FREE SPEECH AND FAIR SPEECH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 191, 19 February 1943, Page 5

FREE SPEECH AND FAIR SPEECH

The Responsibility Of Broadcasting

HE BBC is a Corporation created by Parliament and holding a monopoly of all broadcasting in this country. This monopoly imposes upon us, the BBC, a _ responsibility which is a very grave and serious responsibility. It does not give us more fréedom, it gives us less freedom. We are not a private concern in the sense that a newspaper is a private concern. We are a public concern; it is our duty not merely to inform and entertain our own public, but to present a picture of ae tee Eee ee re

British life and character which shall be coherent, balanced, representative, and true. We must avoid, obviously, at any cost taking political sides. I am always delighted when my friends of the Right tell me that the BBC is a seed-bed of Leftist opinions, and when my friends of the Left deplore the fact that it should be a sanctuary of reaction. When I hear that, I feel satisfied that we are fulfilling our duty of being fair to all, of keeping the middle way. I know that the middle way often seems the middleaged way, and that it strikes many men and women as obvious, unadventurous, and dull. But it is the only way along which a Corporation possessing so vast a public responsibility can discharge its duty. The wireless is a new and highly powerful invention. It is at the same time universal and intimate-by which I mean that whereas we are addressing some twenty million people we are also speaking to them in the intimacy of their homes. We are bound to respect such intimacy; we are bound constantly to reflect that we are not merely addressing a vast public audience, but also being admitted into the privacy of countless families. The BBC is not like a newspaper which can express its editorial ‘opinion

or repudiate responsibility for what it publishes; nor is it a Government Department like the Post Office, which is obliged to accept and carry any letter, however boring or silly that letter may be. The BBC is an organisation entrusted with the handling of the most potent instrument of publicity that has ever been devised. It must be inspired throughout by the utmost carefulness, which is something wholly different from timidity. And that carefulness must take constant account of the fact’ that when an idea or an opinion is broadcast it at once loses its true proportion and becomes magnified or amplified beyond life-size. In giving time on the air to some minority opinion (however sincere or useful that opinion may be; however ardently we may agree with it ourselves) it is our duty, as the BBC, to consider, not merely whether we are being fair to those who agree with this opinion, but whether we are also being fair to those to whom that opinion is a very abomination. It is for this reason that in controversial matters we generally try to adopt a round-table method. I do not call that cowardice; I do not call it a denial of free speech: I call it a careful and difficult maintenance of responsibility. We do make mistakes and sometimes we make blunders: but when you have to magnify opinion a thousand times beyond life-size it may happen that free speech does not turn out as fair speech; and our rule is, when in doubt, to prefer what is fair.