In an office in Japan’s Radio Tokyo building last week, the U.S. Army set up a new bureau to deal with military security. Its name: Press Advisory Division. Its function: to censor all military dispatches and photos from the war area. General MacArthur’s headquarters, which has been reluctant to establish censorship, still insisted it had not done so; it had merely established an “advance security check.” But all correspondents were ordered to submit dispatches to the bureau before sending them. Since the Army does not control outgoing radio and cable channels, it is still possible for correspondents to send dispatches that the censors have not seen. But anyone who does so runs the chance of being ordered from the theater by MacArthur. For all practical purposes, full censorship of military news is in force.
Most of the correspondents thought that censorship was long past due. Under the vague and sometimes conflicting directives of “voluntary censorship,” correspondents were saddled with the responsibility of deciding security problems for themselves. As a result, they were often in hot water (TIME, July 24 et seq.). At other times, correspondents in Korea sat on good stories, for fear of breaking security, only to find that the same stories had been released in Tokyo or Washington and that they had been scooped.
The Seventh Paragraph. MacArthur’s decision to crack down stemmed from the coverage of the Hungnam evacuation. Three weeks ago, while U.S. marines and G.I.s were still clawing their way back to the escape port, a Reuters dispatch from Tokyo briefly mentioned the preparations for an evacuation, a fact all Tokyo correspondents knew but had not filed, for security reasons. The evacuation news, which had been buried in the seventh paragraph of the Reuters story, was rewritten into the lead in London and splashed across the front page by the Chicago Tribune and other papers. When the New York offices of Associated Press, United Press and International News Service asked their Tokyo bureaus for the story, detailed reports of the evacuation were promptly filed.
MacArthur’s acting chief of staff for military operations, Major General Doyle O. Hickey, called in the bureau chiefs for a powwow. A precise, genial artilleryman, Hickey asked the newsmen for their ideas on what should be done. At the suggestion of the A.P.’s Russell Brines, the Army set up the Press Advisory Division, a staff of officers who could be consulted on security matters but who had no censorship powers.
Jet Action. Hopped-up accounts of the Hungnam fighting kept going out. The U.P. sent out a breathless story of the “crucial final stage” that had the U.S. 3rd Division fighting “with its back to the sea to hold open the escape port of Hungnam against Communist ‘banzai’ attacks.” Actually, MacArthur’s headquarters insisted, U.S. forces were engaged in an orderly withdrawal at small cost.
In the first few days under censorship, the blue pencils were light and copy flowed along smoothly. But at week’s end the honeymoon ended. Eighth Army Headquarters in Korea ordered NBC’s Kenneth Kantor and U.P.’s Peter Webb confined to quarters for a “gross security violation” in disclosing prematurely the death of Lieut. General Walton Walker in a jeep accident (see WAR IN ASIA). Full field censorship was ordered for all press copy, and telephones used by newsmen covering Eighth Army Headquarters were removed.
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