Please Don't Print This

Official censorship of all newspapers may soon become an established institution in this country if we enter a shooting war; such anti-democratic action seems to be a necessary accompaniment of the forging of a sword from a nation's people. The necessity for it is called into question by the repeated protests by Britain's war-time civilians against soft-pedalling reports of defeats; they feel that sugar-coating disaster is no way to bolster the war effort. But at any rate, there can be little excuse for the present policy of America's army and navy bigwigs, a policy of unofficial suppression of critical or embarrassing facts about progress in national defense.

Bona fide military secrets are accepted, and rightly so, in periods of war or crisis, but the army-navy attitude goes beyond this in an unwarranted fashion. Reporters are discouraged from printing unsavory material by the threat of blacklist--being refused access to government releases or press conferences. In this manner a quietus is put on reports of waste and inefficiency in the building of our national defense, so that optimistic generalities prevail. The absurd "voluntary censorship" on the presence of British warships in New York and San Francisco harbors was an attempt to keep ammunition from the isolationists. Coming closer to home, a new military activity at Harvard is being hush-hushed by Washington simply to avoid appeals for the same from other colleges. A small but juicy scandal concerning national defense and Administration foreign policy came out of a recent Crimson news interview, but was squelched by bureaucratic frowns.

In general, military authorities are either slanting the news at the source or by various pressures getting it slanted later on. The facts suppressed are not "military secrets" which could be used by the Nazis. The censorship of them is an obstacle to an informed electorate and a needless curb on freedom of the press.