Official Censor

The U.S. press last week got an official censor and the first glimmerings of how U.S. wartime censorship is meant to work.

The censor, appointed by Presidential executive order: 50-year-old Hoosier-born Byron Price, competent executive news editor of Associated Press. Because the press had long expected a New Deal zealot as censor, its first reaction to the Price appointment was one of relief.

Censor Price conceives of his job as involving four main duties: 1) peripheral censorship (outgoing news dispatches, cables, radio, letters); 2) withholding at the source military secrets valuable to the enemy; 3) use of the Espionage Act to prevent publication of information of value to the enemy; 4) "voluntary censorship." Censor Price sees his administration of the blurred area called "voluntary censorship" in terms of newspaper libel law, i.e., when in doubt, see a libel lawyer (read censor) before publishing anything.

He will not have authority to originate news. (The Creel Committee of World War I combined censorship and propaganda with total powers in both departments. ) Government press bureaus, like those of Army and Navy, will continue to issue their own releases.

Like the Creel Committee, the new Price censorship has no authority directly to mete out punishments or forbid the publication of news. His vast powers are derived chiefly from the Espionage Act of 1917, which is still on the books.

Under the Act dissemination of information which can be construed as of value to the enemy subjects those responsible to heavy fines, imprisonment and even the death penalty. The terms of the law are so general and so broad that the press is virtually at the mercy of the censor. If he decides that any paper has said too much he can instigate its prosecution by the Department of Justice, get the Postmaster General to bar it from the mails--and put its editors in jail.

The only real protection for the press is to consult the censor in advance and to print nothing that he does not want printed. Under these circumstances the only limitations on the censor's power are 1) the Government's attitude; 2) what public opinion will stand for; 3) the character and inclination of the censor himself.

How much censorship the public will stand for still remains to be seen. As for the censor himself, Byron Price indicates he would be reasonable and as former chief of one of the world's biggest staffs of foreign correspondents he ought to have considerable understanding of the curse of strict and inept censorship.

Appointed to a policy board to advise him on "coordination and integration" are Vice President Wallace, the Secretaries of War, Navy, Treasury, Attorney General Biddle, Postmaster General Walker (chair man), OGR's Lowell Mellett and OFF's Archibald MacLeish -- but how much active part they will take is still problematical.

Said Presidential Press Secretary Ste phen Early last week: "If anything is wrong, it is that there is too much machinery."

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