LURID JOURNALISM.

Evening Star, Issue 21835, 26 September 1934, Page 8

LURID JOURNALISM.

The Statutes Revision Committee has returned to the House of Representatives a Bill which the Minister of Justice had introduced to limit the scope of a sensational fraction of the newspaper Press. It appears doubtful, however, whether the Minister will consider it worth while to persevere with a measure from which the main operative clauses have been expunged. In most journals the treatment of certain classes of cases coming before the law courts is as restrained as is possible without bowdlerisation; but a type is not quite unrepresented which finds the seamy side of life to have distinct attractions, and does its best to draw the attention of its own class of reader to the abnormal and the depraved. In the past private members have sought to ensure that the law courts shall not be made a perennial source of material for the manufacture of copy whose main appeal is to the baser side of human nature. The Government has at length moved in the matter, and proposed to make it unlawful to publish indecent matter or indecent medical, surgical, or physiological details calculated to injure public morals. It does not seem a dangerous or unjust proposal to ensure all papers suppressing certain types of evidence which most of them already ignore where possible. The committee, however, thought differently, and gave as the reason the deterrent effect of publicity. At the same time one member of the committee implied that already such publicity is not given, for he said that if ever there arose in New Zealand a different class of newspaper which did not exercise discretion in the handling of such matters it would be time enough to legislate. In the opinion of a number of people that time arrived long ago in New Zealand. Regularly some types of case have a floodlight of publicity given them, but what the deterrent effect is we do not know, but should imagine it to be negligible. So in the meantime the Press is not to be “ shackled ” in either the aspect mentioned or in reports of divorce and allied cases. It might have been inequitable to do so while free entry is given to reams of salacious literature, of American origin mostly, to which attention has recently been drawn very pointedly.