For Export Only

Though no one said so openly, the sponsors of "journals-for-export" (see above) were moved by the American's abiding distrust of Government-controlled news. If they needed grounds for their distrust, they now had a good example.

Three weeks ago, the U.S. press headlined the testimony of Lieut. General Albert Wedemeyer before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Wedemeyer, whose report on China had been suppressed by Secretary George Marshall, roundly endorsed immediate economic and military aid to the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek (TIME, Dec. 29).

But the U.S. Information Service's bulletins to China (framed by the State Department) sounded quite different. In its account of the China hearings, USIS gave a niggling 17 lines to Wedemeyer, a fat 68 to Willard Thorp and William Walton Butterworth Jr., State Department apologists for the U.S.'s indecisive China policy. USIS painstakingly reported that Wedemeyer had called Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek "a benevolent despot"; it did not add that Wedemeyer also declared that Chiang was "a fine character" and "the logical leader of China today," who needed U.S. help and should get it. Nothing was said to China, either, about Wedemeyer's recommendation of military aid.

Few U.S. correspondents in China were surprised at USIS' slanting of the news. USIS headquarters in Shanghai, run by big, beefy Bradley Connors, had consistently trimmed its sails to the State Department's anti-Chiang clique. From Nanking, TIME Correspondent Fred Gruin reported:

"Since July, there have appeared in the U.S. press many powerful opinions favoring aid, including speeches by Thomas E. Dewey, statements by Representative Walter Judd, former Secretary of State James Byrnes, and former Ambassador to France William C. Bullitt.

"So far as USIS is concerned, these do not make news fit to print. Of 66 U.S. editorials on China which were distributed by USIS, 59 were anti-Chiang and anti-U.S. aid. The hostile New York Herald Tribune was quoted eleven times, the New York Times, guardedly sympathetic, only three times."

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