International: Unfinished Business

Free access to the world’s news — one of the basic issues between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. — came up in three forms at the Potsdam conference:

¶ President Truman lost a strong fight for wider press coverage of the conference itself.

¶ The Potsdam communiqué noted the Polish Provisional Government’s promise to give full freedom to the press of Allied nations in reporting developments in that country “before and during” the elections to determine Poland’s government.

¶ The Big Three “have no doubt” that in future “representatives of the Allied press will enjoy full freedom to report to the world upon developments in Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland.” Yugoslavia was not included; the Russians took the convenient view that Tito’s Government should decide its own press policy without Big Three interference.

As for Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, the communiqué by no means insured free access to the Russian-dominated zone. The Russians themselves, with a fundamentally different conception of the role of the press, had only a handful of Tass men in the Balkans. Nor could they understand why the U.S. and British governments had transmitted applications for scores of reporters to enter the area. U.S.-Russian understanding on a free press was still unfinished business.