Lawful Spies
Any newspaperman who has worked abroad, or among foreign correspondents here, knows that there is the closest connection between the work of a correspondent and the interests of the State. Walter Lippmann, in criticizing Congress for the attempted U.N.R.R.A. holdup, pointed out that virtually all of a correspondent’s news comes from officials and business men of his own country, plus some friendly foreign diplomatic sources. There is no clear line separating the correspondent from the Embassy officials of his country. There is even less sharp a distinction between the information exchanged by the correspondent with Embassy officials and the “intelligence” supplied by agents and outright spies.
The recent Pearl Harbor inquiry dented the old shallow idea of “intelligence” which centered on beautiful Mata Haris and stolen plans, though the recent Canadian spy-scare exploited this popular misconception. The United States has just created a new national intelligence agency on a more realistic basis. Gathering of every kind of public and secret information, plus the over-all evaluation of the total information, is the job of the new agency. Evaluation of information at every stage is essential. Poor evaluation led General Marshall to believe—and to tell a press conference—that the Nazis would go through the Red Army like a hot knife through butter; later that Japan was militarily a joke.
For the function of gathering information and evaluating it as it is gathered, the correspondent is ideally equipped. Since his work is conditioned to the objectives of the dominant interests in his own country, and even of his own government to varying degrees, he cannot be regarded as an innocent man from Mars, dispassionately reporting history as it unfolds. As a matter of fact, news values are determined, for the correspondent, with relation to state policy. Events are not “news” unless they have some bearing on the progress or lack of progress of specific American policies. The current American coverage of the Balkans is typical. Correspondence from that area is almost exclusively concerned with the Anglo-American effort to get “reliable” governments installed. The correspondent makes no pretense of drawing a positive picture of life in those lands.
But over and beyond what the correspondent reports, or does not report, is his value as a contact man. It is not for nothing that Sulzberger stresses complete freedom of motion and contact for the business man and correspondent alike. In the Socialist sphere, and in rival imperialist territory, the American newspaperman is part of a network of capitalist contacts within the country to which he is assigned. He is a war correspondent and intelligence agent in peacetime!
This question of contacts is as decisive for the newspaper business as it is for intelligence work. And it provides an interesting link with the secret history of the world news cartel. For just such contacts were the foundation of the global news monopoly. And the cartel was, from the start, unmistakably at the service of commercial and state interests!