THE PRESS IS A MEMBER OF SOCIETY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27505, 27 September 1950, Page 8

THE PRESS IS A MEMBER OF SOCIETY

Travel-log

VIII.

Freedom of the press is a phrase which, like many others in common use—liberty of the subject, the democratic way of life, our common destiny, etc. —means much or little according to the thought and understanding which we are prepared to give to it—and to the political climate in which the phrase is uttered. To pile platitude upon cliche, Mr Stalin and Mr Churchill, for instance, have somewhat different ideas of what democracy means and what freedom consists of. * * * * Newspapermen think they know what freedom of the press means. So, no doubt, does the reader. Sometimes he thinks the press too free. Sometimes (for instance, when he writes an indignant letter saying -he favourite was pulled, the judges were crooked and the stewards corrupt, and his letter is not printed) he considers the press not free enough. But all in all, both the newspaperman and the reader are likely to stray into realms of mysticism when they attempt to explain that simple-sounding phrase. * * * * For the five-score newspapermen who foregathered in Canada this June a main preoccupation was the clearing away of the mystical aura surrounding press freedom. There have been thousands of definitions, and hundreds of applications, of this proposition, and we intend to refrain from citing the “Areopagatica ” of John Milton, the puerile punditory of Pravda or the excesses of the yellow sections of the English and Amercian press, in support or excuse of the liberty which the printed' word is allowed under our benign system. Our own favourite definition was set down m 1784, not by an orator or a publisher but by a plain jurist, Lord Mansfield, who in Rex v. the Dean of St. Asaph said: “The liberty of the press consists in printing without previous licence, subject to the consequences of the law.” Fault it who can? * * * * The press representatives who assembled at Ottawa, in the vast gilded ballroom of the Chateau Laurier, were not there to challenge this strict legal interpretation; but rather were they ready to limit it. This was one of the impressive facts of the Seventh Imperial Press Conference, that men whose trade is selling news and opinion, whose work is to some extent made worrying and legally hazardous by law (and a law that reacts harshly against them on occasion; but we are not concerned with libel action here), were ready to confine their licence to print, not to use the wealth, the influence or the authority behind them to claim expansion of it.

Leaving out all of the discussion which was more often sensible than inspired, and also the perorations which were sometimes more inspiriting than sensible, we come to the heart of the matter in the conference’s somewhat heavy-handed resolution which declared: The press should enjoy by right the full freedom of expression that is secured by every individual, which freedom should in no case be restricted, save for specific transgression, proved to the satisfaction of a competent court of justice, of the known and generally applicable law. Those who have read thus far might perchance peruse this statement a second time. The subject-matter warrants it. * * * * This somewhat turgid and official resolution has a very positive meaning. It means that the press enjoys no special position in the community, and claims none; that the newspaper as an institution has no more liberty, and no greater freedom to say what it likes, than you or I possess as our right, and are guaranteed by the law. It means that the press asks no privileges or special favours, that it rests content to carry the same responsibility to behave itself in the society in which it lives as does the ordinary citizen. * * * * It means also—conversely, as we say—that the press asks, nay, demands, the same liberties and the same tolerance that the citizen has. Claiming nothing of indulgence that is not free to all, the newspaper is entitled also to speak and act as freely as any man—no more freely, but no less freely. This is what the Empire press accepts, and is happy to accept, as its licence to print. If the deliberations of a hundred newspaper publishers and editors, called together from all parts of the Commonwealth (from the United Kingdon, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Gibraltar, Singapore, Bermudas, Bahamas, the British West Indies) had yielded no other resolution, and imparted no other understanding than this wise re-statement of the place of the press in a democracy, then the conference would still, we believe, have been worth the calling. If, as newspaper 51e, we like to believe that the ic has faith in our responsibility and our principles, then are we not entitled also to have faith in the public to approve and assure us our rights as equal to their own? J. M. (Continued on Saturday)