The Facts are Complex

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 1, 17 January 1944, Page 7

The Facts are Complex

But if the press can claim a goodconduct stripe, so, too, can the Government. It is a figment of the imagination to picture the newspapers exposed to ceaseless pressure and dictation during the war ; and a false conclusion to argue from this false premise that the whole apparatus of public information at present provided by the Ministries in wartime should be swept away. Modern Government, in peace dr in war, has a particular need of an informed public, and therefore of an informed press, if its democratic character is to be preserved ; and there are many items in the complexity of twentieth-century legislation and administration which must inevitably be unknown, inaccessible, or unintelligible to journalists no less than to the citizenry at large. The case for press officers and public relations departments was already proved before the war.

Competence is the key. There are certain informatory functions which can only be performed by Government Departments themselves ; they cannot be satisfactorily carried out either by

question and answer in Parliament or by unassisted press investigations. They are functions that must be performed if the right principle of “ Let the people know ” is to inspire the business of government. But they must be efficiently performed. Information must be made available to the press and to the public at all the various levels of sophistication from which inquiry is likely to come ; and it must be purveyed by men who know what they are doing, are anxious to do it in the appropriate way, and are acquainted with all the relevant facts, figures and explanations needed to make the information complete. There is no reason why, after the war, each Government department should not have officers capable of giving every newspaper and citizen, without prejudice, the information they want in the form they want it.

“ Comment is free and facts are sacred.” This phrase of C. P. Scott’s has become the hackneyed slogan of the British press ; and if the aim of postwar independence in the true sense is to be reached it can only be by making this slogan generally true. This is the responsibility that the newspapers will owe to the public when the wartime grip of the Government, such as it has been, is removed. It is in this positive direction that professional guidance is looked for, vainly more often than not, in the current polemics in favour of a press freed from “ dictation.” This is not to say that the press of this country, in comparison with others, has fallen far short of its responsiblities, in peace or in war; the reverse is true. But it is to say that the struggle to maintain high standards, in the face of proprietorial pressure, financial considerations, and the contemporary