The Press: The Forces of Darkness

1960 may have been a big year for independence, but it was less of a year for freedom.

In 1960 Cuba's press stood in chains fresh-forged by Fidel Castro. On Formosa, Newspaper Publisher Lei Chen was imprisoned for daring to be critically independent of Chiang Kaishek. Indonesia's President Sukarno commanded editors to swear allegiance to his regime ("Our publication is duty-bound to support guided democracy") or lose their licenses.

Strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized—i.e., confiscated—the Egyptian press; and in Ceylon, a self-styled democracy, newly elected Prime Minister Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike threatened to seize the country's two largest news paper groups for opposing her during the campaign. Of 17 new African states, just one — Nigeria — was born with a free press.

Where freedom of the press vanished in 1960, without exception it vanished from countries whose constitutions guarantee a free press. Press freedom is constitution ally warranted by nearly every nation on earth — including all those behind the Iron Curtain. But for all the pious pledges, the world's press is slowly losing its freedom.

Today only 35 of the world's countries, now about 145, allow a press that can be called truly free.

Methods of Repression. Paradoxically, wherever the new spirit of national free dom is on forced march — in Africa, Asia, the Middle East— freedom of the press is usually trampled underfoot. Once freed of their countries' colonial occupiers, the new rulers of Africa often modeled them selves not on libertarian standards but on the example of Africa's oldest black republic, Liberia, which has kept the press subjugated for 134 years.

There are degrees of freedom and pressure, and often nations that subdue their own' press will allow foreign correspondents free passage—while censoring their findings in incoming papers and magazines. Last week, for example, Ethiopia, annoyed by factual accounts in U.S. magazines of December's short-lived revolt against Emperor Haile Selassie, turned back the magazines at customs.

Some of the noisiest protesters at the U.N. of other people's freedom denied are. in their own homelands, unwilling to allow their newspapers to report fact and truth. Indonesia has reared an imposing machine, involving agencies called Paperpu, Paperda and Perperti, which comb the slightest intransigence from the press.

Last October the government summarily canceled the licenses of all 65 Indonesian papers, reissued only 55; the missing ten were papers whose performance as advocates of the administration did not meet Sukarno's exacting standards. South Viet Nam arrests not only offending journalists but pressmen, compositors and Linotypists as well—together with their families.

In tiny Yemen, the Imam personally censors all outgoing cable copy.