OCR Text |
Show Causes Not Removed A GREAT many travelers returning to America Amer-ica from Europe say that there is little talk about war among the people there and almost nothing in the newspapers about troubled international inter-national relationships. They also remark that it was when they reached home and read their local papers that they read dismal accounts of conflict Their conclusion, therefore, is that American Journalism is guilty of overstatement, of sensationalizing the whole matter "to sell more papers." Of course there is little general discussion of war and war fears in Europe. On the continent, very nearly the whole press is under the occluding domination of government. It per-mits per-mits the people to know only what it wants them to know. If governments keep their people in the dark, how can they be expected to talk about much of anything? Europeans do not know the perils they face in their neighborhoods. In the whole world no people is so completely com-pletely and accurately informed regarding foreign and domestic occurrences as that of the United States. No other country has comparable com-parable channels of communication and there are no secret police spying upon anyone to find out what he reads or what he listens to on the radio. The press of no other nation maintains corps of foreign correspondents so large or alert or capable or widely dispersed. In these few facts are found the reasons why American newspapers news-papers are printing more disturbing foreign news than any other newspapers in the world, the British press not excepted, as was conclusively conclu-sively shown in the self-censorship adopted by the newspapers of the United Kingdom and the empire) during the "constitutional crisis" transpiring trans-piring from the romance of their ex-king. Because the general run of the population in Europe is kept in ignorance of ominous day-today developments and because In this ignorance they maintain a placid outlook and calm utter-nee, utter-nee, travelers' conclusions that a spirit of peace dwells over the scene lack substance. This spirit of peace cannot come until the cause of unrest are removed. None of those cause has been altered by agreements, treaties or conciliatory speeches. They may have created cre-ated a false sense of security in government quarters, but, the sanctity of mutual pledges among nations being what it is, no enduring assurances of neighborly amity have been set up. |