Dummy in the Closet

Smart, young Sevellon Brown III, Washington correspondent of the Providence Evening Bulletin and son of its publisher, had good reason for wishing he did not know so much. Someone in OWI had shown him a dummy of a proposed official U.S. Government daily newspaper. It even had a tentative name: American Reporter. Brown dutifully reported the project last week. Then he ducked. OWI and most of Washington officialdom wanted to know the authors. But Brown was sworn to secrecy.

The dummy Brown saw was a 32-page tabloid, expensively and carefully printed. Brown's informant admitted that the newspaper had neither OWI nor any other official backing or sponsorship. It was the independent brain child of an anonymous group of Government publicity men who thought the U.S. press and the Government were bungling the news of the war effort. The American Reporter would set everyone straight.

The would-be publishers' claim that a copy of the Reporter had been sent to the White House to see what the President thought of the idea produced an instant and vehement denial. Elmer Davis began turning his OWI inside out to discover who was behind the Reporter. Nothing could have been better calculated to embarrass him or the White House. He had just suspended some 300 surplus Government publications. Relations between the President and the press (TIME, Oct. 12) had never been worse. A Government newspaper would unquestionably be the last straw.

Radio Friesland (Nazi propaganda station in Holland) put the story on the air to show U.S. discontent with the press on the war effort. Whoever had dummied up the American Reporter had gone deep underground.

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