SIGNED ARTICLES.

Colonist, Volume LIV, Issue 13479, 26 July 1912, Page 4

SIGNED ARTICLES.

Tub Hon W. A. Holman, AttorneyGeneral of New South Wales, adoiessed a meeting of journalists at Sydney recently in support of the new electoral law which requires that any published matter bearing upon a Parliamentary election or tho candidates, must bear tho signature and address of the writer. The response has been an emphatic dissent from tho Australian Journalists' Association. The president of the Association, Mr J. W. Niesigh, after showing that it would be unfair to require a newspaper writer to sign an article in which he sot forth the policy of his newspaper in regard to the matter under discussion,'and contending that any person who was aggrieved or injured by a newspaper had at present just as good a legal remedy as if all articles were signed, carried tho war into the enemy's camp by stating that the politician was almost exclusively the person who asked for the abandonment of anonynfrty, and ho did not ask for it when the bulk of the Press was in his favour but when one might conclude that his purpose was to stop some of tho criticism that was being hurled agaiiist him. If the leader-writer were to mit his name to his article, was it not fair that tho source of his information, upon which the comment was based, should also be stated? If, after a Cabinet meeting, the Premier announced that tho Government had decided upon a course of action, should it not also "no announced by what majority tho decision was arrived at ? Should tho Premier not state that certain Ministers were against the decision, so that the leader-writer who had to comment on tho situation would know the precise facts ? Under the signed article system an editor would be compelled to admit to his columns every word written by his staff. That would not be fair to the editor, while to censor a man's article above his signature would not bo fair to the writer. In regard to tho work of reporters, Mr Niesigh continued, it was a common idea that every pressman wrote in a certain manner because he was told, but the occasions on which a reporter, pai--ticularly a critic, was told to report thin way or that were very few indeed, and then only under exceptional circumstances. Other speakers denied Mr Holman' s assertion that the French Press had gained in influence by adopting the signed article system, and quoted Zola as their authority for .saying that the system, had' reduced French journalism to a scries of abominable squabbles.