The imprisonment of two “silent” reporters for refusing to disclose their sources of information has touched off a fierce debate on the concept of liberty in general and the role of the press in a democratic society in particular. The failure of the authorities to detect a spy in the Admiralty for five long years, which originally set in train developments culminating in the imprisonment of the reporters, is almost forgotten. Instead of the government, the press, to be accurate, the popular press, is in the dock at the bar of enlightened public opinion. This is a development no one outside of the government foresaw or indeed could have forseen.
The debate is not merely one between the authorities anxious to encroach on the freedom of the press as it were, and the newspapers fighting in defence of their rights and privileges. The press itself is divided on the merits of its own case with such respected, independent and liberal papers as The Times and The Guardian apparently ranged on opposite sides at least on the question of emphasis. While The Times has come out wholly on the side of the rights of the journalists, The Guardian has chosen to draw attention to the need for the press to “clean itself up”. The vocal section of the community is equally divided.
Staggering
The most striking feature is the hostility the critics of the popular press have displayed towards it. The hostility is truly staggering. It is all the more significant because the critics, The Times said editorially last Monday, have “broken the dam to a long pent-up, ever rising flood of resentment against the practices of some newspapers.” It defined these offensive practices as “intrusion, triviality, distortion, muck-raking and the inversion of values” and said “the newspapers were warned years ago that if they went on the way they were going they would alienate those very sections of the community upon whose goodwill the freedom and the working conventions of the press depend.” Apparently this has now happened.
In formulating some of the “essential questions of conduct affecting every newspaper” for the Press Council, The Guardian last Wednesday elaborated on the same theme of malpractices by newspapers. Was it proper for newspapers to pay criminals and call girls for their memoirs, it asked? Mr Vassall, original cause of all this uproar, who confessed to being a homosexual and a spy, was paid £7,000 for his memoirs by one newspaper. The memoirs in the form of four articles were wholly written by the staff on the basis of talks with him. They disclosed nothing new beyond his statement at the trial. Other notorious criminals involved in cases of murder and rape have had generally more than one offer to choose from. A few months ago two reporters came to blows in trying to push their way to a criminal to buy the rights to his memoirs.
The other questions posed by The Guardian are equally revealing. Some of them are: Can the slanting and fabrication of news be reduced? Is it legitimate to represent unverified hearsay as fact? Where does inquiry end and intrusion begin? When is it in public interest to give details about suicides and crimes that stimulate imitation? It asked whether the freedom of the press was to be used (it referred by name to The Mirror, the tabloid daily with the highest circulation of about four and half million) “to purvey the trivial, to play up the aristocracy, to emphasise the sordid and to purchase for large sums the memoirs of criminals, and call girls”.
One quotation from a letter from a professor at Oxford in The Spectator last week would illustrate the nature of the educated Britishers’ antipathy to the popular press. He wrote: “On the day when it publishes the full text of the Galbraith-Vassall letters, one of our leading newspapers sees fit to place at the top of its front page photographs of the correspondents leering at each other and beneath these photographs a full page banner headline: ‘My dear Vassall’. This, mark you, at the start of a report of an enquiry which seems sure to acquit totally Mr Galbraith of any impropriety! So ‘a free press’ also covers the right to force the resignation of junior ministers by means of disgusting and unfounded accusations that stay just on the right side of the laws of libel”.
The reference is to The Daily Express which has the second largest circulation among the dailies – over four and quarter million. Mr Galbraith, it might be recalled, was the Civil Lord of the Admiralty and Mr Vassall served as a clerk in the office. He resigned following the discovery of innocuous letters he had innocently written to Mr Vassall who had made special efforts to ingratiate himself with him. The insinuation against him clearly related to Mr Vassall’s sexual perversion. But the publication of the letters completely cleared him in the eyes of MPs and the public.
Important role
This is of course only one side of the story. The role of the popular press is by no means wholly negative. The Daily Mirror, for instance, played an important role in mobilising public opinion against the government on the Suez issue. Day after day it hammered away at the utterly false excuses the government invented to justify this mad adventure till they all collapsed. In the beginning even the then opposition leader, Mr Hugh Gaitskell, had wavered and so had The Mirror.But this period of equivocation was brief and once it was over it campaigned with a vigour and sense of purpose equalled in recent times by its closest rival, The Daily Express, during the Common Market controversy last year.
The Express was for the protection of the interests of the Commonwealth though for some peculiar psychological compulsions of the proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, it still chooses to confuse the Commonwealth with the empire. Among the national dailies it was the only paper that unequivocally opposed Britain’s entry into the Common Market. It did not care if it made common cause with the Labour party at home and old rebels like Mr Nehru abroad. The Times placed itself above the battle and The Guardian changed its position from one of support to opposition and then again to that of support to the government’s policy of joining the Community almost at any price. Every single opinion poll showed that the opponents of the government’s policy outnumbered its supporters. Without The Express the voice of the former could hardly have been heard.
This debate on the role of the press would have served a highly useful purpose if there was any hope that some of the malpractices spotlighted by it would be eliminated and that a statutory provision would be made to entitle journalists to withhold their sources of information. Neither of these hopes is likely to be realised.
Social Change
The revolutionary changes that Lord Northcliffe brought about in journalism have come to stay even if in a somewhat unhappy form because of a more fundamental social change – the spread of literacy. Hundreds of thousands of working class boys and girls who leave school at the age of 15 every year have no use for the quality papers. The Mirror, for instance, consciously caters to this class. Then there is the remorseless logic of competition. The News Chronicle had to close down because even with its circulation of well over one million it could not attract sufficient advertisement. The Daily Herald with its circulation of 1.4 million survives just because the present proprietor agreed to keep it going for a certain period when he took over the Odham’s press.
In the larger sense, therefore, the prospects are that the debate would prove sterile. It has, however, another side to it. When Mr Macmillan announced the terms of reference for the Radcliffe tribunal he left little scope for doubt that he was going for the journalists. Subsequent developments have strengthened this hostility between him and the popular press. Even papers with long traditions of supporting the Conservative party are hostile to him personally. This may well be one explanation why the publicity for the new Labour leader, Harold Wilson, has been better than his most wild eyed optimistic supporters could have hoped for. For some papers even Edward Heath has become unacceptable because he enjoys the confidence of Mr Macmillan. If this trend continues it could have decisive influence on the outcome of the next election.
The Times of India, 23 March 1963