The Press: The Forces of Darkness

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Living by Sufferance. Press control comes in many other gradations and forms. It can be wildly irrational, as when L'Echo du Maroc was suspended for three days in Morocco for dropping an m from King Mohammed V's name. South Africa has a free press, but over the heads of South African newsmen hangs a legal threat: editors can be fined, imprisoned and flogged for minor offenses. India's newsmen enjoy a freedom comparable to that of U.S. journalists, but partly on the sufferance of Prime Minister Nehru, who does not choose to invoke the country's punitive press laws. "Nehru allows me to abuse him," ponders a leading Indian journalist. "Will the next government?"

The French press is ostensibly free. But suppressing papers has become a postwar governmental habit, one that De Gaulle pursues more stubbornly than any of his predecessors. In the prevailing official state of emergency, articles judged inflammatory about the Algerian war are forbidden, and the press is kept in line with the threat of Article 30 of the constitution, which allows even local prefects to take "all necessary measures for the control of the press."

Still other countries suborn their press by buying it, or manipulating the supply of newsprint. In Ghana, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah has sustained his pet propaganda outlets, the Evening News and the Ghana Times, by pumping some $8,000,000 into them over the past three years. When this did not daunt Accra's Ashanti Pioneer, an opposition paper, Nkrumah tamed the Pioneer with suspension and censorship. The Irish press, otherwise free, applies a stern and moralistic self-censorship to avoid all possibility of offending the country's dominant Roman Catholic Church.

Urgent Instinct. Even where press freedom exists, it is rarely secure. Last year Argentina, so recently liberated from Peron's yoke, nervously muzzled its press on several occasions during anti-government riots staged by diehard Peronistas. The U.S. press is obviously one of the world's freest, but the International Press Institute, a dogged opponent of press control, left the U.S. of its 1956 list of countries where full freedom prevails, on the grounds that a growing Government tendency to suppress and manipulate the news is an indirect form of control.

For all that governments may do, the public appetite for truth the world over is insatiable. The walls of Asuncion are widely known as "Paraguay's only free press"; there, nightly, appear messages that the country's papers dare not print. East Berliners, who may visit West Berlin but may not bring back its newspapers, smuggle copies home in their underclothing. In Russia, during the interlude of the thaw when relatively outspoken Polish Communist papers were allowed to be sold at kiosks, comrades queued patiently for hours to buy them. In the young state of Israel, a defiant press has resisted successive efforts to whip it into line. Last year, when Secretary to the Government Katriel Katz angrily suggested that "the public itself should demand for its own good that press freedom be limited somewhat," he was hooted down by the public and the press.