The Press: Now It Can Be Told?

From behind the thick-lensed glasses that give him a Martian rather than a martial appearance, Military Expert Fletcher Pratt last week shot a pained backward look at the war he had helped to report. Critic H. L. Mencken, who only knew what he read in the papers, had called its war correspondents "a sorry lot" (TIME, Jan. 14). Expert Pratt, a correspondent himself, is convinced that World War II "was very nearly the worst reported war in history." But he turned the blame elsewhere.

In the February Harper's, Pratt blamed Army & Navy officers in the field, who used censorship to keep...

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