Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/252

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have been so graphically and so naïvely described by Sven Hedin in With the German Armies in the West. A second form of official limitation on foreign press corre spondence is found in the censorship that even months after the signing of the armistice prevented letters from accomplishing their end, - a double censorship that has opened letters on the frontier and again examined the surviving remnant at their destination ,39 and has thus prevented the circulation of informa

tion concerning revolutionary movements. Even at the Peace Conference , the foreign press correspondents were effectively prevented from acquiring special knowledge essential to their work and from receiving information from America that would

have shown the attitude of the country towards some of the questions under consideration .40 If the foreign press corre spondence has at times seemed to the editor the least satisfactory part of the product of the newspaper press, at least a partial explanation may be found in the mutual relations of press corre

spondents and governments. It often happens that special correspondence is written " for home consumption . ” When the first American troops arrived in

France in 1917, someof the American press correspondents wrote of the enthusiastic greeting they received on landing, while the troops themselves were said to view the landing otherwise, — the

landing had been made early in themorning, the day was wet, the peasants were weary , they had seen many troops land, troops of all nationalities looked much alike to them and they did not appreciate the significance of the landing of American troops .

The enthusiasm felt to be noticeably lacking in the reality was abundantly supplied by some of the press correspondents. At a

later time one woman socially prominent in America was recog nized among the war workers by a crowd of troops and given a great ovation that was fully described by the press correspon 89 “ Freedom of the Press in France,” The Nation , February 22, 1919, 108 : 305 - 306 .

10 H . P . Stokes, “ Colonel House [is ] Correspondents' Stand -By," New York Evening Post, May 26, 1919 . An interesting description is given of " the erection of a wire barrier in the courtyard (of the Royal Palace at Versailles), from behind which themul

titude of newspaper correspondents will be permitted to witness the arrival and departure of the plenipotentiaries.” — New York Tribune, April 28 , 1919 .