THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Tuesday, June 11, 1946. FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26175, 11 June 1946, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Tuesday, June 11, 1946. FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

Some principles of importance to the public were expressed in the cabled reports of speeches at the Imperial Press Conference. “Freedom of the Press ” is a familiar cry in the historic fight for liberty, but its very familiarity has tended to obscure public appreciation of the fact that what is meant is not something which is either the primary or the sole concern of the newspapers and journalists, but something which is essentially the public’s own right Liberty for journalists, as'Major Astor aptly expressed it, is not a privilege but a fundamental liberty of the subject. During the war, national security made it necessary to impose limitations on what information could be passed to the public. This power was best employed when it was recognised that censorship was a bad thing but that it had to be used to prevent something worse: that it was a temporary loss of freedom to guard against the loss of greater freedom. The experience in this and other countries was that the degree of restraint could not be defined, so that there had to be constant vigilance to ensure that the power of censorship was not abused. By urging the need for preserving public morale, Government departments were tempted to ban reference to or discussion of questions of the greatest social interest. Sometimes the press, as guardian of the public welfare, was able to obtain permission to inform the people of such things, but at other times officialdom, rightly and wrongly, had its will. The events of the war years have therefore- given an urgency to the necessity of re-defin-ing the freedom of the press in modern terms.

There is another tendency in government which emphasises this need and that is the growth of the practice of establishing Government departments of information. Reference to this development was made by Mr Francis Williams, Public Relations Adviser to Mr Attlee. Mr Williams is a former editor of the Daily Herald, and was war-time Controller of News*and Censorship at the Ministry of Information. It was necessary, he said, with the concentration in the Government of authority in ever-widening fields, to build a bridge between the Government and the people. The system of releasing departmental statements through an official bureau is one which has its advantages, but it is also open to the gravest abuses and the responsibilities of such a bureau cannot be too seriously considered. The pre-requisite to such a system is that facts and not propaganda should be released, but the temptation for a department, or a Government, to conceal unfavourable facts or to present its policy in an unduly favourable light is too great for a democratic people to countenance such a possibility unless there is some adequate safeguard. That safeguard is a strong and free press. Just what should be the relationship between the Government and the press under these new circumstances is a matter which must be freshly considered. The proceedings at the Imperial Press Conference have made it. clear that the press is awake to this necessity, but the public must also be vigilant. It is appropriate at this time to recall the best definition yet given of the responsibilities of the press in relation to the Government. This appeared in an editorial in The Times in 1852, after that influential journal had been attacked in the House by Lord Palmerston and Lord Derby. We cannot admit, said The Times, that its (the newspaper’s) purpose is to share the labours of statesmanship, or that it is bound by the same limitations, the same duties, the same liabilities as that of the Ministers of the Crown. The purpose and‘duties of the two powers are constantly separate, generally independent, sometimes diametrically opposite. The dignity and the freedom of the press are trammelled from the moment it accepts an ancillary position. To perform its duties with entire independence and consequently with the utmost public ad-vantage,-the press can enter into no close or binding alliances with the statesmen of the day, nor can it surrender its permanent interests to the convenience of the ephemeral power of any Government.