FREE NEWS FROM UNFREE NATIONS?
LYONS, EUGENE
Free News FROM Unfree Nations? By Eugene Lyons THERE was loud rejoicing in tha heavens of democracy, some months ago. The angels of freedom and seraphim of civil liberties trumpeted the glad...
...The joy, alas, was short-lived...
...The most remarkable part of the Russian episode has not been mentioned by anyone, as far as I am aware...
...It ia a basic condition for their functioning and aarvival...
...Others hold on to shreds of illusion in this respect...
...But...
...The current excitement about a free flow of news across all frontiers, as evidenced in UNO resolutions, demands by the heads of news associations and junkets by American p*ub* lishlng Innocents abroad, seems to ma useful...
...I refer to the fact that dispatches under Moscow datelines in those weeks of blessed freedom from censorious restraints were no different, in quantity or quality or subject matter, from those that went before and those that came after...
...From this you are justified in deducing that censorship per se—under which an official reads, bluepencils and authorizes a dispatch before it is sent—is only one of the obstacles to a free flow of news and views between nations...
...Sometimes the serewa are put on the home office to recall a man...
...FREE" NEWS FROM EUROPI Eugene Lyons Is tha well-known foreign correspondent...
...Yet the episode merits some attention, not merely as a case study in wishful notthinking but for the light it sheds on the whole business of global "freedom of information" now so widely discussed...
...In my own case (though it all happened so long ago) my home office yielded meekly to Soviet pressures for my recall, though the dispatch on which the pressures were based was entirely true and my employers knew that it was true...
...Other times the offender is refused re-admission when he leaves for a vacation or for a visit home...
...Besides, if thrown out, he leaves his territory "uncovered" and thereby gives the competing correspondents a temporary advantage...
...The correspondent who risks the anger of local dictators, or actual expulsion, to obtain and transmit vital news, is likely to put his employers to annoying expense and trouble...
...The miracle is that so many foreign correspondents do manage to save their souls...
...Not one of them informed his customers about the magnitude of forced labor, the tensions within the ilictatorship, the postwar reign of terror . or any other "dangerous" subject...
...The rulers of one of the freedom-loving nations, as Vishinsky might phrase it, had "lifted the censorship" in their vast domain...
...How could he function, even if all legal barriers to travel and to interview and to Inspect were removed, when the people among whom he lives must, in sheer self-protection, shun him...
...No one with any experience in the day-to-day tealities of neiva coverage in a dictated area can pump up any •ptimihm about the free low of unadulterated news from enslaved countries...
...Thereafter foreign correspondents stationed in Moscow presumably could write as they pleased and file same without benefit of censors' seals and signatures...
...Apparently, none of the newspapermen whose zeal for truth had been so long frustrated rushed to his typewriter to "tell all...
...From long observation I have extracted a simple and reliable rule: // the writer about a dictatorship can go back, his stuff isn't worth reading...
...Formerly editor of The American Mercury, Lyons has contributed to many Journals...
...Wa shall be far belter advised to face I he irreduribl* fact that freedom of information Is incompatible with unfree nations...
...r i 1 1HIS needs to be understood In order ¦ that...
...Actually, it seems to me, we are better off when totalitarian news is clearly labeled CENSORED...
...Gene," he whispered, "everything you wrote in Assignment in Utopia is still true—only more so...
...Under a dictatorship, those temptations are multiplied a thousandfold, until they become almost compulsions...
...This includes the reporter's right to travel anywhere anytime in the country to which he is accredited, without official chaperonage...
...that he may come to decipher the message in the eyes of muzzled men and women...
...After all, be had to go back to live and Work in Moscow...
...to investigate events and government claims independently...
...We should not help totalitarian countries sweeten their brew of lies with a few minor concessions that do not affect the essence...
...Our democratic demands for news freedom should not be tangled In self-delusions...
...Ths press agency hack* continued meekly to transmit official handouts and quotations from the censored local papers...
...Censorship is the least Important of the restraints under which foreign reporters operate and the one most easily circumvented...
...concealed censorship ran be worse than open censorship...
...Visas are issued only to "friendly" and "objective" reporters — euphemisms for complacent or manageable ^reporters...
...Only newsmen who have pawned their professional integrity for a "friendly" atatus can be altogether sure, *«!.leaving their beats, that they will be ltd to return...
...Not content with hailing the gracious favor as a journalistic victory, the horntooters professed to see in it portents of a democratic trend in Soviet Russia, proofs of Stalin's eagerness to cooperate for world peace and other recondite glories...
...Under such circumstances, correspondents with a robust sense of selfinterest tend to become demonstratively "friendly" to their hosts and benignly "tolerant" of the surrounding horrors in ^places like Rome and Berlin yesterday, Moscow and Warsaw and Belgrade today...
...Then he got up ami delivered a stereotyped address on the glories of the Soviet system...
...The most revealing accounts of Hitler's Germa"hy, Mussolini's Italy, and Stalin's Russia .have been given to us in books written after the authors had left those prison-states...
...What was his reward for bucking the dictators...
...Merely to list these minimal conditions for effective news-gathering and trustworthy analysis of news is to acknowledge that they cannot possibly be met under a dictatorship of the Nazi or Stalinist type...
...The angels of freedom and seraphim of civil liberties trumpeted the glad tidings in editorials and radio analyses...
...with those who can open or close political and social doors to him...
...But there are ether ways to get rid of an undesirable witness to totalitarian behavior...
...to dig deep under the surface of public affairs for concealed facts and motives...
...The same, we may be sure, will prove to be the rase in the next few years for Tito's Yugoslavia, Bierut's Poland, Communistcontrolled Bulgaria and Rumania, the Soviet segments of Germany, Austria, Korea and other current totalitarian legions...
...XhOSE who agitate with naive fervor for the lifting of censorships as a full solution seem unmindful of another serious 'aspect of the problem...
...to check statistics at their source...
...Anything, In fact, that helps to emphasize jipd clarify the contrasts between the democratic and antidemocratic worlds is to the good...
...Dismissal and unemployment, while colleagues more amenable to the wishes of their hosts, and less quixotic in pursuit of their duty, rose to journalistic eminence...
...Just as millions of muddled Americans seem willing to accept the rankest kind of political despotism as a new species of "democracy," they may fall for adulterated and rationed information, once the formal censorships are removed, . as a new species of press freedom...
...The danger, in short, is that the present American pressure for worldwide freedom may succeed in enforcing a more artful camouflage of the propaganda and official falsehoods being pumped out of tha dictated capitals...
...Expulsions are rare, because of the attendant publicity...
...The curious blindness or indifference of most American home offices to the problems of their representatives in police-states is one of the obstacles to honest reporting under totalitarian auspices...
...besides, he was a young man with a career to make...
...Nor, having been allowed to pass the portals, is the correspondent's tenure assured...
...I know of a correspondent, at one time outstanding, who had made himself "undesirable" first in Moscow, then in Berlin, by his bothersome habit of telling facts...
...Even in a democratic capital, the reporter's temptations are to conform and "play ball" with those in power...
...Either they do not know or prefer to gloss ever the fact that the total state exercises a total veto power over the selection of foreign press and radio emissaries to their realm...
...Good, honest men do get through—dictators, too, makes mistakes—but this is despite the system...
...When I introduced myself, the guest of honor greeted me warmly...
...Whether he will make friends or be ostracized, whether be will be given the inside track on routine news, the comfort of his family, the schooling of his children, his food and his housing, tha safety of friends—everything depends on the good will of the totalitarian rulers...
...In the measure that.thcse things make newspaper readers and radio listeners aware that the news out of certain areas Is not fret, they servo a desirable purpose...
...An enterprising reporter in a dictated country becomes a menace to everyone around him...
...to ascertain trends in public feeling...
...It alone decides who shall and who shall not enter...
...The freedom-lovuig rulers offered no more explanation for the restoration than they had for the revocation...
...If they had some inkling of how artfully dictatorships exploit the competitive set-up to their own advantage and to the more thorough befuddlement of American readers, editors might temper competition with common sens...
...Our ' democratic trumpeters, understandably, were too embarrassed to say much...
...How, for instance, could the cprrespondent exercise a right to independent- investigation where citizens do not dare give him facts or opinions not In line with official claims...
...His employers would hardly relish the trouble of changing horses in midstream...
...jcouple of years ago 1 attended a neon ©f the Overseas Press Club re a prominent newspaperman just /^ck from Moscow was scheduled to speak...
...He is also the author of Tha Red Decade and a biography of Stalin, In this article, ha draws upon his experience as a foreign correspondent to put in proper perspective the problem of "free" news from Soviet-dominated Europe...
...Hla book on tha Soviet Union was one of the first to tell clearly what Ufa had become In "Utopia...
...The UNO could obtain unanimous consent to the abolition of all censorships without affecting the character of the misinformation sent out of totalitarian countries in the" guise of news...
...the danger is that we may have a few meaningless changes in the mechanics of news-gathering and transmission palmed off on us as the advent of international freedom of information...
...democratic peoples may not find themselves swallowing an ersatz International press freedom as the genuine article...
...i i recall, In my own experience, occasions when I decided not to transmit "hot stories" for fear that local people who befriended me might be falselj accused of having tipped me off...
...Unless the demands for open two-way conduits of international news are coupled with a clear-headed realization that only minor improvements in procedure, rather than true freedom, are possible, the cure may prove worse than the disease...
...What had happened...
...J NIMPEDED access to news and news sources is vastly more important than the aboltion of censorships...
...It includes the reporter's right to make honest mistakes in his pursuit of the truth without being pilloried or expelled...
...Rigid control of information Is, after all, net a whim of dictatorships...
...Why democratic newsgathering groups operating in a blackcdout country should compete so feverishly understanding...
...that he may "develop an intuition about public affairs —and that he will store his secret knowledge for the day when, he can write without the unnerving certainty that his every hour is :,»>ied uport, his every word reported, his wires tapped, his mail rifled...
...A few weeks later the censorship was restored as suddenly and arbitrarily as it had been revoked...
...To ask them to end the preas blackout* is to ask them to commit aoieide...
...Having invested in a reporter's fare and expenses to some far-off country, the average editor—and this is especially thu case with mass-production agencies—expects him to ".behave," to be "sensible," to play the game and make friends...
...The best that his readers and employers can hope is that in the course of years an intelligent reporter will learn to read between the lines of the controlled press...
...Editors and commentators who had done handsprings of joy over the removal of that censorship, now somehow ignored its restitution...
...TlIE futility of expecting truthful, uninhibited news to be cabled from totalitarian news sources is unfortunately obvious only to those who have tried to do it...
...It should not be forgotten that the correspondent, being human, is himself under the pressures of the pervasive propaganda, coercion and fear to which the whole population is subjected...
Vol. 30 • February 1947 • No. 7
