TILTS AT THE NEWSPAPERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22905, 12 June 1936, Page 8

TILTS AT THE NEWSPAPERS

The newspapers of the Dominion should, perhaps, be rather flattered than otherwise at the evidence of the extent to which they .occupy the thoughts of members of the Labour Party. The debate in the Lower Houston the Broadcasting Bill was quite illuminating on this point. Certain of. the Government members who expressed themselves in support of this remarkable measure appear to have embraced wholeheartedly an opportunity of attacking the press. What set them in such ferment can only be a matter for surmise. But they have themselves revealed that their ideas of fair argument and their actual knowledge of the press and its practice are equally exiguous. The Labour Party seems to possess some exceptionally newspaper-conscious members. Their efforts in the debate convey something of a reminder of that! hero of Waterloo who, in the Byronic line, "rushed into the field, and foremost fighting fell." With high hopes, or an assumption of them, the member for Timaru sprang to the brink of achievement in a revelation of a shockingly immoral mutual arrangement between the late Government and the newspapers. Under this the one was supposed to suppress advertising over the air and the other to refrain from publishing Continental and American short-wave information. Unfortunately for Mr Carr this excursion of his merely landed him squarely in a mare's nest, as the Postmaster-general, perhaps commiseratingly, was constrained to show. The Minister himself, in opening the debate on the second reading of the Bill, had gone so fir as to say that the newspapers had tyrauically restricted the news services hitherto supplied by radio, using quite unfairly an illustration from Australia relative to conditions that are entirely different. No great acumen should be required for understanding that the newspapers of the Dominion would be under little temptation in any case, even if they were at liberty to do so—and they are not —to use items coming from the quarters referred to by the member for Timaru, for they are particular about their sources of foreign information, and that they prefer news from abroad to be sifted and reliable. The Broadcasting Board, as listeners know, has appreciated the fact that, by courtesy of the newspapers, it has been accorded the opportunity of transmitting a certain amount of information which they supply, and which is received by them at considerable cost to themselves and is their property in the form in which it is presented. But the discomfiture of his colleague did not deter the member for Dunedin West from returning subsequently in the debate to the same attractive trail of newspaper "suppression and distortion" and to an allegation of some secret arrangements between the press and the Broadcasting Board. It may be hoped that Dr M'Millan's deliverance from the floor of the House concerning the newspapers has relieved him somewhat of a burden that was evidently becoming too great for silent endurance. His was a wild and unwarranted statement, made under the privilege of Parliament by a member who showed plainly that he did not know what he was talking about. " The activating motive," to use one of his own expressions, need not be a matter for serious conjecture. The freedom of the press is evidently not a cause to which he is indissolubly wedded. It would be a pity to ignore another contribution to this debate, touching the newspapers, which also came from an Otago representative, and surely it was the unkindest cut of all. Mr M'Dougall claimed that the speeches of members were mutilated by the Tory press of the Dominion. Et tu Brute! If there is one member of the House who should be grateful to the newspapers for the manner in which they report the profound utterances with which ho enlivens the proceedings of Parliament it is the member for Mataura. Yet he shouts the harsh accusation "mutilation." The indulgence which the press exhibits towards those who recklessly ma'ko in Parliament charges which it knows to be false is exhibited in the fact that it publishes their spiteful and ridiculous statements.