Free or Fair?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 191, 19 February 1943, Page 3

Free or Fair?

E print to-day, and may some day print again, an arresting statement by Harold Nicolson, M.P., on the most difficult of all broadcasting problems, control of speech on the air, Mr, Nicolson is not only a Governor of the BBC, but a member of Parliament, a former member of the Diplomatic Service, an aristocrat by origin, a radical by conversion, and he came to the BBC through the present Ministry of Information. It would be difficult to think of a better preparation for a BBC Governor, and the statement that we print expresses a

considered opinion after a year’s experience on the reconstituted Board. It is considered, and it is convincing, but it will disappoint, and perhaps disturb, many ardent lovers of diberty, In a word Mr. Nicolson says that the air can never be quite free; that if broadcasting is a state monopoly its path must be the middle of the road; and that when a choice has to be made between free speech and! fair speech, fairness must come first. This will always mean caution; it will often seem to mean timidity; it can never fail to mean some loss of liveliness and of stimulation. Fairness can be achieved only at a great price. To maintain it the BBC is surrender-ing-many would say, has already lost--the boldness, the provocativeness, the challenging and fruitful aggressiveness of the still independent newspapers, But it is a price that such a monopoly must pay, since not to pay it is to become tyrannical, and ultimately corrupt. And of course there is not much more than an alphabetical difference in this matter between BBC and NBS, While it is as easy on this side of the world as on Mr. Nicolson’s to talk about free speech when the responsibility is carried by someone else, it is as difficult. here as it is there, and as dangerous, to say that the air shall be free to anybody at any time, even if those only who wished to hear were compelled to listen.