Senseless Censors

The time was last January; the scene, Censor Byron Price's office. The nation's press had just received a very complete and baffling set of ground rules for wartime censorship, but despite this everyone was optimistic and cooperative. A far cry from that was the scene in Washington a fortnight ago, as long-suffering correspondents threatened at last to blow the lid over the ridiculous hush-hush handling of President Roosevelt's inspection tour.

This was merely one in a series of countless rubs that have made the going rough since Pearl Harbor for press and public alike. Price's statement in January that the press "understands the need for temporary sacrifice" typifies a failure by government sources to realize that those who are the principal victims of miscarried news are the American public and not their press. To withhold from this public information which might "aid or comfort the enemy" is recognized as essential by every fair-minded citizen; but when the enemy is able, on the other hand, to truthfully contradict statements issued by the War Department on American losses, a situation has arisen that is hardly morale-building. Just such was the case when Secretary of War Stimson was forced to admit last week that members of General Doolittle's Tokyo bombing party are now prisoners of Japan. After the raid Doolittle stated that "no planes were left behind in Japan." It is now known that several planes were forced down in Manchuria and other Jap-held regions. With such deliberate deceptions as this coming to light from time to time, it will soon be obvious to many Americans that daily bulletins from the Pacific are falling quite short of picturing the struggle in full. Complacency was America's greatest enemy before December 7. Today it still looms ominously in the background, as the United States, quite capable of hearing the straight facts, is subjected to unreasonable stories of superior American fighting machinery the world over.

The home front, too, has come through very little better. Here pettifogging tactics by Office of Censorship employees frequently annoy cooperative correspondents in the field of national news. In June a group of Washington pressmen made a 24-day tour of important war plants as the guests of the National Association of Manufacturers. Accompanied by one Navy and six Army censors, the correspondents were forbidden to publish production figures that frequently appeared, fully covered, in local papers. At one plant they could not even mention the product manufactured, while it was being currently featured in a full-page magazine advertisement. Equally ridiculous was exaggerated secrecy over the President's recent tour. Delayed reports on the progress of the tour would have both insured his personal safety and at the same time informed a public that has become all too wary of pre-digested news releases.

This is merely the latest development in a situation that grows more serious daily. If the government is to hold the confidence of the American public, it must immediately clean up a mess which has resulted from ignorant administration, as well as undemocratic methods.