The Office of Censorship
Under the authority granted him by the First War Powers Act which was enacted by Congress in December 1941, President Roosevelt issued an Executive Order on December 19, 1941 which established the Office of Censorship. The Office not only censored news stories by the war correspondents which accompanied the troops and fleets, but all communications, including private mail and telegrams, which crossed the borders of the United States. It also censored radio broadcasts, films, and international telephone communications. Unlike the CPI of the previous World War, the Office of Censorship was not involved in propaganda activities.
The Office established a hotline which was manned 24 hours a day, where editors could discuss potentially harmful stories with the censors. Officially only stories which affected the war effort were to come under censorship, but the war touched nearly all aspects of American life. Stories which described the black market for rationed items could be used by the enemy as propaganda and were thus subject to censorship by the government. Popular radio programs which featured the interviews of people at random were discontinued because of the risk of enemy agents or sympathizers being given a voice. Radio stations were also forced to stop complying with listeners requests for specific music, to prevent their use as signals to agents.
The government limited the broadcast of weather forecasts, especially early in the war, because too detailed weather information was deemed to be aiding the enemy in the event of an attack being planned. Baseball and football games continued to be broadcast throughout the war, but discussion of the weather conditions during the games was restricted, other than the announcement of rain delays during baseball games. On both coasts only the government approved weather announcements were allowed in order to prevent information regarding pending weather conditions being monitored by submarines.
The Director of the Office of Censorship, former Associated Press member Byron Price, reported directly to FDR, which allowed FDR to censor reports of his activities and whereabouts throughout the war. FDR could specify what was said of him in the press and when it was said, and reports of his activities often didn’t appear in the press until well after they were completed. The President’s trips to overseas meetings with Churchill and Stalin at Tehran and Yalta were censored in this manner and his rapidly declining health late in the war was also kept from the public through the use of censorship. For the most part the press co-operated with the censorship.
As the military situation improved on all fronts and the possibility of attack on the United States waned the restrictions imposed by the Office of Censorship eased, but those regarding overseas communications remained in effect throughout the war. Besides the notable failure of the censors to stop the publication by the Chicago Tribune of the article which clearly implied the Americans ability to decipher Japanese coded communications, and another which was the fault of a US Congressman, Andrew Jackson May, censorship during the war was largely successful from the point of view of the government.