There Ought To Be a Law

The Newburgh (N.Y.) News, a tough little link in Frank Gannett's newspaper chain, was crusading against vice and gambling in its tough little town (pop. 31,883). When the News documented its case with pictures of locally sold policy tickets, a grand jury summoned News Editor Douglas V. Clarke and Reporter Charles L. Leonard, and wanted to know where the tickets came from.

The Newsmen refused to tell. Their position, as they stated it, is the standard practice of the press: "Violation of a confidence is the gravest ethical omission of which a newspaperman can stand accused." In some states the law would have protected them from such questioning. New York has no such law. So last week Clarke and Leonard were fined $100 each for contempt of court and clapped into jail to serve ten days. (They straightway began writing a series on prison life.)

Boss Frank Gannett fumed that the state needed a law "putting newspapermen on a legal par with the clergy in protecting those who confide." In going after Clarke and Leonard, said Gannett, District Attorney Stanley B. Johnson "has established a reputation for swift and ruthless action. It is to be hoped he shows a like alacrity in disposing of gamblers and gambling institutions." At week's end, Johnson showed no such alacrity. The only other arrests were two gamblers, their pockets stuffed with policy tickets. They were fined and turned loose.

In other places, freedom of the press found the going rough.

P: In Athens, press officers of the U.S. Embassy and the American Mission for Aid denied correspondents' charges that Greece had no free press. "There is as real a freedom of the press in Greece today," said the official statement, "as there is in the U.S." It was an overstatement. The same day Athens' military governor arrested two editors of the Socialist weekly Mahi. Their offense: printing a clemency petition from political prisoners, and an editorial deploring the execution of former ELAS guerrillas.

P: In Prague, the Ministry of Information warned foreign correspondents to "rely mainly on official sources" in reporting the news from Communist-captured Czechoslovakia (see INTERNATIONAL).Next day, outright censorship began: foreign radiomen lost their broadcasting privileges, and 27 foreign publications (including TIME, LIFE, the Chicago Tribune, the London Daily Mail and Daily Mirror) were banned from the country.

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