Censorship in the Offing

The U. S., however involved it may be in World War II, is not fighting with any nation, but last week newsmen in Washington were brought face to face with the problems of wartime newsgathering. Some of them came in physical contact with it. For three days correspondents filed into the billiard room of the White House to be photographed and fingerprinted by the Secret Service in order to get passes to attend President Roosevelt's press conferences.

Meanwhile a more important development took place in the Navy Department. Secretary Frank Knox met for two-and-a-half hours in an off-the-record session with representatives of twelve newspaper publishers' associations. The subject was censorship; the meeting was a follow-up of Secretary Knox's "confidential" letter (TIME, Jan. 27) which in effect requested that publishers print no significant Navy news unless it was issued or approved by the Navy. Love feast rather than war council, the meeting consisted of polite queries from publishers, urbane answers from the Secretary of the Navy and William Knudsen, blandly disavowing any intent to enforce "a rigid news censorship."

Beneath these official amenities were somewhat less nonchalant concerns about recent censorship developments. Newsmen were by no means agreed that Secretary Knox's "confidential" letter made sense. Said Southern Editor Jonathan Daniels in The Nation fortnight ago: "I can keep a secret, even one I did not ask to receive and one that is shared with several thousand other people. But I am saying that I feel very strongly that any regulation of the press in America in the emergency ought not to be a personal and confidential matter between an official and the editors. If I understand the freedom of the press, it does not belong to either the editors or the officials but to the people."

The problems of wartime news-handling belong to two classes: 1) getting accurate and important information; 2) being able to print it, i.e., dealing with censorship. In practice the two often interlock, for the officials to whom newsmen must go for information or for its verification often act as censors.

At present these men are the press sections of the Army and Navy, the National Defense Advisory Commission and other defense agencies. Army's Chief of Staff General Marshall, a flexible and sensible democrat, has steadily supported the view that a healthy army and a healthy press are complementary. Concerned with guarding the Army's truly vital secrets, he has consistently recognized the fact that a free press inevitably makes mistakes and even unwarranted criticisms. Army's press section has grown from four officers, ten clerks to 18 officers, 40 clerks since Aug. 1. Of Marshall's stamp are others in Army's publicity apparatus (now being reorganized)--Major General Robert Richardson of the Cavalry; Lieut. Colonel Ward Maris of Field Artillery, no newsman but a discerning publicist of small patience with bureaucrats; Major Art Ennis of the Air Corps; Lieut. Colonel Ginsburgh, liaison officer between Under Secretary of War Patterson and the public, graduate of Harvard University, ex-reporter on the New York Morning World.

Navy's press section, smaller, but more experienced from pre-Defense days in handling publicity, is somewhat thinnerskinned. It has a nucleus of capable men --Captain Alan G. Kirk, longtime Naval Attache in London, Chief of the Intelligence Division; Commander Harry R. Thurber, head of Navy's press section; Lieut. Commander Robert Berry.

To such Army and Navy publicists as these the majority of U. S. newsmen look for solution of Problem No. 1 of the U. S. press--how to insure intelligent, free-flowing news from Army and Navy. In the services is the cream of the news of national defense--and only a small part of it has any connection with legitimate military secrets. Failing to insure an intelligent and efficient censorship, Army and Navy, believes many a newsman, may well find their information bureaus handed over to some civilian "propaganda ministry," more skilfully organized but far less satisfactory as a source of news for the U. S. press.

Increasingly newsmen have lately been stirred by uneasy memories of World War I's Committee on Public Information, and its mercurial creator of genius, George Creel, the crusading Denver newspaperman. Let there be no propaganda, said Creel to his bosom friend, Woodrow Wilson; let there be "unparalleled openness," "expression, not repression"--in short, "voluntary censorship." With that idealistic base Creel proceeded to build such a propaganda wonder, with vast, adroitly concealed powers over the press.

Lacking any clear definition of treasonable and seditious news, and operating through the vague but wide terms of the Espionage Act of 1917 (which has never been repealed), the Creel Committee kept the U. S. press vacillating uneasily between timidity and hysteria.

Oftenest reputed to be in line for World War II's George Creel, if one is ever appointed, is a soft-spoken ex-newspaperman named Lowell Mellett, elder brother of Don Mellett, "the newspapermen's martyr," who was killed in 1926 by gangsters on whom he waged war as editor of the Canton (Ohio) News. Top-flight Scripps-Howard editor and executive for 16 years, Mellett parted company with Roy Howard in 1937 over editorial policy in the Supreme Court fight. Called by President Roosevelt to head the National Emergency Council, super-press bureau of the New Deal, Mellett soon succeeded Charles Michelson and Tommy Corcoran in the President's counsels. Two years ago, when the Senate killed NEC, Mellett took over the Office of Government Reports, and became one of the "secret six" executive assistants to the President. Since then he has picked the heads of most key press bureaus in the New Deal. Generally Mellett is accounted the nearest approximation yet to the late Louis McHenry Howe as the President's confidant.

Mellett's critics charge that he is an impractical idealist who runs a spy service--an accusation at least partly belied by his executive ability. His friends, vastly admiring, sometimes charge him with excessive sweet-temperedness. But at times Mellett has shown sufficient temper to scare the daylights out of those who envision him as a future Censor-in-Chief of the U. S. Press. However, it is not too likely that President Roosevelt would give him such a job. Mellett himself declares he wants no part of any "Information Ministry" and adds: "I simply don't believe in censorship."

Nevertheless, newsmen, little as they relish it, know that censorship is in the offing. Like other patriotic citizens they realize that it won't do to tell the real military secrets of the U. S. in print where potential enemies can read them. Actually the beginnings of censorship are already in force and newsmen already have a number of complaints such as that:

> Often it is hard to get important information from Army or Navy because their own information services are not well organized--no one knows the answers or those who do are too busy to see the press. --

> There are three classes of information ("secret," "confidential," and "restricted") which it is illegal to publish, and any officer whatever can tag one of the last two labels to military news. Many officers don't know what constitutes "classified" information. The press sections of the services, instead of being headed by generals and admirals who have authority to decide what is and is not classified information for publication, are manned by officers of lower rank who cannot give out any information which might offend some cranky general or admiral. Result: the press sections of the services withhold much information that is already matter of public record (printed, for example, in the Congressional Record to which anyone can subscribe).

> On occasion, some newsmen think, officers try to prevent publication of news not in order to protect military secrets but to cover up military mistakes.

> Sometimes agencies have appealed on patriotic grounds to reporters not to print certain information which subsequently was printed by other publications which had not been appealed to.

The last is typical of the kind of mishap which occurs under voluntary censorship such as Secretary Knox has tried to invoke on naval matters. Voluntary censorship always looks best to begin with because it has the political advantage of not seeming to be censorship at all. In the U.S. where it can be backed up by the penalties imposed for revealing "secret," "confidential" or "restricted" information such censorship could be very severe. So if a newsman were to play safe he would either print only handouts or submit his copy in advance of publication for editing by Government officials.

Many U. S. newsmen who have been in Europe since World War II began agree that worse sins of suppression and publication are committed in the name of voluntary censorship than of any other kind. For a newsman's professional conscience requires him to print all the important information he can but voluntary censorship imposes on him a conflicting patriotic conscience. Either he prints information damaging to his country or more often damages his country by concealing facts that would lead to the correction of military mistakes.

Last week the U. S. was obviously floundering in its first attempts to decide what is a military secret and how to prevent its publication without making the press a kept creature of the Government.

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