ETHIOPIA: Defeat of the Press

Monday, Jan. 27, 1936

Journalism by last week had been defeated in Ethiopia on all fronts.

The most unfortunate setbacks had been suffered by outstanding journalists assigned to the
North Front. Swizzling in Cairo recently and proclaiming, "I'm having a nervous
breakdown!" famed Floyd Gibbons was all but unrecognizable when last photographed (see
cut) except for his trademark, the patch across one blind eye. Others were arriving in
Manhattan, London and Paris heart-shocked by the altitude; nausea-shocked by the fleas,
flies and filth; sleepless from malaria and dysentery; jittering and at such low ebb that their
journalistic employers sent them to secluded rest homes. On the subject of altitude able
United Press European News Manager Webb Miller vividly said: "You would lie down,
thoroughly fatigued, your heart would palpitate and you would get scared, thinking you
were going to die. Then would come fits of weeping, and then fits of passionate anger. It was
a God-awful experience."
Of some 120 correspondents and photographers who originally beseiged Addis Ababa for
news only a scant dozen had not left by last week. Gone were Karl von Weigand, Hubert
Renfro Knickerbocker and Evelyn Waugh. The Ethiopians had cheated the pants off the
correspondents as individuals and collectively mulcted the world's news and newsreel
services to an extent which makes Ethiopia journalism's worst investment of all time.
The Addis Ababa crowd, who had supposed the North Front crowd were "riding around in
Italian limousines and bathing in chianti," discovered with surprise on reaching civilization
that it was themselves who physically and mentally suffered least. Dictator Mussolini, with
the tendency of a onetime editor to hold reporters' lives cheap, let the boys on Italy's front
get thoroughly Ethiopia-shocked.
Home from Addis and Harar with bloodshot-eyes, malaria and insomnia but in hearty
spirits, Fox Movietone's Laurence Stallings bubbled of Ethiopian beauties "too proud to
notice a white man," confirmed that at the first sound of an Italian bombing plane Ethiopian
officers dive for the nearest Red Cross shelter. A prized Stallings snapshot shows the Ducal
Palace of Emperor Haile Selassie's younger son Makonnen at Harar flying the Red Cross flag
although not used for any Red Cross purpose.

One correspondent died in Ethiopia, Chicago Tribune's Will Barbour. Of him in Manhattan
last week Emperor Haile Selassie's Public Relations Counsel Josef Israels II said, "I like to
place Will Barbour among some of the other empire builders who are buried in African soil,
because never in all the history of journalism has the press so swiftly, so expertly and so
completely built an empire of news and enlightenment in a wilderness hitherto
unpenetrated." This was one way of alluding to the fact that it remains impossible to obtain
for love or money anything remotely approaching an accurate day by day account of the war
on Ethiopia's fronts.
Sensation of Ethiopia today are newly arrived Moscow correspondents and cinemen
representing Tass, official Soviet news agency. Seemingly supplied with unlimited funds and
spending right & left, they say they are "preparing a complete photographic document of
Ethiopia," were splashing vigorously about in Dessye last week making most elaborate shots
of His Imperial Majesty for Bolsheviks to gape at.