The Press: Conditioned Retreat

After advancing more than half a dozen different foreign-policy reasons for refusing to let U.S. newsmen into Red China in the past year, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles retreated a step; he is willing, he said last week, to ease the ban if the "newsgathering community" will help him work out the administrative details. His main concern is no longer to keep reporters out of China (TIME, Feb. 18) but to devise "a passport policy which will permit responsible newsgathering and at the same time not permit a general influx of Americans into Communist China."

Dulles told reporters that "we will be really glad to consider" a pool system or any other plan for China coverage, on the condition that correspondents who go there are 1) "responsible," 2) "strictly limited,' and 3) assigned on a "one-shot" temporary basis. Dulles thus only inflamed the central argument on which he and the press have been deadlocked for more than a year: Has the State Department any constitutional right to decide where newsmen may go for news? William Dwight, president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, answered the question for most newsmen: "In the thinking of American newspapermen, there is no such thing as limiting the right to know."