The Press as a Minefield

"To perform its duties with entire independence," said the London Times in 1852, "the press can enter into no close or binding alliances with the statesmen of the day. The duty of the journalist is the same as that of the historian--to seek out the truth, above all things, and to present to his readers not such things as statecraft would wish them to know but the truth as near as he can attain it." While U.S. and British newspapers today have more readers than ever in history, many observers on both sides of the Atlantic share a mounting conviction that the press is more than ever entangled with political alliances, less than ever concerned with the pursuit of attainable truth.

This week, in a new history of the British press called Dangerous Estate, newsmen may find a timely re-evaluation of their basic role on both sides of the Atlantic. Written by Francis Williams, a veteran Fleet Streeter who was editor of the Laborite Daily Herald before the war and now edits the Socialist Forward magazine, the book was hailed by the London Observer's reviewer as the best study of the press he had read, praised by the London Times and recommended by the Manchester Guardian as "required reading."

Barnum's Blood Brother. Williams believes that society in any stage of evolution gets the newspapers it deserves. "The press," he says, "is the mirror of its age because the degree of authority and independence it is permitted to exercise, or is able to seize for itself, and the nature of its influence on public opinion, throw light on the real balance of power in a society." Newspapers can no longer influence readers as they did when government was less complex and the electorate less educated. As the phenomenally successful Lord Northcliffe once told Daily Mail staffers, "We don't direct the ordinary man's opinion. We reflect it." Though high production costs and what Williams calls "trustification" have killed more than 475 newspapers in Britain and the U.S. in the past 35 years, he argues that it is "not the one-sidedness of the monopoly newspaper that contains the greatest threat to local democracy now, but its circumspect neutrality in many matters where the clash of opinion is desirable." Most newspapers' sins of omission* and commission spring from an economic dilemma: they are torn between the journalistic duty to inform and the competitive need to entertain mass audiences which have little interest in serious news. The modern newspaper editor, says Williams, is "a blood brother to Barnum"; his paper "a three-ring circus, daily presenting to its patrons the greatest show on earth."

River of Pornography. Quite without design, one of Williams' points was disputed last week by another new book on the British press, Randolph Churchill's What I Said About the Press, a collection of his splenetic attacks on the British press lords (TIME, Dec. 26,1955). Churchill argues bitterly that a kind of journalistic Gresham's Law is at work; that honest newspapering is being drowned in a "deep and lush and fast-flowing river of pornography and crime." Williams disagrees. The average tabloid, says he, offers "neither worse nor better'' entertainment than many movies, TV shows or books; the "whole idea of what a free press ought to do and be" is constantly changing. What is the mid-century role of the press? Says Williams: "Not that of a judge but that of a minefield through which authority, great and small, and at every level of policy and administration, must step warily, conscious always that a false step may blow it up. The estate of journalism is a dangerous one. It exists as a force in society to remind all those who govern that systems are made for men."

"The basic commitment of journalism." Williams concludes, "remains the same as always. It is identical for all. It is to report honestly, to comment fearlessly, and to hold fast to independence ... It is upon the individual journalist that the ultimate responsibility rests. He is the legatee of a great tradition. He cannot abdicate."

In a society where capital and able management have become essential to newspapers along with journalistic talent, many will still agree with Churchill, that the ultimate responsibility for the press rests with the newspaper and magazine owners. "They have the power not only of the press but of the SUP-press," says Churchill. As if by magic, rumpled, rambling Critic Churchill got additional ammunition to back the charge. Britain's biggest newsstand distributor, which is loudly denounced in Churchill's book, has refused to handle it, on grounds that it might be libelous*; the book lambastes almost every major London daily from the Times to the tabloids, but most refused to reply or to review it. In one of the few magazine comments on the book, a columnist in the left-wing New Statesman and Nation declared: "His main case is both well founded and important, and it seems to me a shocking thing that it should be made so very difficult for the ordinary reading public to hear it." The New Statesman's columnist: Francis Williams.

*Though there were few instances of deliberate distortion during Britain's 1955 general-election campaign, a University of Manchester study of the major London dailies showed that the biggest-circulation newspapers, the Laborite Daily Mirror and the right-wing Daily Express, gave election material less than 6% of their total news space. *Noting with approval that Churchill had himself won a $14,000 libel suit against the Sunday People (TIME, Oct. 22), Evelyn Waugh wrote in the Spectator last week: "No one who knows Mr. Randolph Churchill and wishes to express distaste for him should ever be at a loss for words which would be both opprobrious and apt."

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