It is not generally known that the American news industry has now attained virtual domination of the world news market--which means every country except the Soviet Union and its immediate neighbors. The story of the battle for world opinion control will be told in later pages. Here it is enough to point out that official pressure for world news “freedom” has a double purpose. First, it is aimed to break down Soviet resistance, especially in respect to reported plans of Tass, official Soviet news agency, to serve Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary and Rumania. Second, it is designed to further expand and consolidate the powerful world position of the American news monopoly against future challenges by its now feeble rivals. In such a program, news is a naked arm of Empire. It cannot be separated from the territorial, military-strategic, economic and political aspects of American foreign policy. The increasingly imperialistic tone of that policy, the spread-eagle drive for absolute world power, is more and more reflected in the demands of the news industry. Thus, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the banker-minded _New York Times_, frankly states the connection between the two. In a speech containing the crude threat of atomic bombs and the flavor of political blackmail, he declared: I do not believe that free peoples can afford to trust dictatorships. We should not share our military secrets, or make any financial agreements, calculated to build the Soviet Union until we in this country have more knowledge of her and her ways.... I think we should put definite limits upon our cooperation ... until we have the same freedom of access to the news of Russia as they have to the news over here.... Access to the news is, therefore, my condition for full cooperation and I should hold to that position uncompromisingly. The elimination of censorship would be but a small part of compliance with this condition. _Access to the news means freedom to travel at will--to talk with whomsoever one wishes--it means finding communications systems available--it means the right of a business man to see how his product is used or whether a market for it exists.... I say this as a newspaper man, it is true, but in this all-important freedom we in the newspaper profession act as your agents._ What Sulzberger and the news industry are demanding, is acceptance by the Soviet Union of the system of special privileges for private enterprise that prevails here. At the very least, they would require the Russians to agree that information is a commodity to be peddled exclusively by morally irresponsible private organizations. If the Soviet Union could be forced to bow to American private enterprise in this instance, a capitalist wedge would have been inserted in the Socialist system. Lawful Spies