“I have learned to my distress that the correspondent of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has been arrested and his papers taken from him,” said Dorothy Thompson, the first American correspondent expelled from Germany, in an address over the stations of the Columbia Broadcasting System from Paris, “and that it was in connection with my case.
“I should like to say here that my own connection with this agency began and ended eighteen months ago with six articles which I wrote for them, and that I did not see this unfortunate man or have any contact with him during my stay in Germany, either then or now.
“In April of last year, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked me to do some reports for them, and I agreed. They asked me, knowing that I was not Jewish, and believing that I would be unbiased. The German government may rest assured that the corps of foreign journalists in Berlin are, on the whole, animated by loyalty to just one thing, their professional standards. They are out for the facts. If, therefore; they and the rest of the world with them have gained the impresion that in Germany these facts are withheld from them, and that in their place there is a systematic substitution of more or less ingenius fairy tales, there must be some reason for it.”
Miss Thompson, who is Mrs. Sinclair Lewis in private life, attributed a “program of mystification” to the German propaganda ministry. The only motive governing the press corps in Germany, she said, is a regard for professional standards.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
