The Press: mongers!

Several West German Communist papers, warned by the North Rhine-Westphalia press commission to curb their tongues or risk suspension, were trying out a bowdlerized brand of Newspeak this week. In place of standard party-line invective against the Bonn government and the Western Powers, editors were substituting strategically located five-dot blanks. Sample from Düsseldorf's Freies Volk: "The Prague District Organization of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia unanimously condemns the disgraceful action on the part of the representatives of the . . . . . Bonn Government which stands in the service of Truman's. . . . . and is trying to plunge the people of West Germany into a new . . . . ."