The Press: Pass the Ammunition

In four years as a United Press war correspondent, lean, handsome Charles P. Arnot saw plenty of battles. He watched the sinking of the U.S.S. Hornet, covered the battle of Guadalcanal and the invasion of Guam. Last week, Newsman Arnot, 33, was in the thick of a different battle. As director of Amerika-Dienst, news and feature service of the U.S. High Commission in Germany, he was passing the ammunition to German newspapers in the cold war against Russian propaganda.

The service was Arnot's own idea, set up in July 1948 after he went to work for the High Commission. It has become so popular with West German editors that last month they used 393 pictures and 1,044,960 words put out by the service. In one week recently, the Braunschweig Zeitung ran an illustrated spread on U.S. Quakers, the Berlin Telegraf filled its children's page with a visit to the White House, the Gottingen Tageblatt told about U.S. cowboys, and a dozen papers carried a character sketch.of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg.

In his hotel headquarters at Bad Nauheim, where he directs a staff of five Americans and 80 Germans, Nebraska-born Charlie Arnot is careful not to compete with his old employer U.P. or other commercial news agencies on spot news. Instead, the staff culls U.S. newspapers, magazines and books, translates the best articles and mails them to 191 newspapers.

Wary of official handouts after twelve years of Dr. Goebbels' force-feeding, German editors have grown to trust Amerika-Dienst because it does not slant its stories. Arnot figures that the good in U.S. life will outweigh the bad in any factual presentation. Once an editor in Nürnberg rejected an Amerika-Dienst picture of hundreds of U.S. workers' automobiles parked in front of a factory because "My readers will say it's just so much propaganda." Arnot came back with a story discussing high prices and unemployment, but also documenting the fact that the U.S. standard of living is the world's highest for workers. The Nürnberg editor was convinced, printed both story and picture.