The Press MONDAY, MARCH 4, 1946. Post-War Censorship

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24815, 4 March 1946, Page 4

The Press MONDAY, MARCH 4, 1946. Post-War Censorship

The outspoken remarks of the chairman of the New Zealand Press Association (Sir Cecil Leys) about the continuation of obscure forms of censorship in the Dominion are worth emphasis. The tendency to withhold from the public news which they have every right to hear and read was marked before the war and has become more noticeable since. The Labour Government has always been secretive. During the war it used, probably more than any other country, the censorship regulation against upsetting public morale; and this was made the excuse for some ridiculous censorship decisions which would not have been tolerated in countries far nearer the fighting fronts, notably Great Britain. Ministers of the Crown in New Zealand have frequently charged the newspapers with giving too little publicity to their utterances. It was always an unfair charge; it is more unfair when they deliberately set out to channel official information through Ministerial sources and to use various devices to tie the hands of reporters in search of authentic news. A favourite stratagem is to trap the unwary newspaperman into accepting a confidence, which in truth he has no right to accept, since he is not concerned with the news as an individual but only as a representative of his paper. Having accepted the confidence, he is debarred from using the news, even if he gets it, untrammelled by confidence, from any other source. It is fair to say that the newspaperman j<? as much to blame as the Minister or official if he listens to news with such a tag. But a more dictatorial attitude is taken by some Ministers, who attempt to insist, when a reporter has asked a question, not only that they will not answer the question but also that the reporter must make no mention of the fact that he has asked it. No newspaper of standing will accept any such restriction on its liberty. “ The Press ”, for example, recently attempted to ask the Acting-Prime Minister questions about the future of the J Force. Mr Nash not only refused to listen to the questions but attempted to insist that no mention should be made of the effort to ask them. This is a form of censorship which he had no right to impose and was certainly not accepted. What Sir Cecil Leys describes as the “ hang-over ” from war censorship certainly exists and should be combated by press and public alike. “ The Press ” and other newspapers in New Zealand conceive it their duty to obtain the news by legitimate inquiry as soon as possible; and they certainly do not subscribe to the notion that even if they can get an authentic story unofficially they should await the whim of a Minister or a Government official before releasing it. Yet this Government has always been evasive and resentful when a newspaper breaks a news story which is not a “ hand-out ” from an official source. A similar tendency has been more and more apparent in recent years among local bodies, as Sir Cecil Leys has pointed out. The practice of members of public bodies, who are servants of the public, of going into committee to discuss public questions of vital concern to the whole community, very often having regard to the expenditure of large sums of public money, cannot be too strongly condemned as a denial o£ the right of citizens to know how their own business is being conducted. Sir Cecil Leys has done a public service in directing attention to these matters. He deserves the approval and support of the public in whose interests he was primarily speaking.