The Nome Nugget

McKay Defends Interior Policy,
Protests Opponents' 'Propaganda

CHANDLER, Ariz., (AP) - Secretary of the Interior McKay last night told the National Press Photographers Assn. he is surprised by "the increasing use of the slick propaganda technique I like to call the 'big doubt'."

"There have been numerous instances recently," the secretary said at the association's convention here, "of the use of the big doubt in an effort to create public suspicion of the new regulations I approved governing oil and gas leases on wildlife refuges."

McKay has resigned from his Cabinet post to seek the U.S. Senate seat from Oregon in the fall elections.

"It is charged, for instance, that I have 'thrown the 17 million acres of national wildlife refuges wide open to exploitation,' and thus have 'doomed' the refuges," he said. "The facts which are not mentioned in this big doubt charge include such salient matters as this:

"1. The refuges were not opened to oil leasing by me, but by a previous administration.

"2. The new regulations are admitted by many sincere conservationists to offer greater protection to wildlife values than ever before.

"3. Far from throwing the refuges 'wide open to exploitation,' the new regulations make inviolate those refuges which are a prime importance to rare or endangered species and provide the most careful safeguards in all other areas.

"The use of half truths, distortions and isolated and unrelated facts to reach sweeping and unfounded conclusions are all part of the big doubt trickery. As a government official, it is my job to see that the public gets all the truth, not the half truths of political propagandists. As members of the press, you have the same responsibility to make available the whole story--the wide-lens shots, if you will . . . "

The secretary complimented the photographers on the advances made in pictorial journalism in the last two decades.

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