A dispatch to the New York Times from Athens helps illustrate the new method. After noting that the United States is far from withdrawing from Greece, the dispatch says: “The State Department’s comments ... sounded much like what the British had been telling the Greeks for some time.... It is believed that the only substantial difference between British and American views relates to the extent to which Allied officials should be injected into the Greek civil administration. The British originally intended to ask for a practical veto over acts of the Central Bank and Ministries dealing with economic affairs. It is now suggested that the British will suggest something much closer to the concept enunciated by the State Department yesterday: technical assistance to Greece ‘upon the request of the Greek Government.’”
In effect, as in Kent Cooper’s 1927 contract, the word “exploitation” has been removed, but the imperialism is still there. And among the industries making great headway in all “assisted” countries is the American news industry. It is favored by the change in the ownership of communications. Britannia no longer rules the waves—either of the air or the sea. Telephone, telegraph, cable dominance is no longer hers. Aviation, radio, multiple-address newscasting and facsimile broadcasting, are off to a good start under the control of American interests. And whatever advantages British imperialism still has, she is forced by the State Department to relinquish in return for a loan. Cable communications with British Empire points, for instance, are still in British hands. Yet not long ago conferences were held in Bermuda and Rio de Janeiro at which American government representatives compelled the British to cut press cable rates from New York to Empire points. This admitted American opinion-forming “news” to at least equal status with similar British propaganda in the Empire itself.
Now the government is also going into the business of distributing “news about America, by Americans.” The news agencies contend that a government information service is “propaganda,” whereas they “distribute the news as such, wholly unbiased and without intent to influence.” This is an empty boast. Riegel, in Mobilizing for Chaos, says: “The press associations differ in the amount of direct government control affecting them, but all are obviously governed by the newspapers they serve, and the destinies of all of them are inseparably united with the destinies of the nations with which they are identified. An impartial international news-gathering organization does not exist.” The Report on Freedom of the Press calls news-export an “adjunct of diplomacy and national policy. This inevitable relationship is no less real in the U.S. for having been avoided by the government, resisted by industry, and needlessly confused by imaginary threats of encroachment upon the First Amendment.”
State Department, A.P., U.P., I.N.S., alike provide “opinion-forming” material designed to further the current dangerous drive for American imperialist rule of the world. They are at one, moreover, in pressing foreign news services to abandon their present spheres of influence in favor of the American news monopoly. The Soviet news system, which checks the functioning of outside opinion-formers in the Soviet Union and helps limit their activities in Eastern Europe, is their favorite target. But they have made little headway there.
When Randal Heymanson of the North American Newspaper Alliance visited Czechoslovakia last year, government spokesman Dr. Theodore Kuska talked with him. Dr. Kuska said the Czech film industry would be nationalized and newspapers would be published only by political parties, trade unions and similar responsible groups. “Only in this way,” said Dr. Kuska, “can the press be regarded as truly free.”
It is not recorded whether the N.A.N.A. representative swooned on the spot. But for the benefit of Brooks Atkinson, it should be pointed out that some of the responsible groups Dr. Kuska speaks of cannot even be heard in the American press. The conditions earlier described prevent their publishing papers or obtaining circulation of their views. Thus, control of the press and control of opinion is rigidly frozen into monopoly shapes here; the Czech proposal seems to promise a much broader freedom of the press.
Responsibility of the Press
Indeed, if Mr. Atkinson will look about him in the Soviet Union, he will see an extension of the idea suggested by Dr. Kuska. As described by Alexander Kendrick at an American-Soviet Cultural Conference in New York recently, the Soviet press is unique. Before the Revolution, there were 859 newspapers in the Czar’s realm, with a total circulation of 2,700,000 and a policy dictated by the Russo-Asiatic Bank. Today there are 9,000 papers in 80 languages with a circulation of 40,000,000 and several readers to every copy of each paper.
Compared to our papers, there are obvious differences: no sensation, no spice, no scandal, no desperate competitive drive for entertainment. The newspapers are all informative, they tend to be typographically excellent, their news is presented in careful, balanced form so that the constant reader is prepared to grasp new developments as they take place. The cultural leaders of the country, scholars, critics, writers and musicians, contribute to the papers.
The principal difference, however, is in their publishers. No paper is published for profit. No multimillionaire can control public opinion. No people’s organization is without a newspaper: trade unions, hundreds of them; national groups; local, district and national government councils; sport groups; youth groups; women’s organizations. They are crusaders, too; not reactionary anti-vivisection crusaders like the Hearstlings here, but stinging critics of public and governmental bodies for sloppy execution of their tasks. And there is a contact between the readers and the papers that would be inconceivable here. Newspaper staffs hold regular meetings with readers to discuss problems raised by the readers and most papers have an annual readers’ conference at which editors make public accounting of their stewardship. The Soviet Constitution guarantees printing presses and stocks of paper to the organizations of the people, such as trade unions, cultural and scientific organizations, etc. It has not remained a paper promise: the press is entirely in popular hands. It operates in a responsible way to further Soviet objectives by stimulating more active support, by exposing failures.