The Press: The Censor Takes a Look

The A.P.’s Byron Price had been director of Censorship long enough to know the virtues of newspapers, and a working newspaperman himself long enough (34 years) to know newspapers’ faults. Last week he took a hard look at the press in general.

For a stump to speak from, A.P. Executive News Editor Price (on leave) chose the Library of Congress, which had just acquired an original of the Bill of Rights. Said he: the Bill of Rights is “a map, not a railroad ticket, to the millennium. . . . A free press is obligated by its birthright to be a competent press, produced by competent men. The press neither does its duty nor fulfills its destiny if it poisons its news columns with propaganda and private opinions; or is careless of its facts; or presents editorials written by the uninformed and swayed by hearsay; or publishes misleading advertising or vicious and sensational gossip from whatever source.”

Price saved his roughest words for canned scandalmongers: “One of the mysteries of our day is the widespread assumption that syndicated columns on any subject and in any degree of inaccuracy or mendacity may be presented to the public, just because they were bought and paid for, without the slightest assumption of responsibility by the publisher. Such a thing makes a mockery of common sense.”