The Press: Booby Trap

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At a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Minneapolis Tribune Chief Editorial Writer Carroll Binder announced bluntly: "This is a report on a project launched by this society which has boomeranged." The project: a U.N. newsgathering treaty that would free the press of the world from censorship and other restrictions (TIME, May 23, 1949). As the global-minded U.S. delegate to the U.N.'s conferences on freedom of information, 56-year-old Editorialist Binder knew just what went wrong. Spurred on by the most high-minded intentions, the U.S. had marched starry-eyed into the jaws of a trap that it set itself.

Last week in Chicago, an American Bar Association committee added its voice to a chorus demanding that the U.S. pull out of the trap altogether. The committee, which had once approved a U.N. press treaty, reversed its stand. It changed its mind because many editors themselves now feel the proposed U.N. press treaty will put shackles on the U.S. press without freeing the world's press anywhere.

Censor's Whim. The editors learned their lesson the hard way. In 1944, with the Four Freedoms of the Atlantic Charter still ringing in their ears, 242 members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors passed a resolution urging the U.S. to persuade other nations to guarantee the press the same freedom that it enjoys in the U.S. Congress endorsed the A.S.N.E. proposal and the State Department drafted a proposed U.N. convention. Its main provisions would allow correspondents to move around the world freely, their copy safe from the whim of local censors, except where it touched on matters of "national security."

At a 1948 U.N. conference, the U.S. delegation, including Harvard Professor Zechariah Chaffee, Sevellon Brown, publisher of the Providence Journal & Bulletin, and the Christian Science Monitor's Editor Erwin ("Spike") Canham, won enough supporters to get their "Newsgathering Convention" tentatively approved. But to do so, they had to bargain. Among the 55 countries attending, many wanted a clause giving a nation the right to demand corrections of erroneous stories. Unwisely, the U.S. agreed. One government might send a "correction" to another and it would be required to pass along the correction to its press, though the newspapers could decide for themselves whether to print it. But the clause was the beginning of a chain reaction of proposals to restrict the press.

A coalition of Latin American, Middle Eastern and Asiatic countries teamed up on a second plan called the "Freedom of Information Convention." Small countries wanted a ban on stories which might injure their "national prestige and dignity." They wanted clauses saying the press should promote peace, combat war propaganda and work towards a solution of economic, social and humanitarian problems. The Communists chimed in and tried to push these provisions even further.