Steps Toward Freedom

A year and a half ago, Philippine Delegate Carlos P. Romulo, who used to be a newspaperman himself, asked U.N. to call a global meeting on press freedom. Last week, at Geneva, Romulo signed his name, as chairman, to a report telling what the world's first Conference on Freedom of Information (TIME, April 12) had done.

In four weeks of hot & cold debate, the delegates from 55 member nations had done considerable deriding of each other's definitions of freedom. But they had also drafted some new international law, subject to approval by their parliamentary parents (U.N.'s Economic & Social Council, the General Assembly, and participating nations). The major proposals:

P: A U.S.-sponsored agreement granting foreign correspondents complete freedom to get the news and send it, free from all censorship except for military security.

P: A French proposal granting the "right of reply." (If a nation felt that the press of another country had published false reports about it, it could request that country's government to circulate corrections.)

P: A British proposal on press freedom, and the partial draft of a U.N. Covenant on Human Rights, both of which permit penalties for "systematic diffusion" of false news endangering peace. The U.S. opposed both, thinking they went too far in the direction of state control of news. The Soviet bloc opposed them for not going far enough. (It also opposed the U.S. and French proposals.)

Had the conference been worth holding? Many an editor thought not. Addressing the annual luncheon of the Associated Press, lean Lord Rothermere, publisher of the London super-Tory Daily Mail, complained:* "We have now in Geneva gratuitously provided a platform [where] the enemies of freedom may pour out their torrents of dialectical abuse, wasting the time and wearing the patience of all men of good will."

Editor Erwin D. ("Spike") Canham of the Christian Science Monitor, new president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and member of the U.S. delegation to Geneva, disagreed. Said Canham: "The conference has done no harm and has substantially advanced the cause of freedom of information."

*But not in the hearing of the Chicago Tribune's Anglophobic Colonel Robert R. McCormick, who stalked out of the Waldorf-Astoria's Grand Ballroom when Rothermere began. The Colonel, tactful friends explained, is also allergic to cigar smoke.

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