ATTACK ON THE PRESS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 250, 21 October 1937, Page 5

ATTACK ON THE PRESS

"GOVERNMENT ENTITLED TO HAVE OWN CASE STATED”

OPINION OF MR. J. A. LEE A further Government attack on the Press of New Zealand was delivered by Mr. J. A. Lee, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Housing, during the Budget debate in the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Newpapers existed to earn dividends, said Mr. Lee, but at the same time they had the power to exercise a great cultural influence. There was never any talk of the Dominion's education system being used for the re turn of dividends but, by the same token, the country did not get the largest cultural return out of its newspapers. There were some newspapers which were run as proprietary concerns and which gave expression to an individual viewpoint. No great quarrel could be found with them. On the other hand, there were newspapers which served only an agglomeration of financial interests and their influence was not healthy. “A paper in Wellington, The Dominion, has stated in an editorial that young people of the age of 21 are not qualified to vote,” Mr. Lee continued. “Another paper in Auckland advocated the disfranchisement of the civil servants.” Mr. A. G. Osborne (Government, Manukau):" The Auckland Star.”

“Newspapers like that,” said Mr. Lee, “are just as dangerous to democracy in New Zealand as Hitler was to democracy in Germany. Something will have to be done not to curb their expression, but to see to it that there is a daily newspaper in every centre in which the majority of the people can have their own viewpoint expressed. The gentleman who wrote that a young man of 21 was not qualified to vote would be c-Mcerned if a young man of 18 or 21 did not rush to war to lay down his life for his country. The young man, he says, is fit to die, but he is not fit to vote. “The newspapers indulge in distortion and misrepresentation all of the time. The Government, some of the time, is entitled to have its own case Later in his speech Mr. Lee quoted a Press report in support of an argument concerning housing. '“Sometimes the Press is right,” he said. “Indeed, most of the time it is right; but occasionally it suppresses and distorts.”