Price Control

U.S. newsmen, fully recognizing the need of censorship codes for wartime news, have long been irked by the way the U.S. codes were maltreated. Last week they found they were in good company. Genial, rolypoly U.S. Censor Byron Price was irked, too.

Censor Price announced that the codes (because of the improvement in the Allies' war prospects) would be relaxed in several particulars. He also announced that the crowd of volunteer cooks who had been sticking their spoons into the censorship broth would now go back and sit down. He meant the Army & Navy security officers, war plant pressagents, a few chambers of commerce, many a Government agency, who had become overofficious in deciding what kind of war news the U.S. public was entitled to get.

Said Censor Price: "I solicit continued cooperation to see . . . that a dangerous psychology of overcensorship is not created throughout the land by the activities of a miscellany of volunteer firemen."

Censor's Cases. As Censor Price well knew, many a volunteer censor had suppressed news stories or portions of news stories under the pretext of security for the Armed Forces--when the real reason was that the suppressed facts did no credit to his organization. Recent example: the Defense Plant Corp. held up a Tulsa Tribune story on coal mining for five months (TIME, Dec. 13). More celebrated example was the holdup of the General Patton story on the appeal of the Army High Command in Africa. There were hundreds of other instances.

Now, said Byron Price, all this interference with the news must stop. "The Office of Censorship . . ." said he, "is the only Government agency authorized by the President to request that certain news must not be published or broadcast. . . ."

The Office of Censorship will assume wider responsibility in clearing news. Heretofore the codes have requested that various kinds of information be withheld except when such information is made available "by appropriate authority." Hereafter the Office of Censorship, Price said, "will itself undertake to act as an appropriate authority."

Censor's Guide. As a guide to the new policy, Censor Price relaxed some of censorship's 250-odd specifications, so that newspapers, magazines and radio may now carry stories about such previously taboo matters as war production figures (on a national scale), merchant marine operations, diplomatic negotiations not connected with military operations.

The scope of censorship was being reduced. Byron Price added that he hoped the whole business would be stopped the minute the last shot was fired. But what pleased newsmen most was that the workmanlike Office of Censorship had taken public cognizance of the perverted censorship that had often given the U.S. news mangled, incomplete or too late.

They knew that in the past Price and assistants had sometimes overruled Service security officers and others who tried to apply the codes too selfishly. Now they had reason to hope that such preservation of the news would become a settled policy.

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