Word: brownouts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Defense Department's new security information order, which newsmen predicted would create a brownout of news from the Pentagon, last week produced a byproduct they did not expect. In Washington, Illinois Democratic Congressman William Dawson announced that his Government Operations Committee is launching an investigation to find out whether the Administration is withholding "pertinent and timely information from [the press]." A special subcommittee plans to question everyone from Syndicated Columnist Drew Pearson to the Washington Post and Times Herald's Managing Editor J. Russell Wiggins, chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee of the American Society of Newspaper...
...never been a newsman, and what press experience he had gained was as Director of Publication for the Bell Telephone Laboratories. His only recent Government experience was as a censor for the Department of Commerce. By last week, newsmen's complaints about Honaman and the news brownout at the Pentagon prompted the congressional probe...
Other reporters-and their bosses-joined the protest against the brownout, centering their fire on the restrictions on news imposed by Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson under his new information policy (TIME, April 18). At the annual Manhattan meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers Association (see above) Richard W. Slocum, Association president and executive vice president of the Philadelphia Bulletin, called upon Wilson to change his ways. Said Slocum: "We shall hope that our well-intentioned Secretary of Defense will quickly see the error in his recent resort to censorship...
...Trade. Next day, reporters made their complaints straight to President Eisenhower at his press conference. Three separate times, reporters rose to ask Ike about the new news brownout. Ike accepted responsibility for the tightening of security. Said he: "For some two years and three months I have been plagued by inexplicable . . . leaks in this Government." Some of the information, said Ike, "is the kind . . . that foreign intelligence systems spend thousands and thousands of dollars...
...most part, Washington reporters accepted Ike's assurances; they had no quarrel with the broad outlines of security that he had sketched out. But in Charlie Wilson's administrative order they saw a different problem. At the Pentagon, the brownout had already made even routine information difficult to get. Newsmen did not think that "time," as Charlie Wilson suggested, would work out the troubles. They felt that the troubles were inherent in the terms of the new policy, which used security as an excuse to withhold news...