THE ANATOMY OF NEWSPAPERS

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28262, 27 April 1957, Page 3

THE ANATOMY OF NEWSPAPERS

Dangerous Estate. The Anatomy of Newspapers. By Francis Williams. Longmans, Green and Co. 304 pp.

Mr Williams’s book may appeal most to those directly concerned with newspaper production; but there is much to interest the general reader in this survey of the press of the United Kingdom, chiefly of the national press published in London.

Newspapers and their predecessors played a great part in British political progress, and even today their influence, for reasons clearly explained by Mr Williams, has been little affected by radio and television. He is concerned with how they will use this influence under the ever-mounting pressure of costs. He sees the best hope for a continuance of the present generally healthy position in the consciences of individual journalists who “serve one of the great professions of the world. The allegiance it properly commands is absolute. Those who give it that allegiance need stand in no man’s shadow.”

Mr Williams writes so well (apart from one truly horrible sentence that must make him blush) about such interesting persons (from Defoe to Bartholomew) and such interesting events that no-one could find the book dull. He writes with authority, because few reporters in any country have had such wide experience in every branch of the profession. The general principles of good journalism apply the world over in any period. Defoe laid down one of them more than 200 years a go-when he said: “If any man was to ask me what I -would suppose to be a perfect style of

language I would answer, that in which a man speaking to 500 people of all common and various capacities, idiots or lunatics excepted, should be understood by them all.”

The brilliant editor of the “Daily Express” in our own day (Mr Arthur Christiansen) has stated another: “News, news, news—that is what we want. You can describe things with the pen of a Shakespeare, but you can’t beat news in a newspaper.”

A third was stated by C. P. Scott, editor of the “Manchester Guardian,” in his famous dictum: “Comment is free but facts are sacred.”

These, as Mr Williams notes, are sound axioms in any newspaper anywhere. But their application in many British national newspapers, particularly the “popular” dailies, differs greatly from anything to which New Zealanders are accustomed. Mr Williams is not worried much by the exploitation of sordid and vulgar news in some English newspapers, because, as he points out, crime, sex, and similar topics have always been popular among English readers. The “Daily Mirror” has not created a demand for this kind of news—it merely meets the demand.

The “Daily Express,” the other successful mass circulation daily, owes its huge readership to a different formula: “It has given to millions a passport to a world in which anything can happen ... It is the paper of escape, but of escape not into an invented world but into the real one. miraculously turned brighter than reality. . . .” It satisfies a demand, too.

These mass circulation newspapers have a special function. Mr Williams believes, in defending the ordinary man against the “trade of authority” in which all who exercise it are linked, whatever their political parties, a “cosy world in which the Federation of British Industries and the Trade Union Congress cuddle together like the lion and the lamb.” Tlie popular press gives the ordinary man a voice that “even the largest administrative monster can hear above the grinding of its own machinery." The circulation of the “quality” newspapers, “The Times” and the “Manchester Guardian.” corresponds very closely with the proportion of population likely to benefit from higher education. These great journals are secure in their position and exert an influence not easily to be calculated. The middle group, the “serious popular” newspapers, is in serious difficulty, because trading conditions impose on them with increasing severity a pattern uncharacteristic and uncongenial. “Their decline is as much a public tragedy as a journalistic pne. for such newspapers perform a service no other can provide.” Mr Williams comments.