Berlin Off

All U.S. radio reporters in Berlin were last week denied the "cooperation" of the Reichsrundfunk Gesellschaft (German Radio Co.): i.e., put off the air sine die. This looked like a Nazi effort to throw the last punch, because two of the correspondents (Mutual's Dickson, NBC's Dreier) had already refused to broadcast and the third (CBS's Smith) was on the point of doing so. Their more or less fed-up opinion: no use.

CBS's famous Berlin newscaster, William L. Shirer, has had no successor in the art of wafting a lifted eyebrow on the air. But until Nazi armies got mired in Russia the job of broadcasting from Berlin, though it took gall and patience, could be honorably carried out. After CBS got tough last summer (TIME, July 28), it even seemed that Berlin would relax its clamp, at least on "color broadcasts." Instead, the personal war of nerves between radio correspondents and censors grew bitterer.

Last week the newscasters put the matter up to their home offices. Excluded from visits to battle fronts, forbidden to quote directly from German newspapers, forbidden to so much as mention the current anti-Semitic drive or Gestapo rule in Czecho-Slovakia, they were further annoyed by Nazi blue pencilers who tried to add to their copy as well as slash it.

Identical cables came to the Manhattan offices of Mutual, of NBC and also of CBS, two days after NBC and Mutual quit broadcasting from Berlin: "Your representative unjustifiably submitted complaints to you which he failed to present to the authorities of our house. In face of such behavior unable to cooperate with present representative. . . ."

Last-punched CBS's canny News Chief Paul White: "If your cablegram implies that you feel a correspondent has no right to inform his home office of his working conditions, then it is obvious that a correspondent does not have sufficient freedom of speech to enable him to work intelligently."

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