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When wartime priorities strained the world's air transport to the limit, we took another tack. Photographs of the pages in a whole issue of TIME took up less plane space than a paperbacked detective story. So we flew to distant points film positives of our pages, from which local presses could print copies for quick delivery to civilians and to allied forces on nearby fronts. At war's peak, we were printing some 834,000 overseas copies at 19 places for distribution to 180 countries and possessions. Among the 19: Bogotá, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Teheran and Sydney. Where transport problems were worst, as in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Burma and the Pacific, we sent out pocket-sized "Pony" editions. Smallest of all was the Navy V-Mail Edition (4¼ in. by 5¼ in.). At war's end, all these editions were consolidated into the present four international editions now serving 1,419,000 readers outside the U.S. In addition to the Latin American Edition, grandfather of them all, there are the
Canadian, Atlantic and Pacific Editions.
Decade of Progress. The Latin American experiment also demonstrated a basic journalistic principle: most men & women the world over want to read honestly reported news, not propaganda.
Many have disagreed with this belief.
Within a year after the air edition began in 1941, when "Good Neighbor" was more of a catch phrase than a policy, a few well-meaning people in the U.S. took us to task for publishing in South America the same news stories we distributed at home. They felt that in the interest of hemispheric unity TIME Air Express should sugar-coat its stories about the U.S. and print only "diplomatic" (i.e., bland and friendly) news about the republics to the south.
We would have dropped the whole export project rather than hoodwink readers in any such fashion, but we passed the complaint along to more than 400 business and political leaders in this hemisphere. Ninety percent of them came back with firm support for our decision.
Our policy of telling the news as we see it gets us into trouble with authoritarian governments anywhere — Latin America not excepted. But the censor's scissors and the dictator's edicts only heighten the educated reader's determination to get the news. Over the past decade, even the "strong men" have tried to govern by more & more democratic methods and have become less & less prone to interfere with what people read. Though single issues are sometimes confiscated, only Perón's Argentina still bans TIME. In all countries, of course, TIME-readers make full and open criticism of any story they do not like. This includes the 16 (out of 20) Presidents of Latin American republics who read the magazine each week. In short, public discussion is replacing censorship's primitive way.