The Press: Double Trouble

For the first time since the Korean war began, U.S. news services last week were getting incomprehensible, hashed-up field dispatches tersely ending: “Rest of story withheld by censor.” Reason: General MacArthur’s Tokyo headquarters had imposed a second censorship on stories already cleared by General Matt Ridgway’s Eighth Army censors in the field, and had set up a board of ex-combat officers to run it. Under this sort of fire, Eighth Army censors had become tougher too.

The reason for the double check, Tokyo explained, was that information vital to the enemy had been seeping out of field headquarters, some of it in Army communiques. But the double check made little sense to correspondents, since 1) it did not apply to Navy or Air Force dispatches and 2) censors on the battlefield presumably know more about what should be killed than Tokyo. The New York Herald Tribune’s David McConnell, who was censored by Tokyo in filing a story on the new censorship itself, pointed out that all news from Korea moves on “unsecure” telephone and teletype lines, “which the Communists can and almost certainly are” tapping. Thus, it does little good to censor dispatches after they reach Tokyo Added he: “There had been no explanation of why the MacArthur command has not improved the Korean censorship if it needs improvement . . .”