Freedom of the City

Ever since their victory a month ago, the new rulers of South Viet Nam have treated the foreign press with a blend of low-key exhortation and surprisingly Western-style savvy. The Provisional Revolutionary Government (P.R.G.) has required the estimated 127 journalists in Saigon, including 27 from Communist nations, to register and pick up credentials. Otherwise it has allowed them and their Vietnamese stringers to roam freely around the city, now unofficially designated as Ho Chi Minn City. Carefully attentive, the P.R.G. has permitted Western reporters, including the eight Americans on hand for United Press International, the Associated Press, and the NBC and CBS television networks--to hold onto their rooms at the Continental Palace and other choice hotels. Along with the P.R.G. troops, the newsmen can buy dated copies of Playboy and Penthouse still on the newsstands, using old Thieu-regime currency.

Weak Links. Living and working can be two different things. The foreign journalists have encountered serious problems in communicating with the outside world. Only last week did the P.R.G. finally permit cables to go directly to Hong Kong rather than through Hanoi, thereby reducing the time it takes for dispatches to reach Western countries from one to two days down to about three hours. The P.R.G. still does not allow direct telex, telephone, radiophoto or film links with Western countries, though it has permitted reporters from Cuba and Eastern Europe to fly to Hanoi with material that they have presumably relayed home and to the West. In recent days, the P.R.G. has stopped picture-taking of troops and street scenes, arresting and later releasing an offending Japanese cameraman, and has reduced its own news flow to a minimum. Only Giai Phong (Liberation), the P.R.G.'s daily newspaper, carries press reports, but they are usually three or four days old and consist of official statements and orders. In exasperation, a delegation of Western reporters, representing 120 correspondents from 13 countries, last week sent a letter of protest over the difficulties in gathering and transmitting news, photo and television film to the outside world and asked for permission to send out their own files via a charter flight to Hong Kong.

Yet no journalists complain about censorship. True, some reporters tone down their dispatches in order to avoid giving offense, and parts of articles sometimes fail to reach the West. But newsmen have been able to write on the tensions between the northern and southern wings of the P.R.G. at the three-day victory celebrations in Saigon, on the reviving black market for scarce gasoline and on the rising wave of crime in Saigon. Indeed, one British correspondent, James Fenton, freely reported that "we Western reporters have been learning in the past few weeks that it is easy to strike up a conversation with North Vietnamese or Viet Cong soldiers, but it is another matter getting any meaningful information from them." Actually, reporters have had an easier time questioning P.R.G. leaders than they had quizzing officials of the Thieu regime. General Tran Van Tra, head of the military administration for Saigon, has held several press conferences; recently Chairman Nguyen Huu Tho skillfully exchanged banter with journalists at a victory ball in Thieu's old Independence Palace.

New Restrictions. Some observers attribute the intermittently "open coverage" to a realization by the North Vietnamese that press contacts with U.S. newsmen after the 1973 peace treaty were helpful; others'"reason that the P.R.G. wants U.S. aid to counterbalance Soviet and Chinese influence and thus seeks to ingratiate itself through the Western press. Flushed by success, the P.R.G. may simply be marking time.and readying a new policy on foreign journalists. In fact, last week the P.R.G. slapped restrictions on travel outside the capital for "the near future"; it has delayed the departure of a number of Western newsmen who want to leave. At week's end no one knew whether these were isolated moves or signals that the phase of relative press freedom was about to give way to the old, familiar and throttling controls.

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