Evening Post. THURSDAY, JUNE 13, 1912. PRESS AND POLITICIANS

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 140, 13 June 1912, Page 6

Evening Post. THURSDAY, JUNE 13 , 1912. PRESS AND POLITICIANS

m m The xemaTks of the Minister of Labour on the Opposition press have raised' a. hackneyed but highly interesting question. It cannot be 6aid that Mr. Laurenson's contribution to the subject was of a tactful or philosophical kind. It was obviously not intended so to be. Mr. Laurenson intended to emite, and he smote. He has also in due course been \ Bmitten. and smitten with all the vigour that he displayed himself, and, as a rule, in decidedly better taste. We have | therefore no desire to enter into a controversy which, having been begun with j heated personalities, was naturally con- i tinned in the same spirit; but it is only one aspect of a very broad question that has been treated in this unfortunate way. Mr. Laurenson's attack was directed at the Opposition, press, but h« had not a word to say against the Ministerial press, and the Independent press he also ignored. He was, of course, ac a party man, merely concerned to strike at his opponents, but he used arguments that hit a much broader mark than that at which he aimed—or shall we say that they- wer© boomerangs which returned with almost equal force to embarrass the ranks of hi 6 own party? If the simple and sufficient explanation of the Opposition press is, that a number of rich men get together and say "Go to; let us have a paper that will fight for oar moneybags, and put thcee, rascally Liberals in their proper places," is it possible to resist the conclusion that the Liberal press may also bo subject to similar infirmities? Even if it had nothing but the Minister's premiesee to go' upon, no impartial mind could fail to draw a conclusion as broad, and therefore as dangerous for the Minister's purpcees, as this. In other words, Mr. Laurenson's arguments are broad enough to discredit the press in general, for nobody but the blindest and most unimaginative ot partisans will be able to believe that the journalism of one party can have "cornered" all .the virtue that is extant. Where one party has enjoyed a strong and unbroken ascendency for many years, euch a monopoly, if ever acquired, would inevitably bo infringed ,by fraudulent imitators, who would retail for profit the very doctrines that constituted the strength and the raison d'etre of the party. Tho pure milk of tho word would be to these pretenders a mere matter of merchandise. "Kept in touch with," says the magnate of the halfpenny press in Mr. C. E. Montague's scathing satire on journalism — "kept in touch with — that's what he wants io be." "What's 'kept in touch with'!" "Told he's right. ... Do folks really want to be told a war's wrong when their blood's up? or right, a year after, when they're sick of it ?" That the doctrine thus candidly expressed has in recent years acquired a considerable hold on the press is undeniable; but to say that all journalists are governed by these influences, or that all who are so governed are on. one side, would be just as reasonable as to suggest, with Mr. Laureneon, that all the wickedness is on the other. There is indeed a very close parallel between politics and journalism in this I respect, as in so many others. The statesman and the demagogue, the politician who is perhaps six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, the enthusiast J of a single idea, and the man of no ideas at all except to sell himself to the highest bidder — all these familiar figures of the political field have their parallels in the other. It is at least as easy to gibe at politicians as a class or at all politicians of a particular colour as to treat journalists in the same way — and just as profitless. The very woi'Bt form of criticism is to attack a man's motives because you dislike his convictions. The controversy to which we have referred took its origin in a lamentable ignoring of this fundamental canon, and the result has been that it has served for little but mutual irritation.