Tom Scott’s position

Press, 23 October 1980, Page 16

Tom Scott’s position

Sir,—What a spineless lot the Parliamentary journalists are. Why has the Journalists’ Union not put a black ban on Mr Muldoon’s press conferences, when one of their members is being so obviously and continuously victimised? In countries where there is real freedom of the press no politician could ride rough-shod over a journalist in this manner. Erosion of freedom is an insidious thing. It started here in 1975, with the victimisation of David Exel. Television current affairs programmes are now so bland, they are hardly worth watching. Are the newspapers going to allow the same thing to happen to them? Unless the journalists have the courage to stop this sort of censorship now, New Zealand will soon not be counted among the countries with a free press. — Yours, etc., JUDY M. WATERS, October 21, 1980. (Asked to comment on his letter, Mr Tom Scott said that he was not a member of the New Zealand Journalists’ Union or of the Association of Broadcasting Journalists or of the Puolic Service Association. As a writer on contract to the “Listener” and also as a writer for television he was a member of the New Zealand Television Writers’ Association and the New Zealand Writers’ Guild. He was also a member of the Eric Heath Drinking Committee of Wellington Cartoonists. “Journalists, particularly those in the Press Gallery, have much more important things to do at the moment than worry about attendances at the Prime Minister’s press conference. Even I am too busy to get upset about it. My colleagues have been ready with support when it mattered, such as over the India trip when the Gallery wrote to the Commonwealth Secretariat in support of my accreditation.”)

Sir, — So, the Prime Minister uses a ludicrous rule about weekly journalists to keep a political correspondent, that he does not like, out of his press conferences. In the Soviet Union foreign reporters are kept out of the political trials of dissidents for much the same reason. 1 had always supposed that in this so-called free world, a bona fide reporter was permitted to attend a Prime Minister’s press conference. Like Mr Muldoon I do not find a great deal of Tom Scott’s articles worth reading, but to bar Tom Scott from a press conference is not the thin end of the wedge for freedom of reporting; it is the blunt end of the hammer with the sickle following through. — Yours, etc., PETER WATSON. October 21, 1980,