THE NEWSPAPERS

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25270, 23 August 1947, Page 7

THE NEWSPAPERS

MR KINGSLEY MARTIN’S STUDY The Press the Public Wants. By Kingsley Martin. The Hogarth Press. 143 pp. This book, which appeared as the Royal Commission set up by the British Government began to consider some fundamental questions about the newspaper press—its organisation and ownership, for example, and whether these are consistent with its traditional freedom and its corresponding responsibility—enables the ordinary citizen and reader to conduct a sort of parallel inquiry of his own. The “ordinary” citizen and reader, however? The same doubtful assumption or suggestion is there, perhaps, as in Mr Kingsley Martin’s title. The press the oublic “wants”: it is not necessary to go very far with Mr Kingsley Martin to discover that he is really considering, less what the public “wants” than what it needs and ought to have. For the broad fact is that the British public to-day has a remarkably wide choice of newspapers, from excellent to shoddy, and chooses, by majorities of millions against hundreds of thousands, the worse before the better. They will not be the ordinary readers and citizens, therefore, who seriously apply themselves to Mr Kingsley Martin’s historical review and critical evidence; they will be the exceptional ones. And the Royal Commission and the Government next cannot sooner or more certainly lose touch with reality than by slipping into the notion that the great mass of newspaper readers are not satisfied with the popular press, think it has fallen away from its essential standards of public service, and want to recall it to them, and that the problem is to find how to -obey public opinion in this matter. There is a problem: but that is not it. (Rather, part of the problem is to create, or correct, or lead public opinion itself.) Mr Kingsley Martin has no trouble in describing the evolution which has produced the problem—the evolution of the popular press, in brief, since Lord Northcliffe “found journalism a profession and left it a branch of commerce.” There has followed that sweeping process of amalgamation to monopolist, central control. If the popular press has grave weaknesses and faults, they are mostly traceable to this process. It is true enough, as he says, that the international situation and the facts about it have been badly misrepresented in some British newspapers, which have expressed “the whims and phobias of particular individuals.” It is also true that few of the mass circulation dailies give. their readers even a sparely comprehensive summary of foreign and home news: the selection is ruthless, unbalanced. and arbitrary. (Also, news “angling” is sometimes so sharp—or obtuse—that the comment which should be explicit in the editorial columns. and confined to them, is projected into the news itself.) Again, the close connexion between the character of a newspaper and that of the regional life of the area it serves has been broken, or disastrously impaired, by those shifts of ownership which have made valuable regional journals mere simulacra of some mass-circula-tion London daily or have displaced them altogether. Mr Kingsley Martin is less positive in proposing what to do than in de--1 scribing what is amiss. (He knows the press too well to waste time on ; some of the common but emoty I charges, such as for example, that I advertisers dictate a newspaper’s ' policy.) No doubt he has felt that the ■! time and the occasion require him ; rather to suggest various ways by I which it mav be possible to “increase I the responsibility of the press.” as Ihe says, without endangering its | freedom in presenting news and ' commenting on it, than to insist on the j way he favours himself—if he does } favour one above another; but his own | preference is clear only in so far as Ihe contrasts ownership by “irrespon- ! sible individuals” and ownership by “responsible and independent , groups.” Czechoslovakia now provides cn example of a press, every organ of which is conducted by. a party, a trade I union, or* some cultural organisation.

Newspapers owned by their "consumers” and conducted on co-opera-tive lines were once advocated by Beatrice and Sydney Webb. Sir Norman Angell has proposed that newspapers should be owned by public corporations. Mr Kingsley Martin discusses briefly these solutions and others less radical. But while he may be allowed to have shown that individual ownership has sometimes been irresponsible, he hardly begins to demonstrate that political or economic or cultural groups can safely and wholly be trusted; and it is not as if no evidence were available. The “Daily Herald,” for example, is controlled by the Trade Union Congress, the “Daily Worker” by the Communist Party, and “Reynolds News” by the Co-operative Movement. These are not encouraging examples. A reader of Mr Kingsley Martin’s book will do well, then, taking full heed of his precisely aimed criticisms of Britain’s newspaper press to-day, to remember that the antithesis between individual irresponsibility and collective responsibility is not valid; and that it makes a very dangerous foundation for proposals of reform.