3,000,000 Words a Week

The New York Times reported last fortnight that SHAEF censors had just released, five months to the day after its filing, a Times correspondent's report of the capture of two German airfields on the Cherbourg peninsula.

Most readers presumably put it down as one more example of military censorship's curseworthy red tape and over-caution. But from London last week came an explanation. SHAEF censors review "held" stories as often and as quickly as they can, to see if once-restricted information can now be released. But they expect correspondents to cooperate with them by jogging their memory. By the time the restricted facts in the Times story were released, both the correspondent and the censor, busy getting on with the war, had forgotten about the story.

The wonder is not that an occasional piece of copy or film gets stuck in the censorship filter, but that so much news gets through as swiftly as it does. Into the filter the 800 correspondents accredited to SHAEF, plus numerous unaccredited correspondents in Britain, now pour every week approximately 3,000,000 words, 35,000 still pictures, 100,000 feet of movie film.

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