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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIX, Issue 21994, 20 June 1941, Page 4

President Roosevelt has reassured the American press, through a letter to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, that no censorship of news or opinion is contemplated so long as he remains head of the United States Government. The text of the President’s message is as follows: Like all of our liberties, liberty of speech and of the press is not a mere phrase, a mere form of words, a constitutional abstraction. It has a living meaning—whatever meaning the press itself gives it. Government and juridical process can afford a negative protection against interference with freedom of speech, but its care, its nurture and its use are responsibilities of the press itself, which has never prized it so much as it should prize it now. How that freedom should be used, what contributions it should make to national defence, national interest and national morals are questions for publishers and editors to decide. It would be a shameful abuse of patriotism to suggest that opinion should be stifled in its service.. Unified national sentiment, which all of us should desire, bears no resemblance to a totalitarian Regimentation of opinion and treatment of news.