Booby Trap

At a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Minneapolis Tribune Chief Editorial Writer Carroll Binder announced bluntly: "This is a report on a project launched by this society which has boomeranged." The project: a U.N. newsgathering treaty that would free the press of the world from censorship and other restrictions (TIME, May 23, 1949). As the global-minded U.S. delegate to the U.N.'s conferences on freedom of information, 56-year-old Editorialist Binder knew just what went wrong. Spurred on by the most high-minded intentions, the U.S. had marched starry-eyed into the jaws of a trap that it set itself.

Last week in Chicago, an American Bar Association committee added its voice to a chorus demanding that the U.S. pull out of the trap altogether. The committee, which had once approved a U.N. press treaty, reversed its stand. It changed its mind because many editors themselves now feel the proposed U.N. press treaty will put shackles on the U.S. press without freeing the world's press anywhere.

Censor's Whim. The editors learned their lesson the hard way. In 1944, with the Four Freedoms of the Atlantic Charter still ringing in their ears, 242 members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors passed a resolution urging the U.S. to persuade other nations to guarantee the press the same freedom that it enjoys in the U.S. Congress endorsed the A.S.N.E. proposal and the State Department drafted a proposed U.N. convention. Its main provisions would allow correspondents to move around the world freely, their copy safe from the whim of local censors, except where it touched on matters of "national security."

At a 1948 U.N. conference, the U.S. delegation, including Harvard Professor Zechariah Chaffee, Sevellon Brown, publisher of the Providence Journal & Bulletin, and the Christian Science Monitor's Editor Erwin ("Spike") Canham, won enough supporters to get their "Newsgathering Convention" tentatively approved. But to do so, they had to bargain. Among the 55 countries attending, many wanted a clause giving a nation the right to demand corrections of erroneous stories. Unwisely, the U.S. agreed. One government might send a "correction" to another and it would be required to pass along the correction to its press, though the newspapers could decide for themselves whether to print it. But the clause was the beginning of a chain reaction of proposals to restrict the press.

A coalition of Latin American, Middle Eastern and Asiatic countries teamed up on a second plan called the "Freedom of Information Convention." Small countries wanted a ban on stories which might injure their "national prestige and dignity." They wanted clauses saying the press should promote peace, combat war propaganda and work towards a solution of economic, social and humanitarian problems. The Communists chimed in and tried to push these provisions even further.

What's Unfair? To any free newsmen, the meaning of such provisions was clear: any unfavorable story by a correspondent, no matter how factual, could be construed as "propaganda" or injurious "to national prestige." Pakistan, for example, wanted to extend everywhere the Moslem rule that forbids images of Mohamed; the Egyptians wanted the press to follow Egypt's own censorship rules and thus, for instance, ban any news of King Farouk's high jinks; Latin American delegates plugged for amendments that made "unfair" reporting (i.e., unfavorable) of their affairs a crime. Behind these gripes stood the Communists, fanning every spark of resentment against the U.S. and Britain, charging that the U.S. convention was simply a naked power grab to protect the capitalistic interests of the Western world's news services.

The conferences became a place to gang up on the Anglo-American press and sound off wildly about "outrages" it had committed. And while all the talking went on, nation after nation tightened up censorship and restrictions on the press.

Despite bitter opposition from the U.S., Britain, Scandinavian countries, The Netherlands and others, the second convention--with all its booby trap provisions for the protection of national prestige and the promotion of peace--was passed by a special U.N. committee. (The U.S. plan was approved by the General Assembly, but then shelved, with almost no chance of ever being ratified.) The dangerously restrictive convention is likely to be okayed finally at the fall session of the General Assembly and sent to the U.N. members for ratification, the final step.

Steamroller. Many U.S. newsmen and politicians who have followed the course of the U.S.'s well-intentioned reach for international press agreements, now demand the U.S. wash its hands altogether of further attempt to legislate press freedom.* But the State Department, Binder and others argue that the U.S., trapped, now has no choice but to go on. It must stay in the fight and try to kill the restrictive convention or it will be steamrollered through, virtually unopposed.

Even if the U.S. refuses to sign the treaty, they contend that a majority of the other U.N. countries can give it the weight of international law. It is so loosely worded that many opponents say such acts as the Czech government's imprisoning of A. P. Correspondent Bill Oatis might be recognized as legal by the signers. Last week even the New York Times, which once applauded the U.S. Convention, decided it would be best to drop it. Said the Times: "The general good faith [needed for the U.S. plan] unhappily does not exist ... It isn't the press that needs reforming. It is the governments that have destroyed, along with other human rights, the right to find and publish the facts and the right to form and publish opinion."

* Including a fuzzy clause on freedom of information in the proposed U.N. covenant of human rights, written by the Human Rights Commission, on which Mrs. Roosevelt is U.S. delegate. A subcommittee is meeting in Manhattan this week to work principally on a "code of ethics" for the press.

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