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Show Guest Editorial Your Right To Know By CHARLES A. FELL Managing Editor, The Birmingham News This is NATIONAL NEWSPAPER WEEK seV apart each year by America's free democratic journalism as a period of self-examination self-examination and re-dedication. If you ask: "SO WHAT?" well, for one thing it's YOUR week, quite as much as the newspaper's. It's dedicated in 1952 to YOUR RIGHT TO KNOW. One of its chief purposes is to inspire better journalism so that YOU may be better served by your newspaper. Another is to remind every American of the importance of guarding the freedom of information guaranteed to our people I by Article I of the Bill of Rights. The individual reader and his newspaper have an inseparable common interest in that constitutional guarantee. Our people must be free. To remain-free, they must be informed. To be adequately informed, they must have unshackled sources of information. And so, NATIONAL NEWSPAPER WEEK is a period belonging be-longing equally to YOU and YOUR NEWSPAPER. INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM would perish if freedom of the press should die. And short of the worst in just that degree in which sources of useful information are wilfully dammed-up by selfish or spiteful spite-ful interests, just so is individual liberty imperiled. Freedom of information is being assailed thjruout the world. Witness the almost complete blackout in Russia and its satellites. sat-ellites. Witness the suppression and confiscation of La Prensa in Argentina. Witness the executive order of the President of the United States about a year ago authorizing civilian agencies of the government gov-ernment as distinguished from the military to decide what the public SHOULD and what it SHOULD NOT know about the PUBLIC BUSINESS under their direction. Yet our people generally seem never to pay more than casual cas-ual attention to the ever-recurring acts and threats against freedom free-dom of information. They apparently have no consciousness of the slow strangulation strangu-lation of public information that selfish and vindictive interests seem determined to bring about. WE AMERICANS can no more permit se'f-serving interests to chisel away our precious rights bit-by-bit than we can afford to permit those rights to be swallowed up suddenly by a Stalin or a Peron. And the newspapers ALONE can't hold the line . Our journalistic freedom comes from a CONSENT on the part of the people. This consent was born of the public NEED and DESIRE: and RIGHT to be informed. The arrangement set up in the Bill of -Rights was a MUTUAL obligation the consent of the people implying, of course, a clear responsibility on the part of the press. In thai sort of partnership, each side obviously depends upon the other. Therefore, however CONSCIENTIOUS, however INGENIOUS and ENTERPRISING they may be, the newspapers can MAINTAIN MAIN-TAIN the freedom of information all of us seek, ONLY if the public bolsters its CONSENT with its ACTIVE SUPPORT. HAVING HANDED their newspapers a vital function to perform per-form in their behalf, it is important that Americans give all possible pos-sible help to the instruments to which they look for truth. The grass-roots authority of our democratic nation the will of the people thru the voice and action of the individual must clearly assert its determination not in any degree to surrender its RIGHT TO KNOW. Just as our people support their law-enforcement agencies in keeping PUBLIC ORDER. Just as they protect their churches and support heir ministers minis-ters in the preservation of FREEDOM OF RELIGION. So also must they, uphold American journalism's hands in the determination to keep open the channels of PUBLIC INFORMATION. INFOR-MATION. They must never forget that freedom of information is NOT some sort of special privilege concocted primarily for newspapers, but that it is the instrument by which every man and woman INDIVIDUALLY IN-DIVIDUALLY may know the facts of human affairs and thereby there-by live intelligently, and in freedom. They must remember what is so true that those who would cripple and destroy our freedom of information would, by the same token, intellectually-hobble, politically-enslave the people. They must keep in mind with reference to punitive and restrictive re-strictive measures, from whatever source they may arise, that , quite as much as the newspapers, it is the readers -Individually and collectively whose rights are impaired whenever freedom of information is obstructed by anyone in any manner in any degree. NEWSPAPERS MAKE NO CLAIM to infallibility. They expect even welcome from their readers honest disagreement dis-agreement and constructive criticism. They would be exceedingly dull and fall far short of their function, if they did NOT arouse controversy. But they like to think that expression of differences of viewpoint view-point serves to find the way to reasoned action and public wel-" fare not to invite unthinking condemnation and crippling obstruction ob-struction of an instrument of enlightenment created for a democratic demo-cratic society. |