The Well-Traveled Skeptics

Into the White House last Week to report to Harry Truman, went three globetrotters. They had been given what no other civilians have got in this war; a free round-the-world trip in Army planes, with high priority to go when & where they pleased--on a jaunt that had nothing to do with winning the war.

Their mission was as nebulous as it was ambitious: to examine the global hopes & fears for a postwar free press. They expected--and got --two-faced answers and open suspicion of U.S. motives from politicians, the support of editors everywhere. Their own 40,000-word report on their 40,000-mile travels was tart and sensible. Overall impression : facts are going to have as hard a time as ever getting around after the war. The traveling threesome, representing the American Society of Newspaper Editors, were the New York Herald Tribune's kindly, pipe-chewing Wilbur Forrest, Columbia University's owlish, gadabout Carl Ackerman, the Atlanta Constitution's nervous, nimble Editor Ralph McGill. Outstanding findings:

P: In Britain, as elsewhere, they were suspected of being undercover agents for the Associated Press's Executive Director Kent Cooper, whose talk of global press freedom sounds to the British like pious sales talk for the A.P. The travelers had some sharp words for Britain's Minister of Information (now First Lord of the Admiralty) Brendan Bracken, who "patently did not care much for newspapers or the profession, but he gave it lip service within limitations. He . . . said that in his opinion no [London] editor, with the possible exception of the editor of the Times, had any real voice. . . . Editors, he found were merely office boys. . . "

P: In Italy, editors "did not appear to realize they were free. They had taken orders so long. . . . There was cynicism, lack of confidence, not much self-respect or dignity. . . . The papers were not doing much of a news job."

P: Turkey's Prime Minister Suekrue Saracoglu said "if we were for a free press he was too. . . . We didn't quite believe him."

P: King Farouk thought the British were to blame for Egypt's censorship. Thought the editors: "Not entirely. The King's own Ministers had been too fond of that weapon."

P: China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek promised to abolish censorship when the war ended. (But last week it was tightened in China-- see FOREIGN NEWS.)

Riots & Hollywood. In Russia, Forrest, Ackerman and McGill had strong toasts and heavy talks with Moscow's leading editors, who for the first time were all gathered at a dinner for foreign visitors. The U.S. visitors listened politely to an angry diatribe by Russia's cantankerous Reporter Ilya Ehrenburg (whom the editors describe drily as an "essayist" for the Government), and sat through "almost identical speeches" by the editors of Pravda and Izvestia, who insisted that only the U.S.S.R. had a truly free press. They concluded that Russian editors get their ideas of the U.S. press from such books as Upton Sinclair's Brass Check (1919) and from Tass News Agency, which carries 13,000 words a day from America but "does not give any real picture."

The editors, who disagreed with, but liked, the Russians, did not blame Tass alone for such distortions of the U.S. scene: "One of the chief complaints we found from our diplomats and information staffs was that our own news services, A.P., U.P., and I.N.S., were doing the same thing, sending out items they thought would be used and displayed . . . to build up their services, without regard to whether people . . . were getting a picture of America. . . . Too often it is race riots, murders, Hollywood loves, divorces. . . ."

Russia's Izvestia, which barks at U.S. papers for barking back at it, used the traveling editors' report as a new excuse to lecture the U.S. press. Said Izvestia: "We do not want upheld as the last word in democracy such 'freedom of the press' which produces Hearsts, brings papers to irresponsibility, inspires false information and the seeds of suspicion in the relations between countries. . . . We do not need such a 'democracy.' Let others have it."

Same day Moscow's Red Star jumped on a Christian Science Monitor dispatch from Istanbul as "a most stupid invention . . . shocking lie." Retorted the Monitor, which, like all but Russian papers, is kept out of most of the Balkans: "If our Balkan coverage has limitations, we would be glad for permission from the Soviet Government to expand it by placing correspondents [there]."

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