewriter, gets trimmed by the censor with his little looseleaf notebook of directives, gets whisked to the cable office, flicks undersea in dits and dots. And the cable editor fights it out with the city editor in the city room, where the phones keep ringing and the rewrite men step into the booths to take the stuff from the stringers in the corner drugstores, and the presses are booming downstairs on the early edition, and cigaret smoke hazes above the grey men with the eyeshades in the slot. And the photograph forms itself on the revolving cylinder, seen through three thousand miles of atmospherics; the makeup man dummies it in.

And the teletypes rap out their spasms of typing in rhythm; in the glass-enclosed room the announcer faces the mike; the newsman is timing his four minutes flat, with a minute commercial; the expert is typing his views of elastic defense; and there sit the bored technicians behind the dials, keeping the pitch of sound in hand, as it goes on the wires to a hundred cities and off the antennae to a hundred million ears. It blats in the taxi, it roars over the public-address system, it speaks in the mess hall, in the midnight coffee stand; and it flops against the screen door, freshly folded, in the early morning dew. . .

Thus the American gets his news and thus pictures his newsgatherers, the radio and the press. He realizes or senses enough about how it is done to make certain allowances for the product; but he expects it to be reasonably accurate and "worth reading" or listening to. Often he seems to absorb an immoderate daily dose of it, and double portions (with color) on Sundays; more, certainly, than the human mind is capable of attending to at all thoughtfully; he is consequently sometimes confused, sometimes reduced to stupor; but in general, with some regional exceptions, he feels himself to be--and is--well informed. Well enough?

How Big Is the Business? In coming times the world will be smaller in one sense but it will also be a larger world for the American. It will be so partly because he will realize not only the existence but the predicaments of other regions; he will see clearly how his doings are "news of the world" to other people, as theirs are to him. This will mean--it means already--that the problem of getting and delivering information is by no means, even in the American's view, merely a business problem of his own big newspapers and press associations. It is, on the contrary, a problem involving the means whereby other countries are informed, and the kind of information they get. It is, in essence, a tremendous problem in world communications.

Societies cannot be held together by law until they have been knit together by understanding. Can the arrangements of the peacemakers hold unless they are understood by the peoples to whom they apply? Can any degree of world government and law succeed without the consent of the governed; i.e., a world consensus about what is true and truly advantageous?

As the deadly bewilderments and debaucheries of recent history have shown, this problem is enough to tax to the limit the minds and energies that would propose to solve it. Restraints on the free exchange of intelligence are all but universal in the world at war; calculated propaganda has become all but universal too. Toward the reduction of this Babel one step is now being taken: the end of the war in Europe will certainly mean the end of the Nazi Ministry for National Enlightenment and Propaganda, of short-wave broadcast from Zeesen, of the Auslands-Deutsche organization, of Signal, the Nazi picture magazine, and of the Wagnerian dwarf, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels.

Another step is clearly indicated. Each of the United Nations has now learned thoroughly that war against the mind can be waged by hostile official propaganda; all may therefore agree that this kind of propaganda comes under the head of aggression, to be dealt with as such in the future.

But the true dimensions of the problem can only begin to appear when these notorious excesses are quieted. In Russia, China, the British Commonwealth and America different histories determine different approaches to the problem of the press, and of all communications. Is any convergence in sight?

The Press Is Whose Instrument? In the great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where the printed word is in many places something new, where for 20 years there has been such an effort at instructing the unlettered masses as the world had never seen before, where the instruction given and the aspirations stirred conformed always to one overmastering pattern --"The press," said Joseph Stalin, "is the only instrument whereby the party can speak daily and hourly with the workers in its own language."

The Russians take pride in the 8,000-odd newspapers founded since the Revolution, in the gain of newspaper readers among the 77 million newly literate peasants of the wide grain lands and the far-flung Republics of Kazakhs and Uzbeks, Georgians and Mongolians. And in two years of frightful war this instrument has held Kremlin and Party and People together.

Pravda ("Truth") is the name of the Party's own paper, the ultimate and august authority of Russian journalism, whose daily two-column front-page editorial is read at dictation speed on the Moscow radio so that editors in distant towns will please copy. There are no comic strips in Pravda (or in any Russian paper) and there is no department-store advertising; since the war began there have been four pages instead of six or eight; the editor is a professor of Marxist political science; Pravda has the austerity of Truth and it is a rare Russian who sets himself up as a better judge of that absolute. It has a daily press run of at least 2,000,000 copies, considerably more than that of Izvestia ("News"), the organ of the Praesidium of the Supreme Council; four times that of Red Star, the Army newspaper.

But the Russian people have had no Thomas Jefferson to uphold "the arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason." Reason in Russia since 1917 has belonged to the Party. As Schoolmaster to the Russians, the Party taught them to read and guided their reading in those lessons--agricultural, industrial and military--necessary for the primary grades in a new Socialist state. It was not judged important that ordinary people should learn, through Pravda or any of its emulators, anything complicated about life elsewhere. The New York Times's correspondent, G. E. R. Gedye, found, in 1940, that Russians were really unable to differentiate between the regions of the outside world. For many Russians the word Zagranitza (beyond the frontier) had an astronomical connotation of outer space, largely populated by slave workers and silk-hatted capitalists that no simple Russian could hope to understand.

Within the classroom thus secluded, Teacher on occasion used all the psychological aids to pedagogy that have proved effective with bird dogs and masses. When the "Fascist Beast" was unchained on the side away from Russia, in 1939, Pravda and company kept the Russians constantly informed of the "War in Europe" waged by the "Plutocratic Aggressors," i.e., France and England. When military foresight required that the Mannerheim Line be taken, the Russian press reported at length on a "glorious Finnish revolution," wholly mythical, against the "White Guard bandits," i.e., the Finnish government. When Pravda, last fall, editorialized several times a week on the Second Front, observers could not help speculating on the Party's purpose.

Can the Lid Be Taken Off? Such semestral changes in the Soviet curriculum have not usually been considered open to analysis by foreign correspondents in Russia. Since the U.S.S.R. began, there have been just nine months (April through December, 1939) when representatives of the world press could send dispatches from Moscow without censorship (in 1940 practically hermetic) by the Press Bureau of the Foreign Office. As for the Associated Press or the United Press selling their news services to Russian newspapers, those newspapers just are not in the market. However significant it may be of the actual desire of the people, the provision for a Free Press in Russia's democratic Constitution of 1936 has scarcely yet been fulfilled.

When U.S. Ambassador William Harrison Standley remarked last month in Moscow that Russians were not well enough informed about what Americans were doing for them, he was in effect asking that the Party get over its habit of trying to keep a free hand in foreign relations by withholding from Press and People any news--such as news of friendly private contributions from abroad--that might warm up the Russians toward the ordinary people of other countries. An immediate result of the Ambassador's reminder was an increase of Lend-Lease news in Russian papers.

There are some signs that the Party may respond further. In Moscow recently a new book by ex-Ambassador Alexander Antonovich Troyanovski explaining U.S. war motives was published, with a first printing of 15,000 copies. The head of Tass, the news agency by which all foreign news is obtained for Russian papers, has for some time been getting up at 6 every morning to study English. He has had correspondents in Geneva, Stockholm. London, Teheran, New York, Ankara and Chungking; this year he finally sent a correspondent to Melbourne and one to Egypt. The several very capable Tass correspondents in China studied Chinese before going to China; they were trained at the Oriental Institute in Leningrad or Moscow, and their spectatorship is purposeful.

In Russian diffusion of information about Russia the war has worked a great change, easily measurable as between a Soviet propaganda film of ten years ago and a new Soviet documentary film like Moscow Strikes Back or One Day of War. What has happened is that propaganda is no longer necessary; the heroic truth will suffice.

The purpose of the Russian press and radio has always been educational as well as hortatory (radio critics have not found it hard to believe the claim that more and better children's programs are broadcast from Moscow than anywhere else in the world). Education, as Wendell Willkie remarked in Moscow, is education, whether conducted by a Party press or a free one; after literacy comes curiosity, and after curiosity the critical mind. It is not unreasonable to foresee that as the century goes on the Russian Government will be less inclined--and less able--to guide with rough propaganda a people who have achieved at least upper classmanship in the tests of war.

The Struggle Is for Expression in the ancient land of China, whose politics are of continuous interest to the serious men of Tass. And as the Chinese armies have become less active and the Chinese capital disconsolate and the Chinese people thin with famine, that struggle too has grown more bitter. No country at war ever suffered greater deprivation of its "communications" even in the military sense, and this deprivation occurred in the course of what one student of China has called "the historically unparalleled effort which China is making to assimilate the achievements of one-half the world's intellect to the other."

Because scarcely more than a putative 50,000,000 of the putative 450,000,000 Chinese are scholars enough to read the difficult written language of China, there is no such distribution of printed news as in Russia. Tea shops generally remain the centers of information and gossip. Because the ruling party, the Kuomintang, is in theory committed to the program of Sun Yat-sen--first to prepare the Chinese people for political democracy before instituting it--and is in practice hard beset, the Chinese press is not free in the Western sense.

In February of this year a new National Press Law stated: "A newspaperman may freely express his opinions in accordance with the law. However, he must not make any statements contradictory to national policy or detrimental to the state of the nation. . . ." But Chinese newspapermen are not slavish, and neither is their tradition. During the first years of the present war, Chinese newspapermen in the International Settlement at Shanghai displayed great professional courage in attacking the Japanese Army Empire, though half a dozen were murdered. In Chungking, at the time of the trouble with the Communist Fourth Army in 1941, the Communist New China Daily News (Sin Hua Jih Pao) defied the censor and printed an elegiac poem by a Communist general. Early this year, Ta Rung Pao published a strong editorial on Chinese inflation and the famine in Honan--with what an American correspondent was allowed to term "unfortunate results to itself."

In comparison with Russian single-mindedness, the Chinese press has an almost democratic diversity and vivacity. No newspapers have been suppressed outright except the "mosquito" tabloids which before the war achieved a lewdness beyond description. Competing for readers in Chungking are 13 dailies, including the Communist paper, the "liberal" Ta Rung Pao, the Roman Catholic Social Welfare Daily (Yih Shih Pao), the racy evening tabloid, New People's Daily (Hsin Min Pao), and the official Kuomintang and Army sheet, Central Daily News (Chung Yang Jih Pao), which has a partly free circulation of 150,000--perhaps more than all the others combined. All depend for most of their foreign and domestic news on the handouts of the Chinese Central News Agency, subsidized by the Kuomintang.

Handwritten in noiseless offices, handset slowly during the evening, printed on flatbed presses, censored on the proof sheets after midnight, the Chungking papers with their vertical headlines and back-to-front pagination are a wonder to Westerners. The style of Chinese news writing ranges from crisp American formulas learned in U.S. schools of journalism to the elegant circumlocutory prose of Chinese tradition, in which the Japanese are always referred to as "dwarf bandits" and the loss of a city is conveyed by the announcement that "our troops have trapped the enemy at --, and are now surrounding him."

The Central News Agency, which has seven correspondents in Washington, London, New Delhi and Geneva, would like to send men to other capitals and fronts of the war, but cable rates on press dispatches to China are exorbitant. The number of Chinese who have some competence in English is going to decline sharply in the next generation, and the Russian influence has certainly grown stronger. Yet it is to American and British universities that the best Chinese reporters would like to go.

The Press Is the People's. The countries where no one party controls the channels of public information, interior or exterior, are the countries with the longest tradition of Free Speech and Free Press. In the British Commonwealth and in the most advanced Republics of America the handling of news is, as in Russia, one of the chief spectacles of civilization--but it is not a very tidy spectacle.

Where the printed word has lost its first wonder, there is evidence that the political power of the press has declined. In Argentina, in 1916, the remarkable Irigoyen became President without the support of either of the two big Buenos Aires newspapers, La Prensa and La Nacion. In 1929 only one national daily newspaper in Great Britain supported the Labor Party, but that party, aided by the trade-union press, won more seats in the House of Commons than any other. In 1936, newspapers with 60% to 70% of U.S. circulation were for Alf Landon, who got 36.4% of the votes. In 1939 FORTUNE published a survey showing that press news, which people were used to, was popularly voted less reliable than the newly triumphant radio news.

But if the Press has lost some of its old immediate political force, it has gained importance as a service: a source of information and entertainment and thus of ultimate power in shaping public opinion. Like democracy itself, the Free Press (and Radio) in these countries has many serious failures and some disgraces to live down. The handlers of news in the democracies are only beginning to understand--from looking about them--what pitiable and terrible forces they can help to restrain. The delicate matter of each country's understanding of others is in their hands, either to misguide and inflame by an abuse of their freedom or to deepen and enlighten according to their duty.

England's great newspapers have grown thinner and keener since the autumn of 1938, when Henry Wickham Steed, old-time editor of the London Times, exploded in disgust over their tameness in submitting to advertisers' pressure, playing down the insolent menace of Hitler after Munich. Probably no war was ever so vulgarized as the present one has been by the American radio; at the same time, as never before, the honest voices of men capable of human feeling have been brought by radio from battle areas with messages of unforgettable truth. The world's free press is, in fact, up to its neck in the struggle not only for freedom but for carefulness, courtesy and good sense.

Disparity in the Commonwealth. Australia's Prime Minister John Curtin, with a shy, twitching smile, said not long ago that there was only one reliable paper in Australia: the sporting Globe--by which jest he paid tribute to the free Australian press soon after it had given him a drubbing. The London Times tradition is represented in the Antipodes by the Sydney Morning Herald. The Sydney Daily Telegraph and Sun are breezier. The Daily Telegraph's latest stunt is a series of answers about the U.S., furnished (through the U.S. Office of War Information) by Secretary Perkins, Vice President Wallace, Henry J. Kaiser, et al.

There is a bare, youthful quality about Australian journalism, practiced by cocky young men and girls who, under the rules of the strong Australian Journalists Association, must spend one to four years as "cadets" before becoming reporters. Most foreign news is gathered through the Australian Associated Press, a nonprofit cooperative.

In India the radio is firmly under government control, but the press is predominantly Opposition. English-language newspapers are still, as in Kipling's day, the only newspapers that "count"; but the best of them are Indian-owned, Indian-read and Nationalist; written for that intelligentsia of perhaps 3,500,000 on whose bilingual pride the future of 285 illiterate millions is suspended. News from the world outside India is scanty in them, partly because Reuters, the British news agency, has a near monopoly on their business, partly because India, like someone with a cancer, can think of nothing but her own politics. India's only first-rate foreign correspondent, B. Shiva Rao of the Manchester Guardian and Baltimore Sun is, significantly, stationed in India, to report his own country.

The Press Is Free for All in Argentina, which has more of it (1,203 magazines and papers in Buenos Aires alone), printed in more languages, running a wider gamut between venality and incorruptibility, triviality and majesty, than any other Latin American country. So powerful is the tradition of freedom that the Castillo government, even under its "state of siege," has not dared to restrict the range of press opinion very much. Radio stations, which may not interpret the news at all, are more under the government's thumb.

The happy-go-lucky Socialist deputy who edits La Vanguardia goes laughing away from Chamber sessions to a small dark office in Socialist Party headquarters, swivels before a chaotic desk, attends to the business of paper and party, talks to his friends, licks his pencil and turns out opposition editorials so ironic, incisive and adroit that even his enemies read them. Critica, nearest in spirit to good American newspapers, is a hard-hitting sheet with several editions; in its city room there is more noise and less paciencia than in most. La Prensa, which has 16 editorial writers and not one ad salesman, does not hesitate to criticize the government or anybody. In a cloistered courtyard, where grey-uniformed copy boys respectfully fold copy into a silver cup, to be pulleyed to editorial balconies, this great old paper represents a fine tradition of Western journalism.

Representing a more recent influence, in a luxurious office in a new, spic-&-span downtown building sits the handsome editor of El Pampero, the biggest and best Nazi newspaper outside Europe. Everywhere on his editors' and writers' tables the swastika has been industriously whittled; between sips of yerba mate he corrupts all the news he can lay his hands on. There are also the Communist La Hora, the Japanese Momenta Argentina and the British Libre Palabra. Through the distribution by various governments of free features and news, some provincial newspapers have taken .on the appearance of propaganda sheets.

Techniques and Truths in Wartime. The democratic governments have had to explain themselves to their people, and to retain public approval of their conduct of the war, through the medium of a press, in Britain and in America, intensely, sometimes childishly, jealous of its independence. These governments have likewise had to undertake political warfare, i.e. propaganda, with the aid of information men who by habit and training have no party--or perhaps the other party--and prefer breaking a story to following a line.

Relying on the traditionally short memory of the public, but relying also on the Press's often undiscriminating weakness for headlines and for "stories" that people will like to read, a number of excellent political minds in Britain and America have brought the art of news-giving to a pitch of brilliance approaching that which news-gathering has achieved. Analysts of this art, think they have seen some masterpieces. They believe:

> That the Republican opposition in Press and Congress is often flipped an exciting lure at which to snap while big things are being done. Example: the tremendous rise the President got out of the Press and Congress when he took his secret trip around the U.S. in 1942 and returned to lash out at "Washington"; during the ensuing indignation, the Administration pursued its serious business unopposed.

> That a diversion is often created to draw the fire of Press opposition away from the Administration. Example: OPA's assignment of X-cards to Congressmen in 1942, which turned upon Congress most public resentment over gas rationing.

> That confusion seems to be deliberately created on certain issues in order that the solution, any solution, will be greeted with relief. Example: Selective Service.

The watchers who notice such things are casting a narrow but bright beam of light on the communication carried on between government and people. Without reflecting at all, necessarily, on the wisdom of the long-range policies carried out by such means, they are assisting what William Graham Sumner long ago grimly felt to be the one hope of democracy--that the men who profess it should know how it works. And in a democracy, under a two-party system, whatever political adroitness there may be in the release of news and information, it is a game at which two or more can play. Indeed, it is in its role as one of the checks and balances of democratic political life that the Press has earned its title of the Fourth Estate.

Official public information men, in the past decade, have begun to have kinds of influence and even of authority that used to belong to statesmen alone. Under tyranny they may indeed redouble the frauds of tyranny, as Goebbels did in Germany. But under democracy they may with courage divulge the truths of democracy. A journalist nurtured in an honest tradition has been the wartime Prime Minister of Britain. And in a long view of the matter, it was a victory in itself for American propaganda that Elmer Davis--who patently dislikes propaganda--was made head of the U.S. Office of War Information.

New Facilities, New Problems. With its 27 "outposts" in 21 countries, its 2,682 radio programs a week (The Voice of America), its service of U.S. newsreels to theaters in neutral countries, its new radiophoto service to eleven points, including Moscow, Chungking and Cairo, OWI has done plenty to open up channels of communication. So has the British Ministry of Information, which even publishes a Russian-language paper in Kuibyshev.

News and intelligence of the English-speaking countries has in the past got around the globe more readily because of two things: the world-girdling British Commonwealth of Nations and the electrical communications systems that serve it and the United States. The most extensive cable service in the world (165,000 nautical miles) is provided by Cable & Wireless, Ltd., a great "combine" owned in part by the British Government, whose rates are not only lower on intra-than on extra-Imperial traffic, but in the case of Australia are made still lower by Government subsidy of messages to the U.S. and Empire countries. Difference in press rate: Sydney to New York, 2-c- a word; Chungking to New York, at one company's rate, 22-c- a word.

One postwar prospect is a U.S. "combine" of similar magnitude. The British and American companies will then be world utilities without rivals, and some regulation of them in the world interest would seem in order. Good communications throughout Latin America, for example, are still a Pan-American dream, in part because the press cable rate from New York to Buenos Aires is 5-c- a word, that from Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires 14 1/2-c- a word.

Universal Air. Radio technology may very quickly alter this. Press Wireless, Inc. transmitted 600 photographs over its radiophoto circuits to Berne,Moscow and Chungking last January; OWI men in the field are now using portable radiophoto transmitters. The development of high-frequency transmission will mean a local broadcast band of nearer to 500,000 kilocycles than the present 15,000. The arrival of television and television networks will enormously increase the possibilities of radio as communication. It is more than ever desirable that the use of these facilities be governed by standards of responsibility to the audiences of the world.

Universal Pictures. No medium of communication is more promising than pictures. Printed news has a strong tendency to be news of the abnormal or disastrous events of life; the camera's patient eye finds equal fascination in the characteristic doings of people, the enduring and mysterious images of places. Already a supranational language of entertainment, the cinema and the news photograph, with television, may in the future become a world-teaching art which artists of all nations may practice.

Universal Knowledge. "Holy is lucidity," as an English writer once put it, "and the mind that dare explain." Men are now dying not to win a negative "peace" but to bring about a more lawful, and therefore a more intelligently dynamic, world. Knowledge does not necessarily breed affection, nor affection justice; but in each case, it helps. The responsibilities of those who win and survive this war will not end with feeding famished people but with letting them in on the learning, both humane and technical, that enriches peace.

And Language. If the license and self-righteousness of great states is to be taken down a peg in the interests of world order, one counterbalance to nationalism may be a supranational language, a simple second tongue that all peoples can learn, in which all can communicate as traders, as guests, as students, as human beings. Recently Basic English has impressed some linguists with its aptness for this role. The European Governments in Exile have discussed English as a second language to be taught in all Continental schools; the Chinese Government has not revoked its decision to make English the second tongue of China. The British and American Governments may either blight this movement by linking it to condescension, or encourage it by living up to their ideals of freedom.

And Freedom. When the American Newspaper Society of Editors recently agreed to work for "a world guarantee of freedom of the press" after the war, they may have meant imperialism, but the chances are better that they meant what they said. In February Brendan Bracken assured the Empire Press Union that, when the war ends, censorship and the Ministry of Information will disappear "overnight--certainly censorship will."

Press agentry in the democracies has perhaps passed its peak. The release in June 1942 of certain important news of Pacific air and sea fighting in the form of a commercial plug--a congratulatory telegram from General Arnold to an aircraft manufacturer--was an incident that has not been, and probably will not be, repeated.

But the World Is Still Vast. It is still the world of the Great Navigators, a world three-quarters ocean, unpotable, in hospitable and deadly to men; the dark masses of land are still as large, the stony mountains still as high, the myriad populations still as strange, the myriad languages still as hard to learn. They deceive themselves who say this globe has shrunk to a convenient size, to a neighborhood whose men can greet each other at corners and whose women can borrow butter across the fence. The truth has been lost in a metaphor. The old and profound distances between places and between minds are still the same; only superimposed on them are the new adjacencies of air travel, the new omnipresent communications as instantaneous as light itself.

Yet in this delicate film of intercourse, of mutual visiting and mutual speech, misunderstood, overrated, and abominably overcharged as it has been with blatancy and mistranslation and deceit, lies part of the world's hope. It is the hope that some day all the media of intercourse may be free, and the important ones as responsible as they are free, that speech between the great regions may become more modest and exact, that respect for one another's differences and charity to ward one another's faults may be taught through the air and on the screen along with the tragi-comic curiosities of the news, and that not only the facts but the schemes of those who would make the facts their tools may be known and judged by a healthy world society.

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