What the American press is at home—an arm of the State—it is abroad. The press, and the forces behind it, have formulated an aggressive program for pushing American commodity news into every corner of the earth. The program is put in the form of a demand for adoption of “freedom of the press as we know it” by all nations. The President, the State Department, the Congress have formally adopted the news industry’s program as a basic unit in American foreign policy.
The first major action of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights was to set up a subcommittee on the “free press,” to consider a resolution along American lines. There was strong pressure to adopt the American view in its entirety. The U.S. has also insisted that many foreign countries accept American correspondents and adopt American news concepts if they want diplomatic recognition.
Speaking for the American newspaper industry, Kent Cooper has further proposed that no country should obtain aid of any kind from the U.S. without acceptance of these views. Official backing of Cooper has gone so far that Congress even delayed a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency appropriation in an attempt to impose a “free press” condition for U.N.R.R.A. aid.
As a matter of fact, the wedding of press and State has carried the “free press” demand far beyond the limits of news policy, no matter how you define the latter. A privileged status is being demanded for the news industry, as witness Cooper’s suggestion that correspondents be given diplomatic immunity! But the matter is far from stopping there.
It is not generally known that the American news industry has now attained virtual domination of the world news market—which means every country except the Soviet Union and its immediate neighbors. The story of the battle for world opinion control will be told in later pages. Here it is enough to point out that official pressure for world news “freedom” has a double purpose. First, it is aimed to break down Soviet resistance, especially in respect to reported plans of Tass, official Soviet news agency, to serve Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary and Rumania. Second, it is designed to further expand and consolidate the powerful world position of the American news monopoly against future challenges by its now feeble rivals.
In such a program, news is a naked arm of Empire. It cannot be separated from the territorial, military-strategic, economic and political aspects of American foreign policy. The increasingly imperialistic tone of that policy, the spread-eagle drive for absolute world power, is more and more reflected in the demands of the news industry. Thus, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the banker-minded New York Times, frankly states the connection between the two. In a speech containing the crude threat of atomic bombs and the flavor of political blackmail, he declared:
I do not believe that free peoples can afford to trust dictatorships. We should not share our military secrets, or make any financial agreements, calculated to build the Soviet Union until we in this country have more knowledge of her and her ways.... I think we should put definite limits upon our cooperation ... until we have the same freedom of access to the news of Russia as they have to the news over here....
Access to the news is, therefore, my condition for full cooperation and I should hold to that position uncompromisingly. The elimination of censorship would be but a small part of compliance with this condition. Access to the news means freedom to travel at will—to talk with whomsoever one wishes—it means finding communications systems available—it means the right of a business man to see how his product is used or whether a market for it exists.... I say this as a newspaper man, it is true, but in this all-important freedom we in the newspaper profession act as your agents.
What Sulzberger and the news industry are demanding, is acceptance by the Soviet Union of the system of special privileges for private enterprise that prevails here. At the very least, they would require the Russians to agree that information is a commodity to be peddled exclusively by morally irresponsible private organizations. If the Soviet Union could be forced to bow to American private enterprise in this instance, a capitalist wedge would have been inserted in the Socialist system.