Radio and the Press

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 285, 8 December 1944, Page 7

Radio and the Press

it is permissible to make at is one comment which this stage about the broadcasting conference in London (announced as we go to press). It is not a drive against the newspapers. The conference has been called by the BBC, and the Director-General went out of his way in his public announcement to emphasise that the spoken word can supplement but cannot supplant the written word. Then he added this: So long as I am at Broadcasting House I will use every endeavour to achieve the synthesis of understanding, co-operation, and accommodation which must exist between broadcasting and the Press in any properly-balanced community.. The Press is one of our most enduring end most vital heritages. In our different ways we must help each other. Competition between Radio and the Press-in those spheres in which competition can take place -is wholesome and helpful. Hostility between them, the kind of hostility that leads to war, would be a disaster from which the community would suffer irreparable harm. When a house loses its windows it becomes a very unpleasant abode, whether there is a void where the glass ought to be or shutters. Sooner or later it becomes unhealthy and uninhabitable, and something comparable with that would happen if conflict between broadcasting and the newspapers dried up the sources of uncoloured news. Fortunately the Director-General of the BBC is a former director of the Manchester Guardian. He knows the possibilities of broadcasting in the news sphere, its instantaneousness, and in normal times its lack of interest in anything but fact. But he also knows its dangers and limitations -its inferiority in the field of reflection, and the very great risk in abnormal times that it will be used tyrannically. The newspapers are more truthful than they would be if there were no BBC; but the BBC is less tyrannical, less smug and stodgy than it would be, if there were no newspapers.