Britain’s Censorship

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 302, 22 December 1939, Page 10

Britain’s Censorship

TRIALS OF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS “Somewhere in Loudon,” in one of the capital’s many centres of learning, officials are now at work supplying a very different sort ot public enlightenment to that for -which the building usually serves (writes John Allan Mayo in the Christian iScience Moniter). This is the Ministry of Information, and here 24 hours a day runs the complicated machinery which must perform the difficult task of combining truth with prudence and news with reticence. Here the civil servants work who decide what information may with safety be made public and what withheld, and who writes restrained communiques and issue official notices. Here has come the Press Department of the Foreign Office, the unpretentious centre of important diplomatic explanations. Here at makeshift desks and, until recently at any rate, amid the clatter and confusion of builders’ operations, work the official censors examining the copy that is to ballast the headlines of the world’s Press.

Here too, in the quiet brown-fur-nished conference room the Press—historians of the present—wait patiently with feet on trestle tables and gas masks on their backs to know whether their daily thesis has passed its vigorous examination. Round the room are ranged telephone booths so that reporters may ring their offices to release stories that come back to the conference room dias through compressed air delivery pipes from the censors’ office. Every now and again interest stirs as an official communique is issued telling of the progress of » ampaigns on land and sea and in the air.

It is not easy to be a newspaper man nowadays, with a news-hungry public to be served at regular intervals. One London newspaper the other day published a long request for forbearance, explaining the reasons for lack of news. Similarly it is not easy to be a consor or an official in charge of the release of information. The wishes of war and other departmens must be respected; and while the public must have news there is much information which must not be allowed to come to the ears of the enemy.

“The Ministry of Information is a new department of State,” says an editorial in the Times, “and as such is entitled to indulgence from Parliament and people. But, like everyone else, it has to reach its maximum efficiency quickly under pressure of war, and can do that only if it learns by its mistakes. It must be prepared therefore for criticism to be not only friendly but candid. . . The absence of news leaves no void; it is immediately replaced by rumour, a malign force that, especially under modern conditions, when the enemy is equipped with the wireless weapon, may be deliberately and dangerously fomented. The crop of rumours that sprang up in the hours of official silence after a recent raid was fantastic. And rumour, as the Ministry of Information will certainly learn by experience, spreads with prodigious rapidity, and is exceedingly difficult to overtake.”

Britain has accustomed itself but slowly to censorship—and that includes public, newspapermen, and the censors themselves. On the one hand it is realised that among the sacrifices that must be made to safeguard national security is the surrender of the island’s cherished freedom of the Press. But on the other it is realised that this surrender does not include the freedom of the critic, the right to criticise. This realisation, which has kept the Labour and Liberal Parties “in opposition” in the House of Parliament and has found its public echo in the questions and debates in Commons and Lords, has been stressed inside the ever-open doors of the Ministry of Information. Not merely have newspapermen been allowed to criticise, they have been encouraged to do so. From such topics as the helpful installation as twopence-in-the-slot telephone boxes for reporters who may want to phone long reports necessitating a ridiculous number of twopences—to over-reticence in official news

There are signs that the Ministry is willing to learn by its mistakes. Many of the improvements in technique already made resulted directly from the criticism and suggestions of newspapermen.

Greatest in number among the foreign newspaper men concerned are the representatives of the American Press. And very concerned they have been. Their concern, transmitted to the authorities in no uncertain terms, has resulted in conferences known unofficially as “beef exchanges,” where the correspondents, gathered in force, have met the highest officials of the Ministry and been given a blank cheque for making out as maay grumbles as they wished.

The first of these resulted* directly in a number of improvements. Five high officials listened to a barrago of suggestions aDd complaints, which lasted for well over an hotfh. Foremost among them -was that at times when important news came through, the methods then adopted for censoring caused delays in transmission of cables up to 12 hours. Waving a sheaf of cables, one correspondent declared that he was being called upon in antagonistic terms for immediate explanations why his paper had not had dispatches on the Athenia disaster. He wanted explanations, too, since he had filed a thousand words immediately the news came through, and apparently it was only reaching his New York office in driblets the following day. It was promised to expedite matters in future by installing one or more censors in the cable offices for duty day and night, so that overseas messages could only be seen and dispatched immediately. When Early Means Late. Another correspondent declared that he had had a “beat” for several hours on an important story, but that his message had arrived later than those dispatched when the official news came through. It was explained to him that “scoops” or “beats” are no longer possible, since no message can go out before an official bulletin has been issued. Furthermore, early messages are likely to get at the bottom of the censor’s pile. A further point was gained, however, when increased staff was promised, and some arrangements agreed upon to put

radiocasts on a more equal time footing, since they do not have to overcome the difficulty of a jam on the cable companies’ wires. The officials, in their turn, were pleased to hear one experienced foreign correspondent say that he had no complaint about the amount of material he could send, as, after working under censorship in 16 other countries, he reckoned the British quite liberal with their information. It is recognised that the officials have no easy task, reading all messages and scanning all Press pictures sent away, always with the view to the possibility of giving away valuable information, while at the same time remembering that the public must be “ in the know. ’ ’ And so, night and day, the work goes on.