Assignment 3

This paper is optional. You can do this assignment if you are not happy with your other assignments and want to improve your grade. Otherwise, your grade will be calculated based on the two 750-word assignments, the term paper and the exam. Your mark cannot go down if you do this assignment, but it may not necessarily go up. You can hand this in any time before the end of the term.

Reprinted below is part of a formerly secret letter written by the chief wartime censor, Wilfrid Eggleston, to Thomas Stone, the head of military intelligence, on August 13th, 1941. Stone had just demanded a tougher press censorship. He thought the media -- mostly newspapers but also CBC radio -- were publishing far too many military secrets. This was the low point of the Allies in World War II. Britain had been through the terrible bombing of its cities called "The blitz", the German army was marching on Moscow, and the United States was still neutral. (It would be in the war four months later). Losing the war seemed like a real possibility. In this memo, Eggleston argues that the press needs to be free to report on facts and problems. He says the war effort is helped by a free media.

The questions: Do you think Eggleston makes his point? There is no right or wrong answer. You know my opinion but you are very free to disagree with it. And is Eggleston's argument right or wrong today? Do you think the media is necessary to our system of government? And lastly, does the media do this job well.

You're being asked to write a  500 word opinion piece.  All good opinion is backed by facts. You may want to use the Internet to get facts to back up your argument, and cite chunks of Eggleston's letter (use the citation "W. Eggleston to T.A. Stone, Aug. 13, 1941" in the first reference and "Eggleston to Stone") afterwards.

The assignment is due Dec. 1.

Dear Mr.  Stone;

Since our meeting on Monday I have been giving some thought to a couple of aspects of press censorship which were thrown up in a somewhat challenging way in the course of our discussions As I believe there is a good deal to be gained by frank and thorough examination of our mutual problems, I hope you will bear with me while I comment as briefly as I can on these two angles.

I.          I was much struck by the reference to the instructions to Nazi Intelligence Agents which are believed to have been intercepted, and the remark that practically all the information they were asked to get could be found either in the press of Canada or in Hansard. This may be true, and if it is, it is a highly disturbing thought, although I believe too much should not be made of the apparent implications of it. In this connection I came across what I regard as an illuminating passage in an article on press censorship which appeared in the magazine "Fortune" for June 1941. I quote three paragraphs:

“As may have been gathered by now, censorship is no fourth--grade subject. Stated at its simplest the problem is to keep from the enemy information of value. The first area of confusion centers about what is valuable. Now, all information is of value to the enemy. The population of a country, its government, the location of rivers, cities, ports, its resources, its ethnic and linguistic composition, are all of value to the enemy. These, of course, the enemy already possesses. Plants and facilities can be located from standard reference works. Naval and aircraft registers, army organization manuals, officer rosters, Congressional hearings contain 95 per cent of the material that the military considers secret, confidential, or restricted -- or will when hostilities begin."

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''Beyond true secrets and army and naval movements and dispositions lies endless disputed territory. Secrets may be deduced from isolated bits of apparently innocent information. (Navy's deductive classic is their cracking the dark secret of Japanese naval guns by checking the export of a special kind of steel from a small middle-western steel plant.) Disclosures of production lags may tip off the enemy to vital weaknesses. But it may also be more important that the people at home should know the weakness than that the enemy should not know. There is in all censorship a strong unconscious tendency to cut off the nose to spite the face. On technical grounds of secrecy the army, say, may show good reason to conceal the failures of a new tank, though such censorship may lead to false optimism with consequent reaction of despair. A German deputy after the last war declared before the Reichstag that military censorship had done more harm -- militarily -- than all the papers in Germany could have if the censorship had been lifted entirely."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"The press in a democracy is still the fourth estate; it is almost a fourth branch of government. It is not, as in Germany or the U.S.S.R., a branch of the government, but a part of our constitutional system. There is the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branch -- and there is the press. It is impossible to imagine governmental processes in the U.S. without a press. Its first function is to inform, its second to criticize. Censorship is a direct threat to both functions and hence a direct threat to effective democracy. Without information there is no basis for criticism and without criticism there is, as the saying goes, tyranny."