| World War II saw the most successful system of wartime censorship of the domestic press in the United States in the Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press prepared by the Office of Censorship under the direction of Byron Price. At the same time the Commission on Freedom of the Press, also known as the Hutchins commission, released “A Free and Responsible Press,” used by Theodore Peterson as the basis for what would come to be known as the social responsibility theory of the press. Utilizing the personal papers of Joseph Pulitzer II and the records of the Office of Censorship, this thesis takes a case study approach in examining the concurrent development of these two diametrically opposed ideas through an examination of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Office of Censorship, and the working relationship between the two from the perspective of social responsibility theory. |
