The Press: Expanding Don'ts

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Censor Byron Price issued a revised "voluntary censorship" code last week, and from its new list of "don'ts" the U.S. people could see how far their news has contracted. Some taboos:

> Ship movements (including last movements to the bottom) are non-reportable except by "appropriate" authority of the Navy—neutral ships included. Whatever information this particular censorship withholds from the enemy, it also withholds from the U.S. public knowledge of the full seriousness of the U-boat campaign.

> Sabotage, for the first time in any U.S. war, is classified as a military secret. Whether this far-from-clarified taboo serves to withhold "aid & comfort" from the enemy is debatable, but it has succeeded in creating the erroneous impression that sabotage in this war, unlike World War I, is virtually nonexistent.

> Rumors are not to be "spread in such a way that they will be accepted as facts. . . . The same is true of enemy propaganda or material calculated by the enemy to bring about division among the United Nations." Rumors in this war have received their chief circulation by word of mouth. The only way to stop them is for the press to print facts and more facts.

> Perhaps the most significant new ban is a warning against "premature disclosure of diplomatic negotiations or conversations." He said the clause was intended to "preclude anything which will give aid to the enemy by flushing our hand," and gave as a horrible example the "premature" news of the talks with Vichy over Martinique.

The effect of this class of suppression is to extend censorship from its proper military to its improper political sphere, to make it possible for the Government to make important political agreements behind the backs of the public (as in the recent visit of Molotov), to put an end to the ideal of open covenants openly arrived at.