PRESS AND FINANCE

Grey River Argus, 20 August 1937, Page 5

PRESS AND FINANCE

A LONDON EXPERT’S VIEWS. In an address given to members of the English Institute of Chartered Accountants, Mr Collin Brooks, editor of the “Sunday Dispatch,” explained the peculiar responsibilities and difficulties of the financial journalist and also the advantages he had in being able to obtain information from experts. The speaker suggested that with the growing publife interest in financial matters, the City Page would be a general rather than a departmentalised feature of the newspapers of the future. “I would like to say frankly,” he re-1 marked, “that the Press in its relation to finance is .very largely in the position of Tommy Atkins. ‘lt’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy you’re a brute. But its ’Thin red line of ’eroes’ when the guns begin to shoot ! -v,, “In other'words, we labour under the double burden of being regarded as a general nuisance for the most part of our working life, and the saviours of society' for the other small fraction, and for very good reasons I assume that the city—by which 1 mean the whole range of finance—always has one of two motives at heart; either it wishes to get information published or it wishes to prevent information from being published; at any given moment it is labouring under one of these two desires or motives. In ordinary journalism, of which I have had considerable experience, the Press would only labour under one motive and that motive would be the publication of information, no matter what the interested parties might feel or desire —but it is not so in the financial section of the Press. It is not so with the two financial dailies and it is not so in the city offices of the various daily and weekly newspapers, because the city editor has got a personal and technical reason and he has also a public spirited reason for not running counter to the wishes of those about him. “His personal reason is this—as a rule in financial matters if you publish information prematurely you stop the thing from happening, so you get the paradox that if you publish a ‘scoop’ your true information immediately becomes false informa tion. You spoil somebody’s negotia tions if you. shall I say, launch too soon a given chain of events, the wheels of the economic and financial machine slow down, and your prophecy, which you knew was going to happen, simply does not happen. The second reason for this rather touching i desire on the part of the city editor to co-operate with his fellows is that the financial sections of the Press are not only an integral part of the economic machine—they are a vital part. It is, after all—and I say this unashamed and unblushingly—through the Press that the complex business community is able to direct into industry the flow of savings and the surplus wealth of the community. That is done rar more by the Press, I suggest, than any other single channel, and if the financial press does not act with the most extreme discretion, it injures something upon which it depends. If it is going to behave in such a way that the flow of investment money into industry, and the brokerages and other delightful things connected with it, are interrupted by its misconduct, the raison d’etre for the financial press has gone. Therefore financial journalists have to be just as tender to the economic machine as any other professional and business unit in the community."