FIGHT FOR THE MICROPHONE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21480, 2 May 1933, Page 8

FIGHT FOR THE MICROPHONE

Many battles, political and otherwise, will rape around the microphone because the broadcasting authorities have not allowed them to rage through it. Mr. Holland is returning to the attack. He is not allowed to broadcast anything of a controversial character, and asserts that he could not help making reference to controversial matters. He must not be surprised at the roar of agreement that this statement wijl evoke from his unseen audience. That actually is the whole trouble. He wants unrestricted right to use the national broadcasting service, paid for by the' public, for party propaganda. But Mr. Holland is not alone in his fight for the microphone. Professor Shelley, of Christchurch, is up in arms because the address of a university lecturer was cut off by an official who considered it to be "too close to the wind." On the merits of this particular incident it is not possible to offer any opinion in the absence of knowledge of the lecture and of the "wind" to which it was deemed to be too close. However, Mr. Holland and Professor Shelley may claim great allies abroad. At the present .time Mr. Winston Churchill is pouring out the vials of his wrath upon the British Broadcasting Corporation because it will not permit him to address the world upon the Indian constitutional proposals. The 8.8.C. has decided to have "three factual statements explanatory of the White Paper on India" issued over the air.. It may interest Mr. Holland to learn that a Labour member of the House of Commons, Major Attlee, is opposed to any broadcasting on the Indian question. He considers that it is impossible for factual talks, owing to the selection and arrange-

ment of the facts and the emphasis given them, to be other than tendentious. And that certainly is what most people in New Zealand feel about Mr. Holland's possible exploits before the microphone. The question simply boils down to this: restrictions must be placed upon thp use of the broadcasting service. If it were to be employed as a vehicle of free speech, if all who imagined they had a message for the people were allowed to use it, if no conditions were imposed upon their utterances, if the listeners had no protection against propagandists, the result would first of all be chaotic and afterwards would mean that people would shut off their instruments in disgust whenever their "opposition" held the air. Mr. Churchill's masterly invective would pall in time. Mr. Holland's would be sheer boredom in no Lime.