"Sunday Express" Reporting
was surprised by your item in A Spectator's Notebook of December 19th attacking the Sunday Express, for I suggest that Janus himself commits a worse misdemeanour than the one you complain of.
The basis of your attack is that the Sunday Express said that Mr. Farrar Bell expected to earn f200 for designing one of the new stamps —when, you claim, Mr. Bell had not given us this figure at all. In answer to this: (1) Our reporter firmly stands by the fact that " around £200 " was the figure mentioned by Mr. Farrar Bell when he saw him. (2) We received a letter from Mr. Bell after the story was published saying: ". . . In any event 1 should have thought a paper of your standing would have bad the sense to know that fees for public commissions of this kind are never disclosed." At Mr. Bell's request the Sunday Express therefore published the following which you make no mention of at all: " The Sunday Express has been asked by Mr. M. C. Farrar Bell, stained glass artist and designer of the new 2-1d. stamp, to point out that he does not expect to receive £200. The fee, he says, has not been disclosed." When this was done the Sunday Express received another letter from Mr. Bell reading " I am obliged to you for the correction-which you published last Sunday. This has put a much better aspect on the facts and I am grateful to you."
The general reader', Sir, is entitled to put what interpretation he chooses upon this incident, but I think it is very wrong of you to conceal the fact that the Express met Mr. Bell's wishes and was thanked for it. Telling half a story for propaganda purposes and concealing the other half is usually considered the most mischievous reporting . Janus writes: There was no question of concealment or suppression. I stated in the first line of my paragraph: " I am indebted to Stamp Collecting for one more example of what appears to be baseless improvisation on the part of one of Lord Beaverbrook's papers." Mr. Farrar Bell himself wrote in Stamp Collecting "I did not tell the reporter what fee I am going to receive." I did not happen to see any subsequent reference in the Sunday Express, slightly cursory reader of • that enterprising organ though I am.
Previous page
