The Dominion SATURDAY, MAY 13, 1922. THE LABOUR PRESS

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 194, 13 May 1922, Page 4

The Dominion SATURDAY, MAY 13, 1922. THE LABOUR PRESS

The salvaging of the London Daily Herald by the General Council of the British Labour Party opens what may prove to be a ..new and interesting chapter in the history of Labour journalism in the United Kingdom. Although it is the only Labour daily newspaper of National standing published in Great Britain, the Daily Herald has been, financially in low water for a long time past. Its financial embarrassments and the length to which at least one of its directors was prepared to go in solving them were advertised a year or two ago by the timely exposure of negotiations with the Soviet Governm.ent. Carried to a conclusion, these negotiations would have made the Daily Herald a secretly subsidised organ of Russian Bolshevism. In' recent months this Labour newspaper, professing to cater for the six million trade unionists of ,the United Kingdom. has- only been kept alive by contributions for which it has made daily appeals to its readers. It is plain enough that in its career •to date, the Daily Herald has failed completely to get into effective touch with the rank and file of the British Labour movement. Its failure is partly ■ explained in the statement attributed, in the cablegram on the subject which appears to-day, to a prominent union official in the United Kingdom. The paper, he said, "was not likely to succeed as long as it continually emphasised Communism, Sovietism, Gandhi-ism, and Egyptian extremism, to the exclusion of the British economic betterment schemes for which unionism primarily stood.” Hitherto tfio Daily Herald has been less a Labour newspaper than the organ and advocate of cranks and self-styled idealists who are never tired of defaming their own country and exalting insurgent elements who are out, to make trouble for it at home and abroad. The poor support the paper has received affords fairly positive proof that anti-national propaganda appeals as little to British trade unionists as to other sections of the community. 1 t ' ’ Although the cage of (he Daily Herald runs in some respects to extremes, it is typical in essentials of the history of the Labour Press, not .only in the United Kingdom, but in other British countries. In different parts of the Empire, Labour newspapers ha.ve been launched in apparently favourable circumstances, only to encounter early shipwreck. And it is the common rather than exceptional experience that those which survive have but a precarious tenure of existence and play a part of limited importance in the world .of affairs? .The. underlying reasons for this record of failure and poor success are everywhere . the same. .. In British countries, at all events,. Labour newspapers are almost invariably stultified by their adoption of a ‘ hopelessly na —ow policy and outlook. Most of them are so narrowly limited, not only in their expression of opinion, but in their presentation of news, that they are more accurately described as propagandist sheets than as newspapers. They are not, of course, singular in devoting their editorial columns to the exposition of party or sectional views and aims. Any newspaper, unless it is content to lapse into colourless insignificance, must adopt and expound a policy. But the Labour Rress, generally speaking, has the unenviable distinction of adopting an extreme partisan standpoint in the presentation of news as well as in the expression of opinion.

Non-Labour newspapers, even when they express the views cf a party, or support a given policy, as a rule endeavour to allow in reasonable measure the fair and unhampered expression in their news columns of all shades and varieties of opinion,, including that of the most rabid Labour extremists. Until the Labour Press adopts similar stapdards it will never make much headway. The slow and hampered development of the Labour Press here and in other parts of the Empire may be very easily understood by comparing almost any daily newspaper in this country with the official organ of the New Zealand Labour Party. The daily Press reflects the whole life of the community. The pages of the Labour organ reflect only the desire of a coterie of extremists to impress their own distorted views on an obviously unsympathetic community. In assuming control of the Daily Herald the General Council of the British Labour Party will presumably institute a broader and more enlightened policy than the paper has hitherto pursued. In the outcome new and better standards of Labour journalism may be established, but it cannot be overlooked that direct control by a party organisation is liable to raise almost as serious obstacles to the unhampered development and success of a newspaper as its control by a set of unbridled extremists .out of touch and sympathy with the mass of those whom they are supposed to serve. The experiment in any case should be worth watching. It is of some interest, in view of the protests macle here and against inevitable wage ‘reductions, 4 that a substantial reduction in salaries figures amongst the conditions' in which the Daily Herald is being taken over by the British Labour Party.