Vigilance Eternal
AGLANCE down the list of the members of he Press Council, whose names and employers are printed at the beginning of its Annual Report, is instructive. The Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian and the Observer are not represented: Associated Newspapers (the Mail group), the Beaverbrook press, the People and the News of the World are. When a group of citizens feel that the law does not give them sufficient protection from vice, they are entitled to set up a vigilance committee; but it is surely unusual, in such circumstances, to allow the brothel-keepers to be represented on it—let alone to be the dominant element, in influence if not in numbers.
The results can be seen in last week's Press Council pronouncement on the recent Osborne affair (too late for inclusion in the annual report); the Telegraph story on that occasion was longer and slimier than any other—even the editor of the Telegraph admitted that the account was set out in greater length and detail than he would have wished. But the Press Council's comment is that it does not consider the article constituted an insult to the good name of the press: 'the persons concerned had been very much in the public eye and the newspapers properly regarded their activities as news.' This could apply to any- body—particularly to members of the Royal Family. If the test whether intrusion into private life is in future to be the newsworthiness of the people intruded upon, we are simply giving the gossip columnist a free rein; for naturally it is the newsworthy people that most interest him.
There is one point, and only one, in the Press Council's report that is worth comment. Its Chairman, George Murray, defends the Coun- cil's action in not having the courtesy to inform those newspapers and periodicals (of which the Spectator was one) that it was going to discuss their use of four-letter words in their reports of the Lady Chatterley trial; a discussion which ended in the Council, with three dissentients, administering a rebuke. Complaints naturally followed: but complaints, Mr. Murray writes, 'come strangely from newspapers which criticise persons, policies and institutions without pre- liminary warning. . . . The Press Council claims a similar right.' But newspapers in this context are the equivalent of counsel for the prosecution (or for the defence): the Press Council. on the other hand, is a quasi-judicial body. the analogy is close enough. If the Press. Coun- cil is going to sit in judgment, therefore, it should notify those whom it may later feel con- strained to condemn, so that they may if they wish present their case, otherwise it will be breaking a cherished principle of English law.
Not that anybody cares, now. The Council as at present constituted is a travesty even of the one originally envisaged—and that was wretched enough. The surprise is that such representatives as Mr. C. D: Hamilton, the new editor *of the Sunday Times, and Mr. Alastair Dunnett, of the Scotsman, still continue -to lend it a faint aura of respectability by their continued membership. The members of the Council would do well to read this month's Encounter article on the: eon- duct of members of the British press during the royal visit to Iran; and then ask theinstIvOs whether the Press here does not peed ore drastic treatment than their Council as at pi-escrit constituted can provide.
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