Word: brownouts
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...Washington newsmen, one of the important stories last week concerned the press itself. The story: the increasing restrictions on news. Wrote U.P. Washington Bureau Chief Lyle Wilson: "The 'brownout' of news by the Eisenhower Administration [has] reached a new high . . . Washington reporters are becoming increasingly alarmed [over the] withholding of the public's urgent business from the public." The brownout, wrote Wilson, often concerns news that has nothing to do with defense, e.g., a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare conference to discuss distribution of the Salk vaccine was closed to newsmen...
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...
...Fight to the End. Had he lived, Carlo Tresca could have wielded great anti-Communist influence in postwar Italy. But on the night of Jan. 11, 1943, as he stepped from an office building into the wartime brownout of New York streets, a gunman killed him. Two days before, Tresca had told his friends: "Vidali is in town. That means there is a job to be done. I smell the stink of death." Police sought Vidali-Contreras for questioning, but could not find...