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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

Q:

Well, also the Bay of Pigs, earlier in that year. James [B.] Reston had privileged information about the upcoming invasion and decided not to print it. I was also thinking of the Pentagon Papers.

Stanton:

Well, all of us had a lot of that kind of information. But, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a separate one, and Kennedy said publicly he wished --

Q:

He wished he'd been scooped, yes. Yes, that was very interesting.

Stanton:

I had occasion the other day and again last night, in a dinner with an old colleague, who followed me by twenty years but he's now retired, who was getting into this question of censorship, in terms of lyrics and things of that kind -- pornography -- and how he would not allow certain things to be put on the air. I said I had traveled quite a ways away from that point of view, and for the most part my North Star was get the information out and let the public be the judge as to whether it was something they should or should not act on. When you start cutting back -- The thing that always scared me, and still scares me is -- In my day, you had a seven-man FCC. Four people out of the seven, if they had the congressional mandate to do it, could say what people got to hear and what they didn't get to hear. They wouldn't touch print, but they would touch electronic, and there was a time when Senator Pastore, as chairman of the Senate committee on communication, got the three network presidents down and said he wanted us to submit any questionable material to a central code committee, to pass judgment whether we could put it on the air.

Q:

When was this?





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