Powell criticises news treatment

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32568, 30 March 1971, Page 17

Powell criticises news treatment

(N.Z. Press Association—-Copyright) EDINBURGH, March 29. Growing confusion over what he described as the “progressive blurring” of the distinction between news and editorial matter was causing news itself to be insidiously perverted, Mr Enoch Powell, Conservative M.P. for Wolverhampton, said last night at the Edinburgh Press Club’s annual dinner.

“Contrary to common and uncharitable belief, the intentional falsification of news, either by false statements of fact or by misleading suppression of true facts, is quite rare, and when it is practised, it is commonly so obvious as to be relatively harmless,” Mr Powell said. “What much more commonly and perilously happens

today is that comment is interspersed or built into the reporting of facts or is actually substituted for them.

“Another contributory factor is a new form of ‘typing.’ No politician can be allowed to feature in the news without the label ‘Left-wing’ or ‘Right-wing’, varied with a range of further adjectives, such as ‘extreme Rightwinger’, or as a variation, ‘Right-wing extremist’, ‘rebel,’ ■maverick’, or “moderate’.” There was an example of this trend in relation to recent events in Northern Ireland, Mr Powell said. News coverage there had not been a record of who did what, when, where, so far as that was known or ascertainable.

“Someone should compile and issue a complete glossary, with translation of the vocabulary through which the news from Northern Ireland has been filtered,” he said.

"By arrangement and rearrangement of terms like ‘moderate,’ ‘extreme,’ ‘Rightwing’, ‘hard-liner’, ‘reform’, ‘civil rights’—terms, not one of which is used in its normal and natural meaning—the impression has been created that the real conflict is between two groups of a party, rather like the old Whigs and new Whigs in the early nineteenth century.

“By further terms, like ‘provocation’, ‘Catholic areas’, ‘gangster’, ‘mob’, “hooligan’, that conflict has been provided with a background of noises, reminiscent, perhaps, of Chicago in the days of Al Capone.”