DANGER OF PRESS CENSORSHIP

Southland Times, Issue 23392, 27 December 1937, Page 8

DANGER OF PRESS CENSORSHIP

PUBLIC OPINION AS A MASS PRODUCT CONTROL THE FIRST AIM OF DICTATORS A warning against “machine-made public opinion” was given by Sir Walter Layton when he presided at the 98th anniversary festival of the Newsvendors’ Benevolent and Provident Institution in the Connaught Rooms, London. “The influence that the Press exercises in public life,” he said, “is often exaggerated by those who are suspicious or critical of the Press ‘Lords.’ Experience had proved again and again that there is a definite limit to the power of the newspaper, however big its circulation, to impose its opinions on the nation. “At the same time it is a sobering thought that in these days their various outpourings constitute by far the most important reading of the nation. “Fortunately the British Press is free. Other countries are facing the appalling dangers of a machine-made public opinion, a machine-made social life and a machine-made soul.” Proposing the toast of the Press, Sir Norman Angell said that if it was true to say that a people had a Government it deserved, it was still truer to say it had the Press it deserved. A man could change his paper very much more easily than he could change his Government.

No one in this country, at least, was dictated to by the Government as to the paper he should buy. The first thing the dictator did was to close down all the papers that presumed to criticize him.

From the point of view of a Government it was an ideal arrangement to

have every newspaper a Government paper, and never have to answer critics, only to put them in gaol. Responding, Colonel the Hon. E. F. Lawson said there was no half-way house to freedom of the Press, and the freedom was just as important in the collection as in the presentation of news. Sir Charles Higham said that in the last few years he had spent £15,000,000 in trying to find out the best way of selling goods for his clients. In his experience the cheapest and most effective way of getting results was through Press advertisment.