NEW ZEALAND PRESS

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28178, 17 January 1957, Page 10

NEW ZEALAND PRESS

DR. MACLEOD’S REPLY

The constancy with which he was informed by New Zealanders, from Auckland to Dunedin, of the rightist tendency of the New Zealand press had impressed him, said the Rev. Dr. George F. MacLeod, the leader of the lona Community and Moderator-designate of the Church of Scotland, in a letter to the editor of "The Press.”

“I apologise for necessitating your second leader in your issue of January 9. Your evidence from overseas of the objective nature of the New Zealand press is impressive,” Dr. MacLeod said. “In my own tiny experience I was hardly happy about the reporting. In one interview I said that church people were as amusing and instructed and alive as everyone else but on church premises they became the dullest people in the world. This hardly merits reporting but it becomes of commercial value w’hen hacked from its context, regardless of how many people it hurts: so the heading goes in about ‘church people being the dullest people in the world,’ ” said Dr. MacLeod.

"Again,” said Dr. MacLeod, “I gave your reporter some 40 minutes of my time when I was very busy. In precisely the last three minutes I asked him why the New Zealand press was rightist. I ended with a phrase I have often used in many parts of the world: ‘offering five shillings if they printed that.’ For the first time in my experience a reporter converted a personal remark to commercial gain; so did the subeditor; so also, to my surprise, did the leader writer.

“Very soon people interviewed will be reduced to monosyllabic replies devoid of all confidence—if this method of "The Press i should spread. “The Rev. Edward Barrar, of the Seventh Day Baptist Church, calls me to task for getting involved in politics as a Christian,” said Dr. MacLeod. "I have always supposed that the problems of food and housing and clothing and education and democratic gcvernment were the issues of politics. It seems to me that the social prophets were so called because they insisted that these were the very issues by which a man’s holiness was tested (e.g Isaiah 58). Indeed our Lord in his parable of judgment makes clear that we are saved or damned in the measure in which we feed the hungry, clothe the naked and release folk from bondage. I cannot see how the Rev. Barrar can do any one of them without becoming involved in politics. “I have enormously enjoyed my Itay in New Zealand and wish well to your paper,” Dr. MacLeod Eaid.