I have received your letter of 3 October [1960], in which you invite me to participate, with other publications in the Press Union of Technical and Specialized News, in the preparation of Radio-Television broadcasts upon which you have agreed "after lengthy efforts to complete it."
Unfortunately, the length of these efforts of completion has left you at a moment in which the directors, journalists, writers and actors -- for the crime opinion -- find themselves excluded from these organs of information by govenmental ordinance.[2]
In this context, your proposition has something annoying and ridiculous about it. I know better than you do that a veritable freedom of expression has never existed on the Radio-Television, no more than in the press. But even though the juridical conception of freedom of expression is overtly denied by current power, one can only suppose that someone who conserves the least sense of intellectual dignity would react to this situation with an absolute boycott of this Radio-Television and its lackeys.[3]
Guy Debord(Written on the letterhead of the journal Internationale Situationniste, with the mention: "Guy Debord, editor of newspaper, card #2220 F.N.P.F.")
[1] President of the Inter-Union Liaison Committee of Press-Radio-Television.
[2] Sanctions pronounced 28 September 1960 against the signatories of the Declaration on the right to insubordination in the Algerian war, who, among other things, were "banished from radio-television, even the citation of their names; and rejected from subsidized theatres and films normally registered by the National Cinema Center."
[3] One of whom responded [to Debord] on 13 October [1960]: "Mr. Editor, we have opened your letter of 11 October 1960. We think that we must return it to you before delivering it to our President so as to permit you to add to it the complimentary closing, the usage of which no governmental ordinance has repealed. Please accept, Mr. Editor, the assurance of our distinguished sentiments. For the Secretariat."
(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 2, 1960-1964. Footnotes and parenthetical remark after the signature by Alice Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! May 2005.)