The barring of a Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter from a State Department briefing on the Palestine Arab refugee question was raised in the United States Senate today, The briefing dealt with the resignation of Dr. Joseph Johnson, Palestine Conciliation Commission special envoy to the Middle East, who studied the refugee problem.
The incident occurred on January 28 when Milton Friedman, chief Washington correspondent of JTA, was denied admission by Robert C. Strong, director of the State Department’s Office on Near Eastern Affairs to a briefing he was conducting. Mr. Friedman, on seeking admission to the briefing, was informed that attendance was by invitation only. The correspondent was told that Mr. Strong had personally prepared the list of correspondents to be permitted attendance and that he did not desire a JTA representative to attend because the briefing was only for American media.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Mr, Friedman are fully accredited to the Department of State. The press section of the Department made it clear, however, that it could not overrule Mr. Strong and tell him which correspondents he was to see. Members of the State Department’s press section personally expressed their regrets to Mr. Friedman.
Mr. Strong himself, in a discussion with the JTA correspondent, said bluntly that he did not approve of material Mr, Friedman had written on the Middle East, criticized Mr, Friedman for what he said was use of information from Congressional sources which, he said, reflected unfavorably on State Department policies, and complained that Israeli diplomats had used news items reported by the JTA as the basis for discussions with his department.
INCIDENT IS INSULT TO ENTIRE AMERICAN JEWISH PRESS, SENATOR SAYS
Senator Hugh Scott, Pennsylvania Republican, said on the Senate floor today that Mr, Friedman’s exclusion from the briefing was due to the fact that the State Department “apparently disagreed with recent dispatches” which the JTA had filed from Washington.
He said the incident was “more than an affront to an American newspaper correspondent. It is a reflection upon all the newspapers which subscribe to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.” The Senator added that he had been assured by the State Department that “there was no anti-Semitism involved in this matter.”
The Pennsylvanian quoted to the Senate from a report on the incident by Merriman Smith, of United Press International, the dean of the White House correspondents’ corps. Mr. Smith described the JTA correspondent as “a proud birthright American” and described the Jewish Telegraphic Agency as “an American organization which deals primarily with news concerning Jews of many nations. The agency,” he pointed out, “naturally carries many items of news to and from Israel.”
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency disclosed that it intends to make a full protest to Secretary of State Dean Rusk against the action by a State Department official in discriminating against the agency and denying it access to news of considerable interest and concern to the American Jewish community. JTA executives noted that this was the first time it had encountered such difficulties in any branch of the United States Government.
Mr.Strong was United States Consul and First Secretary of the American Embassy in Damascus, Syria, from 1954 to 1958. He became director of the Near Eastern Division in the State Department in 1961.
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