Censorship? No & Yes

Is any form of press censorship needed now? From two members of Harry Truman's Cabinet, newsmen got two answers last week.

In Boston, Attorney General Howard McGrath told newsmen: "Newspapers enjoying unlimited freedom from Government interference can be, have been and are, some of them, vile and dishonorable: beyond all understanding . . . [But] under this Administration there will be no implied, no disguised, no direct and no indirect censorship . . . even if the tiny group of malcontents who traduce your Government from day to day were to increase and intensify their output twenty fold."

But in Columbus, Ohio, Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer suggested to the Ohio Newspaper Association that some sort of voluntary censorship is necessary to prevent leaks of defense data. While he admitted that many leaks came from people in Washington who liked "seeing their names in the papers," Sawyer thought the American Society of Newspaper Editors could work out a way of keeping such leaks out of the papers. To help them out, he had set up a division in the Commerce Department to offer advice on what people could say or not say about industrial technical data without violating security. "This service," he said airily, ". . . is designed to furnish a point in Government to which the patriotic citizen can turn when in doubt as to what he should or should not reveal."

The anti-Truman New York Daily News thought there was something fishy about the preoccupation of two non-military Cabinet members with censorship problems. For fellow newsmen it had a warning: "Brace Yourselves, Gents . . . Evidently honest criticism is getting under Harry's hide . . . Better close ranks right now, and get set for the next snide Administration attack on the freedom of the press."

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