Private Rights

The U.S. press, whose zeal for "getting the story" sometimes overrides its respect for private rights, had a door slammed in its face. To hear the outraged yells last week, it might have been supposed that the freedom of the press was in danger. It was not.

The scene was Hot Springs, Va., where 20 months before the press had fought, with better cause, to report the international food conference--an official gathering of 43 United Nations. This time newspapermen wanted to invade the private meetings of a private society: the 19-year-old Institute of Pacific Relations, which meets behind closed doors so that its speakers, some of them Government officials, can speak and discuss freely.

Leading the press storm troops was Ray Richards, a top Hearst hatchet man whose specialty is spreading anti-Japanese sentiment on the Pacific Coast. Richards, though he did not get inside the door, stated last week that "no one took the floor to say a good word for Uncle Sam."

Editor & Publisher, defender of the journalistic faith, excitedly took up the Second Battle of Hot Springs: "The people are entitled to know what is going on." It also solemnly reported newsmen's suspicions that the Institute was somehow both pro-Japanese and proCommunist.

The Institute held its peace and kept the door shut. Its white-haired Secretary-General, E. C. Carter told Hearstling Richards: "You have no more business here than I would have walking into an editorial conference at a Hearst newspaper office." To which, by all the rules of free assembly, there was no comeback.

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