The Press: What Sense Censorship?

U.S. censorship may or may not be keeping information from the enemy, but it is strikingly successful in keeping important news out of print in the U.S. Just how far the U.S. Government is fighting World War II without taking its own people into its confidence was indicated by four incidents last week:

> Five weeks after the battle of the Coral Sea the Navy admitted the sinking of the aircraft carrier Lexington. This delay was an excellent example of justifiable military censorship-withholding news that might be of value to the enemy. For a new Japanese attack was expected, and although the Japanese announced the sinking of a carrier of the “Saratoga class,” presumably they had not known for sure that the Lexington was done for.

> After the news that Dutch Harbor had been bombed, nine days passed before the Navy admitted that the Japanese had made a landing on remote islands in the Aleutians (blaming the delay on bad weather, which prevented air reconnaissance). This week first results of U.S. air attacks on enemy naval units were disclosed, but the U.S. public still knew little about what was happening in Alaska. For months censorship has almost stricken the word Alaska from print. Since Pearl Harbor, no outside reporter or photographer has been allowed a peek inside Alaska. As one correspondent in Alaska puts it: “You people back in the ‘old country’ just plumb don’t know the meaning of the word censorship.” The Office of Censorship has even made a “special request” that the press services submit all stories about Alaskan military operations or installations for censorship before publication.

> National censorship has been clamped on the information contained in a story which detailed certain dispositions not of United Nations’ but of enemy forces; There was apparently good reason why the information should never have been made public. Nevertheless it was published by papers in several parts of the U.S. Outraged, the Government cracked down, forbidding not only mention of its crackdown but any reprinting of the information, which had already had a circulation of some 5,000,000 copies and was therefore hardly a secret, by any definition.

> Censor Byron Price congratulated the press on its “magnificent” performance in keeping mum about the six-day Washington visit of Soviet Foreign Commissar Molotov—”news of very high importance . . . known to hundreds of newspapermen and broadcasters.” (Only paper that talked was the tabloid Philadelphia News, which gossiped: “The talk in official Russian circles here is that Premier V. M. Molotov of Soviet Russia is in this country on a secret mission of vast importance.”) Actually, while photographers waited at the White House to catch the Duke & Duchess of Windsor, Molotov strolled slowly past them and not a camera clicked.

It was debatable whether the press silence on Molotov was something to be proud or ashamed of. The silence may have given the Russian politician some protection from Nazi interference as he flew around in his big, lumbering Soviet plane. But no such protection has been deemed necessary for other important Allied figures (e.g., British Production Tsar Oliver Lyttelton, Harry Hopkins, General Brehon Somervell) after they had safely reached Washington or London.

Since the censorship on Molotov’s whereabouts was clamped down at Russian request, it looked as if a Russian muzzle had been put on the U.S. press in order to please Stalin. And since the effect of the censorship was to keep secret from the public the fact that an agreement between the U.S. and Russia was pending, the inference was that here was a case of political, not military, censorship.

The first paper forcibly ejected from second-class mails for echoing too much Axis propaganda: the X-Ray (TIME, June 1), published by ex-Bootlegger Court Asher of Muncie, Ind. (Father Coughlin’s Social Justice folded up without waiting to be expelled.)