PRAISE FOR THE PRESS

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 66, 10 December 1938, Page 17

PRAISE FOR THE PRESS

A Necessary Institution “The law needs a great deal of alteration. When the New Year conies I will seriously consider whether 1 will not devote more of my leisure moments to impartial consideration of the laws of libel.” declared Lord Hewart, Lord Chief Justice, recently. Lord Hewart was speaking at. the 99th anniversary festival dinner of the Newsvendors’ Benevolent and Provident Institution at the Connaught rooms, London. “Whatever you may think of the virtue and the beauty of the Press,’’ said Lord Hewart, "or of particular portions of it, you will probably agree that at anyrate in a country which is, or is supposed to be, governed by representative institutions, the Press is nothing less than a necessity. “A good many persons, tts we all know, are very ready to find fault with newspapers, both individual and as a whole. These persons seem to me to be, at verv least, profoundly ungrateful. “Formidable Engine.” “Do we not tend to take too much for granted and to think with too little thankfulness, if we think at all, of the skill, judgment, the labour and the pains, the discrimination, restraint, and the enterprise withal which, with perfect regularity and punctuality day by day and almost hour by hour, exhibits the glittering panorama of the world before our too careless eyes? "A trivial Press might excite a smile, but would a dictatorial Press be really better?

"Perhaps, as we grow a little older, we may be disposd to think that the real function of the Press is neither to teach nor to preach, but faithfully and accurately to collect and publish facts.”

Lord Hewart added : “It seems to me that the power of the Press is a formidable engine to contemplate.” Sir Emsley Carr, who presided, said that newspaper proprietors had cause to complain of the injustice they suffered under the Libel Act. They were at the mercy of unscrupulous adventurers and equally unscrupulous lawyers. He went on: “But the grievances of newspaper proprietors are as nought compared with the wrong which newsvendors suffer.

“I ask in the presence of the Lord Chief Justice,” he declared, “is it right that newsvendors should be liable for any libel which appears in any publication they sell —libels for which they cannot be responsible?” Lord Hewart’s comment was: “In the serene—not to say dull—atmosphere in which, I will not say I earned, but received a modest livelihood, 1 will not forget the words of exhortation I have heard tonight. “As an old member of the Press gang, I give you the health of the I’ress,” he concluded.