Fight over Freedom

In banquet halls and smoke-filled rooms in Washington and Manhattan, U.S. publishers, editors and newsmen grappled last week with the postwar problems of the press. One was a tough nut that no amount of shoptalk seemed to crack: how to achieve the worldwide free trade in information that would help men know and understand each other? The matter was urgent: the headlines told of censorship trouble in Iran one day, news suppression in Bulgaria the next.

Editor & Publisher, Bible of the trade, reported that only 16 of the world's 72 countries practice the kind of freedom that the U.S. press preaches.

Who had the answers? Last week the Commission on Freedom of the Press cleared its throat and raised its hand.

After wrestling with the problem for two years (on a grant, but with no guidance, from TIME Inc.), it released its first report. Peoples Speaking to Peoples (University of Chicago Press: $2) proposed a revolution in global communications. The handful of editors who had waded through its 60,000 words found many of them controversial, many highly critical of the press.

The Authors. One co-author of the report was a newsman. Llewellyn White, 46, had worked for the Paris Herald, the Literary Digest, Newsweek and the Chicago Sun. Fortnight ago he went to London to join UNESCO's staff. The other, Dr. Robert D. Leigh,. 55, was a progressive-education specialist, founding president of Bennington College, director of FCC's foreign broadcast intelligence service for two wartime years. Their major proposals :

P: A U.N. treaty assuring the free flow of information and a U.N. unit to enforce it. (Editors favored the first, would fight the latter.)

P:"Export federations" -- nonprofit trade cooperatives in the U.S. newspaper, magazine, radio, book, and cinema industries -- to watch over the quality of exported information. Purpose: to correct the "prewar ratio of 200 True Confessions to every Harper's available abroad."

P: Merger of U.S. cable and radiotelegraph companies into a global "telecommunications" network.

P: A self-policing "foreign correspondents corps" to deal with host governments on censorship, etc. Immediate goal: to break down Russian fears of "irresponsibility" among foreign newsmen.

P: Teamwork by news agencies, radio networks and the U.S. Government to pipe cheap news into "neglected areas." Alternative: "Governments . . . will have to step in and do the job."

P: A Government-industry conference to get the whole program going.

What, No Scoops? Authors Leigh & White are critical of the "slave-press" countries, but believe that the barrier-breaking problem "is not made easier by the fact . . . that the so-called 'free press' countries sometimes preach more zealously than they practice. . . . What newspapermen really want is what Kent Cooper, executive director of the A. P., calls 'the right to roam the world at will, writing freely of what they see and feel.' ... It means ... an equal opportunity to use their wits to create unequal success. . . . Sorely tempted, a New York Times's Raymond Daniell will join a pool to receive Army favors; a New York Herald Tribune's Theodore Wallen will beseech a Calvin Coolidge to make an 'I do not choose to run' news break exclusive; an A.P.'s Edward Kennedy will double-cross his colleagues by breaking a release date."

The whole program looked very much like the same pie from which William Benton's postwar information plan for the State Department was sliced (TIME, Jan. 28). Benton's proposals were far milder. Last week, news tycoons found the pie unpalatable. Publisher John S. Knight (Chicago Daily News, Miami Herald, etc.) called it "a hazard to free reporting," a long step toward a U.S. or U.N. dominated press. Said U.P. President Hugh Baillie (whose outfit, along with A.P., the report roundly rapped for refusing to Jet the State" Department broadcast their news abroad in peacetime): "I cannot think of a speedier way for the press to get under the Government's thumb."

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