POST-WAR PRESS

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 November 1943, Page 6

POST-WAR PRESS

all for independence 'LONDON, September 6. The unanimous’ determination of 2 newspapers to resume their freedom 1 as soon as possible after the war was I expressed by Mr Gordon R ° bb iSsti- ‘ his presidential address to the Insti tute of Journalists at its annual meet- f m The relations of journalists with i external authority, he said, contmuec. to be excellent. They could have no ( serious quarrel with the Ministry o. information or the Paper , under its various aliases as long as , he war lasted. The Government had, on the whole, emerged with credit from the most severe test o. < all. The official attitude towaids , journalists on the fighting fronts on land, at sea, and in the air, whi.e no escaping criticism, had been far nipre liberal and enterprising than m the , last war. The men on the spot had • responded with a brilliance of tech- ■ nique and a devoted courage fully ] vindicating the opinion recently expressed to him by Major-Geneial Lord Burnham that “no war wasi, ever so well reported as this one., I. No harm could be done by giving ■ the official world a gentle reminder : of the unanimous determination oi . the newspaper Press to resume its . freedom without avoidable delay There would be little anxiety about the future if wartime Ministers all spoke with the same voice as the Prime Minister and the Minister oi information. Mr Churchill, who not only wrote good history but made it before men’s eyes, re-created tne Fourth Estate in his Guildhall speech in a new marshalling of the newspapers alongside the Monarchy, Government, and Parliament in a public vote of thanks. „ Unfortunately, it was impossible to bo so sure of other Ministers, more especially those in the Departments exercising exceptional powers oi control over the life and industry oi the nation. Some had got so much into the habit of declaring “What J say goes” that their voices, were developing a much more ominous ring with the implication: “What I have 1 hold.” There was a growing threat to postpone the lifting of Government control to an indefinite and remote future, which journalists would unite in resisting. Let there be no mistake about the attitude of the newspapers; they were all for the war —and, after it, all for independence. When peace came control must go. On the journalistic road they preferred the free wheel of responsible independence to the automatic brake of official restrictions The one might have dangers; the other was certain death. They must be particularly on their guard against the dangerous illusion, that, if the Government no longer kept the newspapers in fetters alter the war, they could make a gesture of good will by coming to their aid with some of the scrapped machinery of control. Government interference was bad enough, but Government help would be infinitely worse. A day to be prayed for was that of release from the captivity of the communique, a word so alien to British ideas that it had no equivalent in the language. Above all else, journalists did not want to be planned into uniformity. Variety always was the breath of the journalist’s nostrils, and, when the war was well won, it must be again. Those trained in a hard school on the good old English principle of heads down in a scrum disliked intensely the softening implications of hands-out on a plate. The utter wrongheadedness of much of the current practice was shown by the fact that a substantial part of official publicity was a dreary waste of paper, which the newspapers were powerless to arrest, although they were being rationed to less than one-fifth of the pre-war consumption of their raw material.