countries authoritative information concerning the war,38 or to promote " a better understanding between the Central Powers
of Europe and North America ,” and in addition to telegraphic reports , incidentally , newspapers were to be supplied with mail contributions dealing with important political, economic , and art events and also with literary articles.39 In 1914, the Krupps Munitions Company formed the Overseas News Agency to dis
seminate pro -German propaganda through American newspapers and early in 1917 it acquired a control of the Wolff Bureau .40
Propaganda masquerading under the guise of telegraphic reports of news to promote a better understanding between nations has been one of the most dangerous, because insidious, enemies of proprietary news organizations.
Serious international misunderstandings are inevitable when a news agency suppresses passages in important official com
munications, as was the case when the Wolff Agency omitted passages from President Wilson 's address to Congress April 2 , 1917, - a suppression defended by the German government.41 The situation was not improved when a German press association adopted, though by a narrow majority after a sharp debate , the
resolution that German newspaper reports of speeches delivered by alien statesmen should be confined to the abbreviated sum
maries circulated by the Wolff Telegraph Bureau,- a decision apparently unqualifiedly censured by the Frankfurter Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt, Vorwärts and in general by liberal,
radical, and socialist papers. The Frankfurter Zeitung frankly disapproved of the plan because of the general lack of confidence in the Wolff Bureau , especially in translating; because the sus
picion would be inevitable that when condensation of speeches was authorized , something had intentionally been omitted ; and
because compression of speeches could best be done by each paper, and thus no essential passage would be omitted simul taneously in every newspaper.42
A contrasting policy was that of the Havas Agency in whose 38 New York Evening Post, October 7, 1914. 39 New York Evening Post, January 29, 1917. 40 New York Tribune, February 4 , 1918. 41 New York Times, November 4, 1917. 42 Christian Science Monitor, November 26 , 1917.
