Various persons who were so bent on getting a Royal
Commission on the Press appointed and arc so palpably discomfited at the outcome of their efforts, are, I am bound to admit, putting up a vast bluff with immense industry. The Commission having disposed decisively of practically every charge formulated in the speeches of the supporters of the Commons resolution—declaring that the British Press is inferior to none in the world, that there is nothing approaching monopoly in the Press as a whole, that only five "chains" of papers worthy of the name exist and that none of them constitute any sort of threat to freedom—the Commission having thus expressed itself in its considered conclusions, the critics can still delve into the appendices and discover cases in which one or other of Lord Kemsley's papers (how strangely ill that genial peer is cast for role of the villain of the journalistic profession) has at some time gone off the rails (which no other paper, of courss, ever does or did), and promptly give a clamorous verdict in their own favour. As for the National Union of Journalists, the actual originators of the whole campaign of detraction, I am interested to see that its Parliamentary branch, shocked by the Commission's strictures on the bias of the memorandum it submitted, and its failure to establish many of its charges, has passed what is in effect a vote of censure on the parent body. I still maintain that there was no ground for appointing the Commission in the first instance, since the evils which formed the raison d'être for its appointment were in the main imaginary. But it may be no bad thing in the end that the Commission should have vindicated the Press so signally, while at the same time indicating clearly where it thinks there ii room for improvement. Most people, in facts knew that already.
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