The Waterbury Democrat., 1944-02-02

grululng out Cnelr own news releases. The armed serv- ices news report consists of a num- Der of routine musts, such as com- muniqueS, casualty lists, promotions, decorations and contract awards, plus news and feature stories. The Navy's output for 1943 was 26O con- muniques and 2100 press releases. Armys is from eight to 10 a day, or maybe 2500 in the course of a year.
 A conservative guess on the entire output of the governments press agents-pardon, public relations of- fices-would be in the neighborhood | of 16,000 to 10000 items and pieces handed out to the papers last year, not counting speeches, pamphlets and posters.
 MILLIONS OF WORDS
 This is something to demand wor- shipful attention, any way you look at it. You can look at it as some thing awful, or you can look at it with just awe, while exclaiming, Gee! Amt it wonderful that our government makes so much news!"
 All this, mind you, is in addition to the news made by Congress, the
 White House and whatever original and exclusive news is dug up by a press, radio, periodical, trade paper and racket trade-letter writing corps
 that now numbers over 1000 and
 turns out gosh knows how many mil
 lions of words.
 A lot of the stuff which they turn out is of necessity a rehash of the handouts, for handouts have be- come increasingly important in the wartime scheme of the governments information Setup. Principal reason for the increasing importance of the handout is the fact that the OWI gag rule, requiring government of- ficialS to tell the same story in an effort to keep them from saying things which are in conflict with the
 things said by the heads of other government agencies, has been re- sponsible for making a lot of these officials draw in their necks. None wants to butt his head into a con-
 troversy If he knows it is going to be cut off. That happened, you'll
 recall, to Vice President Wallace and Secretary of Commerce Jones when they started Squabbling about Board of Economic Warfare.
 PUBLICITY NOW AVOIDED
 The result is that top government spokesmen and administrators have become unusually reticent-for pub lie officials. Grabbing the headlines has been succeeded by studied ef- fort to keep out of the papers" which is now official public rela- tions policy in some agencies. Controversies are fought out be- hind conference room doors instead of in public. War Department pub lie relations office has new rule that no general may say anything for publication unless his remarks are passed not only by the review branch, for security, but the com manding officer of the bureau Of public relations himself.
 Part of this new tightening up of news sources by the Army is pre- invasion jitters. Part of it is re- action to the unfavorable publicity
 which the Army got after high of ficer's f-the-record conference in which he said strike threats hard prolonged the war by months, would cost many American lives and had
 prevented the internal collapse Of Germany and satellites.
 Admirals Leahy and King are practically unapproachable. The next lower layer of admiralS is avail able from time to time at Secretary Frank Knox's scheduled twice-a-
 week press conferences, which are
 fairly regular and do produce news.
 Secretary of State Corden Hull
 schedules a press conference daily
 at noon. Of the other cabinet of-
 ficers, Secretary Morgenthau sched-
 ules two a week, Stimson and Ickes
 one each, but this trio performs only
 about half the time.
 The tendency, whenever there is anything to say, grows more and more towards saying it with hand outs.