Freedom of the Press: Style

"Having given you some idea of our progress," said Cecil Harmsworth King, "I would like to digress." Then, before the annual meeting of stockholders in London last week, the proprietor of the world's largest publishing house, the Mirror Group (London Daily Mirror, Sunday Pictorial, plus 220 other periodicals), took a telling swipe at freedom of the press--British style. Said King:

"The British press is as censored as most censored presses, though in an arbitrary and indeterminate way. We employ on the Mirror and [Sunday] Pictorial three fulltime and eleven part-time barristers to avoid printing libels, breaches of parliamentary privilege, breaches of the Official Secrets Acts, or committing contempt of court. Over the years, the area of operation of these newspaper hazards has been steadily widened until criticism of any kind is becoming impossibly risky.

"The principal Official Secrets Act was originally passed to provide protection against the communication of state secrets to possibly hostile foreigners. The act is now used quite cynically to protect the reputation of ministers, and, above all, of civil servants. One of the last occasions of the use of this act as I recall, was to raise difficulties about a newspaper report of attacks on nurses by patients in Broadmoor.

"There is also an unofficial censorship through 'D Notices'*, warning editors of news the government does not wish to be published for security reasons. Some of these matters are entirely petty, or so general as to be of no possible value to a foreign power. The system comforts only those, it seems to me, who require secrecy as a cloak for their blunders.

"The operation of the libel laws is even more serious. Judges and juries are increasingly inclined to regard any criticism as defamation and to award damages out of all relation to any harm done. The trouble here is not that newspapers do commit libels and do pay heavy damages.

. . . The damage is done by the omission of reports or the watering down of reports that should have been printed. We have now reached a point where strictures on a provincial police force will produce a libel action from the chief constable, which he will probably win.

"Personally, I think this drastic curtailment of the liberty of our press is against the public interest. This country is too smug, complacent and sluggish, and pointed criticism might do much to get us moving again." Added Cecil King, whose giant Daily Mirror (circ. 4,561,876), biggest newspaper in the Western world, stands as impressive evidence that he knows what Britons want to read: "But if, on consideration, the British public wants this censorship, of the press, at least they should realize how much of what they should know is not printed--and why."

* Short for "Defense Notices"--which are issued by the government to publishers as guidance on security affairs. Fleet Street is not obliged to respect the D Notices, but invariably does.

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