“Economist” Debates Future Of Popular Newspapers

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27750, 30 August 1955, Page 11

“Economist” Debates Future Of Popular Newspapers

Otec. 8 pjn.) LONDON, Aug. 28. “This seems to be the season for criticising the British popular press abroad, as well as at home, and the press is not in a good position to defend itself in a week in which so many faces in Fleet Street are barbecue red,” says the weekly journal the •‘Economist.”

British readers of last week’s ‘ ‘Time” magazine must still have felt a certain shock at finding the majority of London dailies arraigned from America, of all places, on account of the sensationalism, frivolity, lurid exploitation of crime, and sex. the misuse of “slam bang headlines,” and failure to purvey information, says the “Economist.”

“ ‘Time’ offers two explanations for its dismal findings. First, that lack of newsprint has put a premium on ‘luring* readers. Second, that the uneducated British majority—‘only 4 per cent, of Britain's population have attended school until they were 18 or older'—cannot be expected to read anything better. “This last explanation, and the conclusion that may be drawn from it, misses the whole point. It just is not true that Britain now has one of the worst national presses in the world; the only tenable charge is that there has been a crashing deterioration in the last 30 years, and especially in the last 10 of what used to be one of the best,” says the “Economist.” Over the period, the very genuine “popular” public has largely disappeared from the mental vision of Fleet Street—the public that built the trade unions, the co-operative movement, and the friendly societies (to say nothing of the Labour Party, which has lately complained of its supposed mouthpieces with a lack of political seriousness) which supplemented the shortened full-time education with W.E.A. classes and evening courses, and formed the backbone of adult schools: the public that produced in the nineteenth century the heroes of Mark Rutherford and Hardy, and in the twentieth century those of H. G. Wells.

“Newspapers that once served its needs and kept its taste in mind, increasingly feel that it is not worth

“It is the pin table public, the pools public, the Radio Luxembourg public, which now constitutes the public with a capital P. “The latter is so much larger, and it has come with a clatter into the newspaper reading field. “One of the tests of newspaper values, and of the technique of British journalism, in the next few years, will be to see how any of the popular iailies use their new, unwelcomed free-

dom of access to newsprint to rebuild their appeal to that minority, substantial surely. even if outnumbered, who find ‘The Times.’ ‘Telegraph’ and the ‘Manchester Guardian,’ too much like someone else’s house organ, but who would welcome something other than the light-weight daily magazine,” says the “Economist.”