THE DUTY OF A NEWSPAPER. D URING the past fortnight there
has been much discussion in and out of Parliament of the Press Censorship, and the whole question was debated in the House of Lords on Monday. That debate, we think, fairly summarized all that there is to be said for and against the Censorship. Although the debate produced much criticism of the Government which was nominally not concerued with the Censorship, nearly all of it did actually relate itself to the Censorship, because the com- plaint was that the Government had not been frank, and it would naturally be through the Press that the Government would convey more information to the nation if they had a mind to do so. On the general principle of the Censorship we would simply say that we doubt its efficacy in the majority of cases. It is a very clumsy instrument. We are tempted to fancy sometimes that we should be in no greater danger if there were no Press Censorship at all. Free rein would be given, of course, to every sort of inaccuracy, wild surmise, and "perilous disclosure," to use Kiuglake's phrase, and though the exact truth would of course be published in the medley—and would be extremely damaging to our interests if it were known by the enemy to be the truth—it would probably be almost impossible for him to disentangle it from other statements that flatly contradicted it. The false and the true would cancel one another. We can imagine a German intelligence officer trying to garner information from the confusion of it wholly uncensored Pres.. We fancy he would have to own himself defeated. But though it would be intensely interesting to see the result of such an experiment, we admit that there are matters in which it is not practical policy to play any tricks and light-heartedly accept unnecessary risks. The overwhelming opinion of naval and military experts is that a Press Censorship is indispensable. The only thing for sensible laymen to do, therefore, is to accept the situation. How would they feel if it could be proved, after all, that the lives of even a few British soldiers and sailors had been sacrificed to the virtual suspension, or even the drastic modification, of the Censorship P It simply is not worth while to accept such a risk, and that is really the determining point in the argument. Granted that the Press Censorship must exist, then, it certainly seems to us that far too much fuss has been made about the refusal of the Censors to allow news- papers to say this, that, or the other thing. Of course the Censorship works unequally, illogically, and even absurdly. How could it be otherwise P During war innumerable things must happen for which there is no precedent. War in its civil aspect is a state of abrogation of precedent. A Press Censorship is opposed to all our,customs and traditions, and therefore when war breaks out the machinery of this unprecedented thing has hastily to be improvised. To complain that in these circumstances some harsh or invidious treatment of a particular newspaper involves a high principle of freedom as surely to have lost all sense of proportion. We are inclined to say to the newspapers who agitate their grievances on these grounds : " Ye take too much upon you, ye sons of Levi " The truth is that the people do not care a rap whether a particular paper is allowed or not allowed to deal out to them startling sensations. All the people want to be assured of is that the enemy is not being helped. If they believe that the Press Censorship is probably doing some good in keeping back information from him, they are indifferent to the editorial tears which are shed over the failure of what is called a - scoop." There is not a trace of indignation, but rather a general satis- faction, at the penalty of suppression inflicted on the Globe for having repeated the statement that Lord Kitchener had resigned when it had been informed that the statement was entirely untrue. We might guess from the speeches of Lord Loreburn and Lord Milner in the House of Lords on Monday the kind of use the more aggrieved newspapers would make of their freedom if the Censorship were much relaxed. Lord Loreburn appealed for answers to such questions as—Why were not more ships sent to Admiral Cradock ? Who sanctioned the Antwerp expedition? Why were the ' Hogue: the Cressy,' and the Aboukir' allowed to become easy targets for a submarine? But surely the discussion of such questions now could do nothing but harm. We shall want answers, of course, in less critical times. But the effect of distributing blame for blunders on various persons and Departments just now would merely be to hamper and weaken the energies of those who cannot spare a moment from performing the task immediately before them. The duty of every newspaper is to strengthen the Government—the Government we have, the Government which is the only possible Govern- ment because there is no alternative. It is impossible to trace the frontier-line between criticism which is helpful and constructive, and criticism which is the reverse; but every man who is tit to be the editor of a journal, how- ever unimportant, must know by instinct what sort of criticism is likely to strengthen the hands of the Government in fighting Germany and what is likely to unnerve them. We admit that it is generally the manner —the mental attitude—rather than the substance of the criticism which makes some newspapers a drag upon the conduct of the war instead of a stimulus. It may be that all such newspapers mean well, as Mr. Balfour charitably assumed at the Lord Mayor's Banquet, just as Lord Milner of course meant well in his speech on Monday ; but readers and audiences know the effect upon themselves of these performances, and can guess the effect of them upon our allies and upon neutrals. There is no place now for any writing or speech which, on the balance of its critical effects, discredits the Government abroad ; no place for what reads or sounds like captious complaint and querulousness. The "gloomy joy of self-depreciation" should be forsworn in the interest of the commonwealth.
Lord Curzon on Monday touched on debatable ground when he suggested that individual Ministers might have to be protected against newspaper criticism. That would be a very bad principle to establish as a principle, and yet we can conceive circumstances in which it might be right for the Press Censorship to offer such protection. Suppose that a particular Minister were being thwarted, and his work were being stultified at every turn, by the dead set of a group of fanatical newspapers. We should certainly approve in such a case of the Censorship refusing to allow the attacks to continue. It would be a very regret- table prohibition, but if it helped us to win the war quicker—beside which objeot nothing else matters—it would be obviously justified. We must not leave Lord Curzon's speech without saying how sensibly and tem- perately he defended the Censorship on the right grounds. Lord Curzon proposed modifications in its working—fuller and prompter information on military and naval events. And, finally, as though to show by practical example the spirit in which all men of goodwill should stand together to-day, he spoke most generously and warmly of the "indignation and shame" with which he had read or listened to the attack's upon Sir Edward Grey. The idol of yesterday was now being bespattered with mud. Lord Curzon is evidently a first-rate man to go tiger-hunting with. But we are all tiger-hunting now, and we elmuld never forget it merely because the tiger is sometimes lost sight of in the jungle.
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