The Lexington Advertiser

Press Freedom On Its Way Out In Most Of The World
By OLIVER EMMERICH

You have a personal right to know what is going on in the world. Should you lose this right you will become a slave.

Americans are known in history as lovers of freedom. But there are reasons which indicate that we love our pocketbooks more than we cherish our freedom.

If a thief breaks into an American home the family and the neighborhood will discuss it excitedly for years. But freedom can be pilfered by a group for a selfish cause and it is accepted with nonchalance.

When a bank is robbed it makes the headlines of our newspapers. Everybody talks about bank robberies when they occur. But freedoms can be stolen by selfish groups for selfish purposes and we manifest complacency.

It may be that we have learned to count our money but that we have forgotten how to measure our freedom.

TIME magazine recently surveyed one of our freedoms -- freedom of the press. It discovered that freedom of the press is curtailed in 145 countries. Only 35 countries have full press freedom.

Freedom of the press is not the prerogative of an editor as some people seem to think. Freedom of the press means freedom of information to people -- the right to know.

In the year 1960 Fidel Castro took the final steps to deprive the Cuban people of this right.

On the island of Formosa a publisher was imprisoned because he was critically independent of Chiang Kaishek.

In Ceylon the new woman prime minister threatened to seize two of the country's largest newspaper enterprises because they opposed her in her campaign.

President Sukarno commanded editors to swear allegiance to his Indonesian regime or lose their licenses.

In Egypt Premier Nasser has nationalized the press.

Of 17 new African states only one - Nigeria - has a free press.

The irony of this situation is that in all of these countries freedom of the press is guaranteed in their respective constitutions.

Even behind the Iron Curtain this freedom is included in the constitutional law.

Freedom of the press is becoming more and more insecure.

In Argentina where Peron was ousted the press has frequently been muzzled.

In Spain this editor personally checked on the freedom of the press. He learned that Franco permits self-censorship.

Editors know how far to go. To violate this self-censorship means imprisonment.

In Ireland the press applies a stern and moralistic self-censorship to avoid possibility of offending the nation's church.

Even President De Gaulle has imposed press restrictions during his administration.

The International Press Institute in 1956 deleted the United States from the list of nations with a completely free press because of the government's secrecy and its manipulation of news.

Freedom of the press is founded in the conviction that if people have the truth that the truth will keep the free. Experience, over and over again, has proved that when freedom of the press is denied that people are enslaved.

The difference between a totalitarian country and a free country is this: In a totalitarian country public policy determines public opinion and in a free country public opinion determines public policy.

In a nation of slavery the political leaders determine public policy and order the editors to popularize it. In a free country, people at the bottom -- at the grass roots -- decide ultimately the public policy of the land.