NEW ZEALAND PAPERS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 68, 11 September 1911, Page 6

NEW ZEALAND PAPERS.

AN ENGLISH TRIBUTE. Says the Standard of Empire:— What is .it that has made the newspapers of Australia and New Zealand the very admirable productions that they are? There is nothing in the Empire to beat them. No doubt various contributory reasons might be adduced; but I think I am right in saying that, nit the root of them all, lies the quality of sobriety. A fine sober sense of duty and responsibility appears to have actuated the newspaper proprietors of the South. Their productions show in their productions 'the very spirit of the teaching of the Empire Day movement And yet one of the most successful weekly' journals in the Empire is the Sydney Bulletin, whose columns Its warmest admirer could hardly say were distinguished by sobriety and sense of responsibility. But the Bulletin stands alone. It is not in the least representative of Australasian journalism. Clever, humorous, bitter, and cynical, it is a sort of Punch, in which sardonic cynicism takes the place of good humour, and slashing satire the place of cheery wit.

And, withal, in its own lone furrow, no one can say the Bulletin is not notable, well done. But take the great dailies of Australia and. New Zealand. I am of the company of those who regard the best Lon--1 don* dailies as the finest newspapers in the world. After these, and very close after thenr, I place the great daily journals of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Wellington, Christchurch, and Auckland. And then comes a considerable gap, in my judgment. These thoughts came to mo as I looked over the twenty large pages of The Press, of Christchurch, New Zealand, for May 25; the jubilee issue of a really great oversea British newspaper. It stirs one's blood to read the record of such a journal as The Press. It is an untarnished record of all that is best and bravest in the work of maintaining the sober best of British traditions. The Press owes nothing to sensationalism-, to jobbery or nepotism of any kind, or to any mean thing. A clean, honorable, straightforward British institution, I place it, and the leaders among its southern contemporaries, high in the list of those sterling institutions which makes "speaking English!" a more binding and confidence-inspiring oath in the Latin world than any invocation of saints or statutory declaration.