INFORMATION: IS IT HELD BACK?: Government Information Restriction Program Erodes Free Press

EVERY CHEMIST, every engineer, every chemical executive should read with special care the article, "Information: Is It Held Back?" (Government, page 4520). The threat to the freedom of the press in this country is real, despite the pious protestations of those who would hamstring it, that all they are asking is "voluntary" cooperation from the editors of newspapers, trade, business, scientific, and technical magazines and journals. Many of the country's most outstanding editors have watched with deep concern the tortuous gyrations of the Office of Strategic Information as it has attempted to justify many of its activities. The latest gimmick is to set up the agency with at least two objectives that appear to us to be wholly incongruous and completely incompatible. In the one breath the agency announces one of its chief avowed purposes is to try to reduce the volume of information of an unclassified nature published in our scientific and technical ...