The Army's Doctrine

Newsmen thumbed through a new official pamphlet, stopped short at one pregnant paragraph, read it again. No, their eyes had not deceived them. The U.S. Army (in Guide to the Use of Information Materials) had given its own startling view of what the U.S. public should know:

"It should be recognized that news is not the sacred property of the press, but something in the public domain. In time of war the armed forces themselves are creators of news and have therefore a vested interest in the way it is reported and edited by the Information services. The all-important question pertaining to news and information is how victory can best be expedited by the truthful use of the news."

To U.S. newsmen, long annoyed and alarmed by brass-buttoned minds, both amateur and professional, the statement was a shocker. Under the broad coverall of "security," the Army has become progressively stricter in defining what newsmen can print. Its new doctrine means, if its words mean anything, that the Army may now (by its "vested interest") definitively prescribe what news may be printed in wartime and what not. Seldom in democratic countries had a servant of the people gone so far before.

At the Source. Newsmen should not have been too greatly surprised. The Army's Bureau of Public Relations has been getting a tighter and tighter hold on press copy. One recent measure: a rule that no officer might talk to a reporter without BPR permission.

Nearly every Washington newsman has his own pet instance of the Army's censorship at the source on grounds of "military security." Examples:

P: The Army's pressure on Britain to suppress British-created war news.

P: The Army's coy insistence on the anonymity (as a military secret) of "General X," press spokesman for General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Britain.

P: The Army's boast of how well it (and the press) kept the secret of the jet propulsion airplane (see p. 66) when its basic principles were expounded and diagrammed Sept. 11, 1941 in the British aviation magazine Flight.

P: The increasing practice of killing and maiming of news stories, and the more frequent brushoff of news queries.

The Army itself has been, and is, quick to compliment the U.S. press on proficient guarding of military information to which the press was privy. But recently the Army has stretched the pretext of "security" to blue-pencil information critical of the Army. Item: the Army attempted to kill a statement that the invasion of New Georgia was "a bungled job," on the ground that it would give propaganda material to the enemy (who knew all about it).

Now that the War Department had proclaimed its "vested interest" in news of its doings, would the Army proceed to suppress such items as the Patton case, the poor start of the Attu campaign, and try to make the U.S. public think that everything is hunky-dory?

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