Bowdlerized TIME?

Should U.S. news be bowdlerized before it is shipped to Americans and the English-speaking people of Latin America? A minor tempest over that question began to blow up last week. The occasion was TIME'S Air-Express edition and, most particularly, what TIME said June 9 about the work of the Rockefeller Committee.

Broadminded, the Director of the Council of National Defense News Section took his stand in favor of letting TIME'S subscribers south of the Rio Grande get truth instead of propaganda. "My own individual judgment is that one of our greatest propaganda assets is an ability to 'take it' on the propaganda front. I would much rather see TIME cover an American strike or a White House picketing than to see the Nazis cover it for us.

This holds true, of course, in the case of the bad news that our press associations and other communications to Latin America are obliged to cover. ... I state this merely to make it clear that ... I, as a Governmental propagandist, am in no way suggesting that TIME pull its punch." But Publisher Franklin Johnston of the American Exporter took the lead in demanding that TIME'S news be expurgated for Pan-American consumption. "In general," said he, "TIME'S story on the Rockefeller offices is, no doubt, a piece or legitimate reporting for American readers, But TIME has no business to send to Latin America in its Air-Express edition news of this kind. . . . What is meat for us here may be poison for those abroad.

Our friends below the Rio Grande must be amazed to see, in this day and age of national feeling and national propaganda, an American paper broadcasting the seamy side of its own country." These arguments posed a major issue of whether anything is to be gained from trying to conceal facts about the U.S. from friendly nations. But this big issue hardly concerns TIME'S Air-Express edition, whose primary purpose is to keep 50,000 American citizens stationed in Latin America in touch with what is going on at home.

Whatever the merits of hoodwinking the Latin Americans--the advantages are probably few--there is certainly nothing to be gained by keeping in the dark the U.S. citizens overseas who are the front line of U.S. contact with South America.

In addition to blanketing the U.S. colony there, TIME Air-Express (printed entirely in English) has its only other--smaller--audience among the native representatives of U.S. business, the diplomatic set and the best educated classes--the most intelligent and, generally speaking, most friendly group in Latin America.

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