View
217
Download
2
Category
Preview:
DESCRIPTION
TIME ETHIOPIA Defeat of the Press
Citation preview
ETHIOPIA: Defeat of the PressMonday, Jan. 27, 1936
Journalism by last week had been defeated in Ethiopia on all fronts.
The most unfortunate setbacks had been suffered by outstanding journalists
assigned to the North Front. Swizzling in Cairo recently and proclaiming, "I'm
having a nervous breakdown!" famed Floyd Gibbons was all but unrecognizable
when last photographed (see cut) except for his trademark, the patch across
one blind eye. Others were arriving in Manhattan, London and Paris heart-
shocked by the altitude; nausea-shocked by the fleas, flies and filth; sleepless
from malaria and dysentery; jittering and at such low ebb that their journalistic
employers sent them to secluded rest homes. On the subject of altitude able
United Press European News Manager Webb Miller vividly said: "You would lie
down, thoroughly fatigued, your heart would palpitate and you would get
scared, thinking you were going to die. Then would come fits of weeping, and
then fits of passionate anger. It was a God-awful experience."
Of some 120 correspondents and photographers who originally beseiged Addis
Ababa for news only a scant dozen had not left by last week. Gone were Karl
von Weigand, Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker and Evelyn Waugh. The Ethiopians
had cheated the pants off the correspondents as individuals and collectively
mulcted the world's news and newsreel services to an extent which makes
Ethiopia journalism's worst investment of all time.
The Addis Ababa crowd, who had supposed the North Front crowd were "riding
around in Italian limousines and bathing in chianti," discovered with surprise
on reaching civilization that it was themselves who physically and mentally
suffered least. Dictator Mussolini, with the tendency of a onetime editor to hold
reporters' lives cheap, let the boys on Italy's front get thoroughly Ethiopia-
shocked.
Home from Addis and Harar with bloodshot-eyes, malaria and insomnia but in
hearty spirits, Fox Movietone's Laurence Stallings bubbled of Ethiopian
beauties "too proud to notice a white man," confirmed that at the first sound of
an Italian bombing plane Ethiopian officers dive for the nearest Red Cross
shelter. A prized Stallings snapshot shows the Ducal Palace of Emperor Haile
Selassie's younger son Makonnen at Harar flying the Red Cross flag although
not used for any Red Cross purpose.
One correspondent died in Ethiopia, Chicago Tribune's Will Barbour. Of him in
Manhattan last week Emperor Haile Selassie's Public Relations Counsel Josef
Israels II said, "I like to place Will Barbour among some of the other empire
builders who are buried in African soil, because never in all the history of
journalism has the press so swiftly, so expertly and so completely built an
empire of news and enlightenment in a wilderness hitherto unpenetrated." This
was one way of alluding to the fact that it remains impossible to obtain for love
or money anything remotely approaching an accurate day by day account of the
war on Ethiopia's fronts.
Sensation of Ethiopia today are newly arrived Moscow correspondents and
cinemen representing Tass, official Soviet news agency. Seemingly supplied
with unlimited funds and spending right & left, they say they are "preparing a
complete photographic document of Ethiopia," were splashing vigorously about
in Dessye last week making most elaborate shots of His Imperial Majesty for
Bolsheviks to gape at.
Recommended